What Hearts Read Free Page A

learned to let the thought stand for something, and pass on.
    Dave pulled up in front of a small squarebungalow about the same size as his car. It was posing as a miniature house painted dark red, with a tiny window and shutters and a window box containing pink plastic geranium blossoms but no plastic greenery on the plastic stems. Asa thought perhaps birds had yanked the leaves off for use in their nest building; at home he had watched many songbird species binding their little baskets with leaves, and others using pieces of plastic bags or fishing line found in the trashy nooks people forgot about when they threw things away. Dave heaved his mother’s suitcase and his knapsack out of the car’s trunk, put them onto the macadam that went right up to the bungalow’s front doorjamb, and handed his mother a key on a green plastic triangle.
    She looked at it as if it were something utterly out of place here, a rubber tomahawk, perhaps, or a handful of snails. She appeared to be lost. “But where are you?”
    Dave pointed to the next bungalow. “Number 10.”
    â€œIs ours 9, or 11?” asked Asa.
    Dave shrugged. “Beats me. Lady just gaveme my lucky number and the one next door. Ask her if you like.” He leaned closer and pointed up the macadam drive, past other bungalows lined up like Monopoly houses. “You can find her in the bigger one at the end. She’d love to hear about you being a king and all, I’m sure. After that, you could tell her about the baseball.”
    â€œDavid,” said Asa’s mother.
    â€œJust thought maybe the boy could chat for thirty or forty minutes while we got a basket of fried oysters,” he said. “No harm.” Then he went to his bungalow and opened the door without a key.
    Asa and his mother stood there a minute. The light around them was turning quickly from orange to twilight blue. Some swallows cut through the air above the driveway like tiny scythes. Asa’s mother sighed.
    â€œDavid and I went to high school together,” she said. “Back before your father and I met. He’s known me a long time. He’s liked me for a long time. Sometimes that makes him a little possessive.” She smiled in Asa’s direction; her teeth looked luminous in the blue dusk. “A girllikes that, sometimes.” She held her smile, then took a step toward him and held out her hand. “I believe you understand, don’t you?”
    Asa plucked the key from the hand reaching out, and went for the door. “Of course not,” he said.
    FIVE
    After dinner the three of them walked along the boardwalk. To Asa, it was as if he had stepped inside a movie about some kind of carnival: he could smell the roasted popcorn and caramel and cotton candy and cigar smoke, he could hear the squeals of teenagers and the constant thunking of bare heels on the boardwalk; but somehow nothing touched him. He could see bellies protruding over Bermuda-shorts belt lines, with a carroty light seeping through pale Banlon shirts from the sunburned skin beneath, and thick faces full of laughter. But none of the whirling faceslooked at him. He was just as glad. He was content just to walk, secure in the growing and marvelous conviction that nothing around him could break through.
    But then Dave stopped and pointed off above their heads. “Now there’s something for the boy,” he said. “Come on.” And he struck off in a new direction, leaving them to follow. Asa could not really see where they were heading, but as they left the main stream of the boardwalk behind them, he noticed a new noise. It was a ratchety rumble that came in surges, curving in and out of loudness. They were moving toward whatever was making it.
    And then they were there. Set off from the boardwalk a bit was a small wooden pier, built on straight black pilings that disappeared into the tilting black water. Underneath, everything was very dark, and although