The Unwanted Read Online Free PDF Page A

minute of Eric’s day with him. What had happened? Who had he had lunch with? How were his classes going? What had he done after school? What was he doing in the evening? Was he seeing Lisa Chambers?
    And Eric, looking to Laura like a trapped animal, would do his best to give his father satisfactory answers. Except, as Laura was all too well aware, there were no satisfactory answers.
    Now Ed turned away from the sink, dried his hands on one of the dish towels, then shoved his bulk into the breakfast nook. His eyes met hers, and his brows knit into a scowl. “Something wrong?” he asked.
    Laura opened her mouth, then changed her mind, closed it and shook her head.
    For a second she thought Ed was going to stand up again, but he merely reached out and pulled the newspaper over to the place in front of him. Breathing a silent sigh of relief, Laura turned back to the sink.
    I should leave him, she told herself. I should take Eric and get out.
    But, of course, she wouldn’t. There was no place for her to go. She was trapped, and there was no way out.
    Besides, none of what had gone wrong for her family was Ed’s fault. She knew that—Ed reminded her of it almost every day, one way or another.
    Everything that went wrong was her fault. Somehow, some way, she’d failed Ed. And having failed him, she couldn’t walk out on him.
    But why did he always have to take it out on Eric too?
    She’d tried to talk about it with him a few times, when he seemed to be in a particularly good mood, but he’d always insisted that he wasn’t being hard on the boy, that he was only giving Eric the guidance that a father owed to a son.
    But Laura was certain there was more to it than that. Though Ed maintained that all he wanted was the best for Eric, Laura always had the distinct feeling that it was somethingelse, that it wasn’t just the normal desire of a man to see his son succeed.
    It was as if her husband wanted to punish Eric. But she had never been able to discover the reason why.
    Almost surreptitiously she found herself studying her husband. His hair—dark brown when she had first met him—was iron gray now, and the athlete’s body that had been his pride then had thickened over the last twenty years. His hands—the large hands that had once made her feel so safe when they held hers—were callused now, and the veins on their backs stood out, even under the thick mat of hair that started at his fingers and ran all the way up to his elbows. His face had been ruggedly handsome when he was in his twenties, but the years of drinking had blurred those sharp features, and there was a puffy looseness in the skin under his eyes.
    So different from Eric, whose lithe body would never attain the mass of his father’s, and whose hands always struck Laura as being the hands of an artist or a musician. Not, of course, that Eric had ever tried any such thing, although Laura knew that sometimes, when he was by himself, Eric liked to draw. Several times she had found sketches in his room. Once she’d even thought about showing them to Ed.
    She had quickly changed her mind, knowing how her husband felt about art: “Sissy way to make a living,” she remembered his saying as he’d sat in front of the television, drinking a beer while she watched a documentary about the life of Andrew Wyeth. “And even most of the good ones wind up starving.” So she’d put Eric’s sketches back in the drawer where she’d found them, and never mentioned them at all.
    Eric’s face, too, was different from Ed’s. Where Ed’s handsomeness—while he’d still had it—had always been rugged, Eric’s face was sensitive, his blue eyes ringed with long black lashes, and his delicately chiseled features framed by an unruly mass of curly black hair which, when he was small, had been the bane of his existence. Even today Laura found it difficult to pass her son without running her hand through his hair.
    Indeed, she sometimes wondered if it was Eric’s looks