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By Root 984 0

where my father put his beer cans when he was conscientious enough to put them somewhere other than where he'd finished drinking them. Then I opened another beer. There was an ugly gnawing in my stomach, which I pretended was still hunger. The only thing to eat in the house was one lonely piece of white bread: I slipped it out of its plastic sleeve and chewed it slowly and thoughtfully, like an especially contemplative cow. Then, after I was through with the bread, after I'd given my father and Deirdre more than enough time to get away, I put my open beer into a paper bag and grabbed the last six-pack out of the fridge. I was going to need whatever courage the beer might give me, plus some. Because now that I'd seen my father with his Deirdre, I was going to have to go talk to the people who'd seen me with my own.

21

It was snowing in Camelot when I arrived. This snow was different from the snow in New Hampshire: it was less intense and deadly and beautiful, just scattered big flakes floating earthward, like confetti separated from the rest of the parade. There was no wind at all; it was cold, not painfully cold but rather the kind of brisk, bright, invigorating cold that made you think cold might not be such a bad thing after all. The sun kept peeking out from behind the clouds, making the clouds and the snow seem more brilliant than they would have been on their own. There were no cars in any of the driveways, no children playing on their pressure-treated wood play sets, no one shoveling their front steps. It was lunchtime on a weekday. There is no quieter time and place than weekday lunchtime in Camelot, but this seemed even quieter than normal. I felt as if it were years in the future and I were pulling into some sort of subdivisional preserve, not a place where people currently lived, but a place designed to show busloads of field-tripping schoolchildren how and where people had once lived before they moved somewhere else.

I say there were no cars, but this wasn't entirely true. There was mine, of course, and in my driveway, there was my father-in-law's car and Anne Marie's minivan. Thomas Coleman's Jeep wasn't in sight. Katherine would be at school; Christian would be eating lunch. He was the sort of boy who ate intensely, and so he wouldn't be able to pay attention to anything except the sandwiches and milk he must finish. This would be my time: if Mr. Mirabelli had told Anne Marie what he'd seen, then I'd explain myself, I'd explain everything; if he hadn't told her, then I'd tell her myself. I drank the rest of my beer, threw the can toward the back of the van, got out, and marched to the front door. This was my last chance: I knew this was my last chance because my face didn't flame up but instead was ice cold, as though it were preparing itself to be another kind of face for another kind of life.

I knocked on the door and waited. The snow stopped falling for a moment, as though in anticipation; the sun shone on me the way the sun never had before, just like in the Bible, when the weather is there to emphasize human drama and not just to grow and kill crops.

Then the door opened. Thomas Coleman stood in the doorway. He was wearing leather sandals and a pair of black-and-white-checked baggy pants that weight lifters might wear over their spandex singlets during the Mr. Universe competition in San Diego. He was bare chested, his chest bony and flat and basically just a higher version of his stomach. His nipples were surprisingly large and choked with impressive, dark brown thatches of hair. He was wearing a white towel on his head, a thick piece of rope holding the towel tight to his skull. Thomas smiled and took a step toward me, and I hit him in the jaw as hard as I could, which admittedly wasn't very hard: my fist hit his jaw with a thud instead of a crack. Thomas fell back into the doorway and onto his ass; he sat there rubbing his jaw but still smiling at me. It was the first time I'd ever punched anyone, and it was the most unsatisfying feeling in the world, and I knew immediately it is better to