The Stardust Lounge Read Free Page A

pajamas. Why don't you sleep in your bed?”
    “I need to be ready if anything happens,” he answers.
    “What could happen? Honey, you're safe here.”
    “I know I'm safe. It's you and Steve I'm talking about.”
    “We're safe too …”
    Charles looks at the floor.
    “Well, at least take off your shoes? It worries me.”
    “Can't do it, Mom,” he finishes with such authority that I let it go.
    But I move Steve's bed into the living room and each night, take to reading to him there. Charles pretends to study, but I can tell he enjoys the stories.
    Or he paints, having set up his easel by the west window, paints oil after oil of empty rooms, closed barbershops, gas stations, bus terminals, farmhouses whose windows you can see through to sky.
    After some months, he begins to take off his shoes to sleep, though he sleeps fully clothed on the couch in Iowa, later England, and then Maryland. Finally in Boston heseems to make peace with a bed, probably because he chose a couch-bed for his room.
    His first autumn in Iowa Charles finishes about thirty paintings. We stretch the canvases ourselves, or when we can't afford canvas Charles gessoes over his earliest efforts, or over a fine piece of wood we've found on our adventures.
    The year before, Stephen and I moved from Columbia, Missouri, to the house on Market Street where I attend the Writers Workshop. Then Charles was hesitant to come with us. He chose to stay with his father and his father's new wife in the house we had moved to from California after eight years in the air force.
    It has taken coercing to get Charles to join us in Iowa City, coercing I feel guilt about. But I believe my boys should be with me. I believe that they should be together, and that they should be with me.
    Never mind that I have only a seven-hundred-and-forty-dollar-a-month teaching assistantship stipend for us to live on, a rented roof to put over our heads. The good news—no taxes will be taken out of my salary because even a year's earning keeps us below the poverty line.
    To get us started, pay for an apartment, and enroll Stephen in the Iowa City Montessori school, I receive some equity out of the Columbia house and I sell our micro bus for forty-five hundred dollars, the dealership throwing in a black 1970 Volkswagen Beetle. Charles calls it the getaway car.
    At the time of the move from Missouri to Iowa Charles is twelve. In the previous two years he has made the difficulttransition from Southern California, where he's spent most of his childhood, to the middle of Missouri.
    Now I'm asking him to move again, this time without his father for whom he is named, and for whom he pined all the years of his father's flying out over the Pacific on months-long sorties in the air force.
    Charles is being asked to move away again in a tiny old car to which is attached a U-Haul trailer that slows our speed, even on the interstate, to twenty-five miles an hour.
    I have a poor memory for the year that Charles isn't with Stephen and me. I'm ashamed at our circumstances, at the wrecked marriage. When people ask if Stephen is my only son I say yes, dreading a muddled explanation as to why Charles doesn't live with us.
    Stephen misses his father and brother, too. So we begin weekend drives to meet halfway, Charles and his father coming as far as Bloomfield, Iowa, Stephen and I meeting them there on Friday evenings under the bank light on Bloomfield's small town square. We try to time those drives so that no one waits long, Stephen and I traveling south on two-lane back roads through Iowa farmland.
    In the warm weather we keep all the windows down, smell the livestock, the black earth, watch as great flocks of starlings, grackles, crows explode before us.
    In the tiny town of St. Francisville we pay a nickel to cross the bridge.
    If we arrive early, Stephen plays with his matchbox cars on the town green. In cold weather we stay in the car, the engine idling to keep the heat coming. When Charles and his