Women and Children First Read Online Free PDF Page B

were there—or maybe not Will, just someone, a husband or lover she trusted to know what she couldn’t begin to say about that little girl, that white dress, that blister.
    From the back seat, Kevin says, “What’s the point of having ESP if you can’t tell when girls like you?”
    He sounds furious, and this surprises Janet more than what he has said, or that he should have said it at all. There’s a silence. Finally Gordie says, “Good question.”
    Janet knows she could blow the moment completely by asking, “Like who? Like which girls?” She takes a deep breath before she says, “Well, you can. A lot of times you can. You just learn how, that’s all.”
    “How?” Kevin says.
    “Take your father,” Janet says. “We were eating in a restaurant with these friends who were introducing us—”
    “Who?” asks Kevin.
    “You didn’t know them,” she says. “They moved when you were little. They had a kid they let run everything. He even got to pick the restaurant, so we ate at a diner he liked because it had mirrored walls. But that night he didn’t care about the walls. He wouldn’t sit in his chair; he ran around, getting under the waitresses’ feet, and our friends kept having to jump up and drag him back. Each time, one of them would say, ‘ You go, I went last time,’ so things were a little tense. From time to time they’d tease your dad about having a kid, having to do what they were doing; I guess he had a reputation for not liking kids. Finally he called the kid over and sat him down between us—we were on the same side of the booth. He cut the kid’s hamburger up for him, in little pieces, and the kid was so surprised that he shut up and ate his whole meal. Our friends didn’t say a word. They must have been wondering what had come over your dad. But I knew he was doing it for me, to show me he was the kind of guy who could be nice to kids.”
    “Right,” says Kevin. Right about what? Janet wonders, but lets it go. Will was always nice to Kevin, or, anyway, an acceptable balance of nice and not nice, no more or less nice then she was. Anyway, she doesn’t want to think about that, she just wants to sit and remember that night in the restaurant—not the noisy kid, the bickering parents, but this: how Will’s hands shook as he sawed away at that burger, and how she had thought: Here was a surgeon, a man with steady hands, and look, look, what power she had.
    “Aren’t you ever wrong?” Kevin says.
    Gordie says, “Not about that. If there’s one thing your Mom’s psychic about, it’s that.”
    Janet looks out the window. They’re almost at the Park ’n Ride where she’s left the truck; she wishes she’d used the bathroom in the medical school. Now there are only gas stations from here on out. She is frightened of public bathrooms and mostly tries not to use them. The only time they didn’t scare her was when she was pregnant with Kevin. Then nothing bothered her, not the grime or the buzzing fluorescent lights or the empty shine of the tiles, the pin-scratched initials, the rust like drops of blood on skin. Nothing frightened her then. She had company.
    They say good-bye to Gordie and drive off. A few miles past the beltway, Kevin says, “Could you pull over somewhere?”
    Janet drives onto the shoulder and Kevin climbs down from the truck. As Kevin heads towards the edge of the woods, he keeps stopping, crouching down. It takes her a while to figure out: he’s looking for ants. She watches till he’s hidden by trees, and she can no longer see him.
    It seems like a long time till he reappears, and though she tells herself that nothing could have happened, she is beginning to get anxious when she spots his blue baseball cap. Emerging from the woods, he waves at her—a broad, enthusiastic wave, as if from miles away.

Other Lives
    C LIMBING UP WITH A handful of star decals to paste on the bathroom ceiling, Claire sees a suspect-looking shampoo bottle on the cluttered top