The Late Child Read Free Page A

anywhere—told her that the best approach when someone close passed away was just to keep on doing normal things as normally as possible. Making macaroni and cheese was a normal thing; so was popping Eddie’s favorite movie,
Benjy
, into the VCR.
    â€œMom, make it go fast until we come to the grizzly bear,” Eddie requested; then he picked up the remote and made it go fast himself—he wanted to get to the scary part right away—the part where the wolf gets after Benjy.
    â€œMaybe Jimmy can watch the scary part with you,” Harmony suggested—Eddie definitely liked company while the scary parts were happening. She tried very hard to follow Gary’s instruction to do normal things, which meant concentrating on the macaroni and cheese.
    â€œHoney, you’re bleeding all over everything, this whole carpet will have to be took up,” Jimmy said. He stood by the refrigerator looking helpless, a roll of paper towels in his hand.
    Harmony knew that bleeding pints of blood on the wall-to-wall wasn’t too normal, but the major normal thing that still seemed within her grasp was to make Eddie the macaroni and cheese she had promised him yesterday, before the tragedy happened, or before she knew about it, at least. She felt that if she concentrated on the macaroni and cheese and made it and fed it to Eddie, as she had so many times, she might not go crazy. But she had to concentrate very hard on that one thing: feeding her son. Her feet were down there somewhere, bleeding, and the carpet was down there too, getting bled on, but Harmony couldn’t direct her attention to the plight of her feet, much less the plight of the carpet. She had to get the right dishes out of the cabinet, and she had to turn the stove on.
    â€œHon, I’m going up to the Circle K and get some cigarettes,” Jimmy said, setting the roll of paper towels on the counter by the sink.
    â€œNeed anything?” he asked, just before he went out the door.
    â€œNo, Jimmy … I guess not,” Harmony said, glancing at him. Even before the door closed behind him she had the feeling that Jimmy Bangor was gone. The look in his eye, before he stepped through the door, had been the going-away look, a look she had seen, sooner or later, in the eyes of every man she had ever been involved with except one. At a certain moment, because of this or that, it just seemed that life with her became too much for her boyfriends to handle. One after another, year after year, they went out for bread or beer or cigarettes and never came back. How women got men to stay with them, month after month and year after year, was a mystery to Harmony. Whether it was better cooking, or tricks in bed, or proper housekeeping techniques, she had no way to know. Men seemed to like her, and certainly she liked them. But usually only a few weeks or at most a few months would go by and she would look up one day from making spaghetti, or maybe a sandwich, and there herman would be, at the door, the going-away look in his eye. She was pretty sure it had just occurred with Jimmy Bangor—maybe it was her bloody feet. Jimmy was sort of a squeamish man, even if he did like to fish.
    â€œDo you think he’ll bring Popsicles, Mom?” Eddie asked. The grizzly bear had just scared the wolf away from Benjy, which meant that he could relax his attention for a few minutes.
    Harmony went to the couch and sat down beside him—she felt like being close to her son, for a little while. As for Eddie, he always liked to be close to his Mom; he immediately climbed up in her lap. After all, the really scary part of the movie was coming up: the part where, just when the black wolf almost has Benjy, Benjy tricks him and the wolf goes off the cliff and falls for a long time and never comes back. It meant the wolf was dead, Eddie believed, though you never really got to see the wolf being dead, which made Eddie worry just a little. It would have been good