Breathing Lessons (1989 Pulitzer Prize) - Anne Tyler [91]
Once when he was eleven or twelve he'd been horsing around with Maggie in the kitchen, punching his catcher's mitt while he teased her about her cooking, and the telephone rang and he answered and said, "Huh? Mr. Bunch?" Mr. Bunch was his sixth-grade teacher, so Maggie assumed the call was for Jesse and she turned back to her work. Jesse said, "Huh?" He said, "Wait a minute! You can't blame me for that!" Then he slammed the phone down, and Maggie, glancing over, saw those telltale dark rings beneath his eyes. "Jesse? Honey? What's the matter?" she had asked. "Nothing," he told her roughly, and he walked out. He left his catcher's mitt on the table, worn and deeply pocketed and curiously alive. The kitchen echoed.
But not ten minutes later she noticed him in the front yard with Herbie Albright, laughing uproariously, crashing through the little boxwood hedge as he'd been told not to a hundred times.
Yes, it was his laughter that she pictured when she thought of him-his eyes lit up and dancing, his teeth very white, his head thrown back to show the clean brown line of his throat. (And why was it that Maggie remembered the laughter while Ira remembered the tantrums?) In a family very nearly without a social life, Jesse was intensely, almost ridiculously social, knee-deep in friends. Classmates came home with him from school every afternoon, and sometimes as many as seven or eight stayed over on weekends, their sleeping bags taking up all the floor space in his room, their cast-off jackets and six-guns and model airplane parts spilling out into the hallway. In the morning when Maggie went to wake them for pancakes the musky, wild smell of boy hung in the doorway like curtains, and she would blink and back off and return to the safety of the kitchen, where little Daisy, swathed to her toes in one of Maggie's aprons, stood on a chair earnestly stirring batter.
He took up running one spring and ran like a maniac, throwing himself into it the way he did with everything that interested him, however briefly. This was when he was fifteen and not yet licensed to drive, so he sometimes asked Maggie for a lift to his favorite track, the Ralston School's cedar-chip-carpeted oval in the woods out in Baltimore County. Maggie would wait for him in the car, reading a library book and glancing up from time to time to check his progress. She could always spot him, even when the track was crowded with middle-aged ladies in sweat suits and Ralston boys in numbered uniforms. Jesse wore tattered jeans and a black T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off, but it wasn't only his clothes that identified him; it was his distinctive style of running. His gait was free and open, as if he were holding nothing in reserve for the next lap. His legs flew out and his arms made long reaching motions, pulling in handfuls of the air in front of him. Every time Maggie located him, her heart would pinch with love. Then he would vanish into the forested end of the track and she would go back to her book.
But one day he didn't come out of the forest. She waited but he didn't appear. And yet the others came, even the slowest, even the silly-looking Swedish-walker people with their elbows pumping like chicken wings. She got out of the car finally and went over to the track, shading her eyes. No Jesse. She followed the bend of the oval into the woods, her crepe-soled work shoes sinking into the cedar chips so her calf muscles