portrait, groups in matched attire grinning at the photographer. A few included the father, who, on occasion, made his way into the annual photo, as he made his way into his ex-wife’s home and maybe sometimes into her bed. Perhaps that would be today’s story, Bonita being a naturally forgiving woman, weak in the face of some lingering, nostalgic bad habit of love. Love for that man in coveralls, that figure who came to Isaac in nightmares and made him scream, who might or might not have been responsible for knocking out Isaac’s front tooth—a story Richard’s wife would have gotten to the bottom of.
Richard left his listening post and joined the boys in Isaac’s room. It was protected by a dead bolt. This despite the fact that the walls and door themselves would have easily shattered or splintered at the mildest use of force. The room, like the rest of the apartment, was very tidy and held a few familiar touches: a cast-off desk and chair from Richard’s home, gifts the two boys had gotten in common—a lighted globe, a poster of SpongeBob. “We just needed this guy,” Danny was explaining, in his palm a drunk-looking Duplo clown, while Isaac sat trembling on the bed with his hands over his ears. “We were making an amusement park in the town, and this is literally the only guy who fits in the cannon. Nobody else has the right feet.” Richard sat beside Isaac and gently took the boy’s hands into his own, explaining the problem with what the boys had done, the worry they’d caused, riding the buses alone, the risk of accident and mishap, the menace of malign strangers, adding that he and Bonita hadn’t been angry so much as scared. Isaac burst into tears, and Danny just looked perplexed.
“If it’s so dangerous, how come we let Bonita and Isaac do it?” he asked. “They do it every day, twice. And also, I think, statistically buses crash a lot less often than cars.” Danny would be a lawyer, Richard thought, not for the first time. He was logical, and passionate about fairness, fearless in an interesting way. Right after Danny had spoken, however, he seemed to realize precisely what he’d said, and then he too was sniffling, burrowing into Richard from the other side. A time would come, Richard thought, when he and his children wouldn’t think of that terrible car crash and death every day, when they would no longer be ambushed by missing her.
Through the thin walls, they could hear the voices carrying on in the kitchen, his and hers, cajoling, laughing, then the embarrassing noise of nothing. Intimacy. And then the sound of his being sent away, a quiet, reluctant goodbye.
“ Is OK ,” Bonita eventually called at the locked door. “Is OK, se fue . Isaac?” Simultaneously, the boys pulled away from Richard, wiped their eyes, put on their game faces. Richard unlocked the door. “Is OK now,” Bonita told him, her eyes also tearful. “He go.” It was hard to say who initiated their embrace, only the second in their long association. It seemed a mutual impulse, sadness, need—the same feelings they’d shared at the funeral, three years ago. Bonita’s shoulders heaved. Tears: they did not require translation. How convenient it would be, Richard thought, Bonita’s wiry hair against his neck, her face on his shoulder, how terribly useful if they could simply wed, he minus a wife, she with her problematic ex-husband, and regroup together like in a sitcom scenario in the fortified comfort of Richard’s house across town, an arrangement that would be possible if they could just ignore that troubling enigma of love.
“Oh no,” she cried, smiling, when they separated, wiping at the mascara on his shirt. “How you say?” she said to the boys, wiggling her fingers.
“Spiders,” they replied together.
“Dad?” Danny said from the backseat. Richard checked the rearview; his son’s tone was hesitant. “Dad, inside your head, do you hear conversations?”
“Like memories? Like of
Stephen G. Michaud, Roy Hazelwood