The Big Dream Read Free Page B

a lullaby. Clint didn’t mind the pain, or his underground apartment with no Virigie to visit. He didn’t hear the hum of the fluorescent lights, the rush of traffic, the rustle of mice in the wall. Clint felt only the relief of fluid bursting against the roof of his mouth.

WAITING FOR WOMEN
    WHEN NEITHER WOMAN had arrived by 6:12, Theo took the kids outside to wait. Jake put on his Transformers hat, scrambled off the porch and hurled his small denim body into the hedge, the glossy leaves closing behind him. Theo didn’t know what was of interest in the hedge, nor why the boy wore the Decepticons toque all summer, but he let it go.
    Easier to get distracted by Marley, who was sitting in his lap, crumbling Saltines onto her belly. Eventually, Jake re-emerged, leaf-sprinkled, clutching Theo’s old skateboard. Theo looked at the peeling Nirvana stickers and dirty orange wheels and wondered whether he had really ever said the kid could play with it. He suspected that Jake had simply taken it from the basement without asking, but after a moment, he let that slide too.
    Jake sat down on the board, then lay down on his back and propelled himself along with his feet. Hanging around with his kids made Theo feel delightfully grown-up. Maybe it was sad that he was only smug in his maturity over a six-year-old scooting backwards across the cement, and a cracker-and-saliva-smeared blind infant. Maybe real grown-ups didn’t even use the word grown-up.
    Marley held a largely intact cracker in both hands, waving it, occasionally sucking on it. She squirmed to put her feet on the step she couldn’t see, and couldn’t yet stand on unsupported. But she was desperate to walk, constantly pulling herself up on anything she could grasp. Theo had been surprised that she wanted to
go places, since how could she know there was anywhere else to go? But Marley had intuited, somehow, the rest of the world, and had started inch-worming towards it, just like on the development charts.
    Theo wondered who would turn up first. Rae’s workday could spill well past five, or so she said. On the other hand, Colleen, for all her other insanities, was punctual. Or close enough. At 6:19, it was indeed Colleen striding from the bus stop at the corner, which was also at the corner of their overgrown, oversized yard. Her pelt of ginger hair bounced against her back as she walked.
    Jake skate-scooted past the bottom of the stairs, close enough for Theo to reach out his socked foot to tap the boy’s horizontal stomach. “Look who it is, Jakey.”
    Marley squawked. Theo wondered if it was the word look.
    Jake sat up and squawked too. “Dolly. Dolly! ” And then he was running down the drive to the sidewalk.
    Colleen made no eye contact as she stomped along in her short grey school tunic, but when Jake reached her and hugged her waist, she crouched, and said a few words that made him jump and clutch at her flannel shoulders. She tolerated this, but as soon as he let go she straightened. Jake adored Colleen, though no one had ever seen her encourage him, or even answer to the nickname he had given her. She stomped on up the walk, Jake trotting in her tall slender shadow, past the wizened herb garden and bald-headed poppies. She stopped about six feet from Theo and the baby.
    â€œYou shouldn’t let him run near the road.”
    Jake plopped down on the board. “I know not to run on. I know. ”
    â€œHe does, actually. We taught him from The Book of Horrible Accidents. ”
    Jake glared. “No. That’s not a real book. Mrs. Silver at school just taught us the rules of the road, is all.” He picked up an ant and placed it on his palm, watched it crawl.

    Colleen’s eyes were a flat silver-green, and her gaze rested on Theo as if he were a tree stump or a fire hydrant. “My dad said he’d promised I’d sit for you.” She whirled and sat one step lower than Theo, her biceps