Ladder of Years Read Free Page B

freckled white face shadowed violet beneath the eyes), but last month he had turned fifteen, and all at once she saw more of Sam in him. He had shot up to nearly six feet, and his pointy chin had suddenly squared, and his hands had grown muscular and disconcertingly competent-looking. Even the way he held his butter knife suggested some new authority.
    His voice was Sam’s too: deep but fine-grained, not subject to the cracks and creaks his brother had gone through. “I hope you bought cornflakes,” he told her.
    “Why, no, I—”
    “Aw, Mom!”
    “But wait till you hear why I didn’t,” she said. “The funniest thing, Carroll! This real adventure. I was standing in the produce section, minding my own business—”
    “There’s not one decent thing in this house to eat.”
    “Well, you don’t usually want breakfast on a Saturday.”
    He scowled at her. “Try telling Ramsay that,” he said.
    “Ramsay?”
    “He’s the one who woke me. Came stumbling into the room in broad daylight, out all night with his lady friend. No way could I get back to sleep after that.”
    Delia turned her attention to the grocery bags. (She knew where this conversation was headed.) She started rummaging through them as if the cornflakes might emerge after all. “But let me tell you my adventure,”she said over her shoulder. “Out of the blue, this man is standing next to me. … Good-looking? He looked like my very first sweetheart, Will Britt. I don’t believe I ever mentioned Will to you.”
    “Mom,” Carroll said. “When are you going to let me move across the hall?”
    “Oh, Carroll.”
    “Nobody else I know has to room with their brother.”
    “Now, now. Plenty of people in this world have to room with whole families,” she told him.
    “Not with their boozehead college-boy brother, though. Not when there’s another room, perfectly empty, right across the hall.”
    Delia set down the box of orzo and faced him squarely. She noticed that he needed a haircut, but this was not the moment to point that out. “Carroll, I’m sorry,” she said, “but I am just not ready.”
    “Aunt Eliza’s ready! Why aren’t you? Aunt Liza was Grandpa’s daughter too, and she says of course I should have his room. She doesn’t understand what’s stopping me.”
    “Oh, listen to us!” Delia said gaily. “Spoiling such a pretty day with disagreements! Where’s your father? Is he seeing a patient?”
    Carroll didn’t answer. He had dropped his toast to his plate, and now he sat tipping his chair back defiantly, no doubt adding more dents to the linoleum. Delia sighed.
    “Sweetie,” she said, “I do know how you feel. And pretty soon you can have the room, I promise. But not just yet! Not right now! Right now it still smells of his pipe tobacco.”
    “It won’t once I’m living there,” Carroll said.
    “But that’s what I’m afraid of.”
    “Shoot, I’ll take up smoking, then.”
    She waved his words away with a dutiful laugh. “Anyhow,” she said. “Is your father with a patient?”
    “Naw.”
    “Where is he?”
    “He’s out running.”
    “He’s what?”
    Carroll picked up his toast again and chomped down on it noisily.
    “He’s doing what? ”
    “He’s running, Mom.”
    “Well, didn’t you at least offer to go with him?”
    “He’s only running around the Gilman track, for gosh sakes.”
    “I asked you children; I begged you not to let him go alone. What if something happens and no one’s around to help?”
    “Fat chance, on the Gilman track,” Carroll said.
    “He shouldn’t be running anyway. He ought to be walking.”
    “Running’s good for him,” Carroll said. “Look. He’s not worried. His doctor’s not worried. So what’s your problem, Mom?”
    Delia could have come up with so many responses to that; all she did was press a hand to her forehead.
    These were the facts she had neglected to tell that young man in the supermarket: She was a sad, tired, anxious, forty-year-old woman who