Where the God of Love Hangs Out - Amy Bloom [46]
I was shaking him hard, wanting him to talk back so I could slap his face, and he was crying, turning his face away from me. I pulled him into the light of the kitchen and saw the purple bruise, the shiny puff of skin above his right eyebrow. There was a cut in his upper lip, making it lift and twist like a harelip.
“What the hell happened to you?”
“I got into a little fight at the Navigator and then I had sort of an accident, nothing serious. I just hit a little tree and bumped my head.”
“You are an asshole.”
“I know, Ma, I’m sorry. I’ll pay you back for the car so your insurance won’t go up. I’m really sorry.”
I put my hands in my pockets and waited for my adrenaline to subside.
I steered him into the bathroom and sat him down on the toilet while I got some ice cubes and wrapped them in a dish towel; that year I was always making compresses for Buster’s skinned knees, busted lips, black eyes. Lion sat there holding the ice to his forehead. The lip was too far gone.
I wasn’t angry anymore and I said so. He smiled lopsidedly and leaned against me for a second. I moved away and told him to wash up.
“All right, I’ll be out in a minute.”
“Take your time.”
I sat on the couch, thinking about his going away and whether or not Jeffrey would be good company for him. Lion came out of the bathroom without his bloody shirt, the dish towel in his hand. He stood in the middle of the room, like he didn’t know where to sit, and then he eased down onto the couch, tossing the towel from hand to hand.
“Don’t send me away. I don’t want to go away from you and Grandma and Buster. I just can’t leave home this summer. Please, Ma, it won’t—what happened won’t happen again. Please let me stay home.” He kept looking at his hands, smoothing the towel over his knees and then balling it up.
How could I do that to him?
“All right, let’s not talk about it any more tonight.”
He put his head back on the couch and sighed, sliding over so his cheek was on my shoulder. I patted his good cheek and went to sit in the brown chair.
I started to say more, to explain to him how it was going to be, but then I thought I shouldn’t. I would tell him that we were looking at wreckage and he would not want to know.
I said good night and went to my bedroom. He was still on the couch in the morning.
We tried for a few weeks, but toward the end of the summer Lion got so obnoxious I could barely speak to him. Ruth kept an uncertain peace for the first two weeks and then blew up at him. “Where have your manners gone, young man? After all she did for you, this is the thanks she gets? And Julia, when did you get so mush-mouthed that you can’t tell him to behave himself?” Lion and I looked at our plates, and Ruth stared at us, puzzled and cross. I came home from work on a Friday and found a note on the kitchen table: Friends called with a housepainting job in Nantucket. Will call before I go to Paris. Will still do junior year abroad, if that’s okay. L. “If that’s okay” meant that he wanted me to foot the bill, and I did. I would have done more if I had known how.
It’s almost summer again. Buster and I do pretty well, and we have dinner every Sunday with Ruth, and more often than not, we drive her over to bingo on Thursday evenings and play a few games ourselves. I see my husband everywhere; in the deft hands of the man handing out the bingo cards, in the black-olive eyes of the boy sitting next to me on the bench, in the thick, curved back of the man moving my new piano. I am starting to play again and I’m teaching Buster.
Most nights, after I have gone to bed, I find myself in the living room or standing on the porch in the cold night air. I tell myself that I am not waiting, it’s just that I’m not yet awake.
NIGHT VISION
For fifteen years, I saw my stepmother only in my dreams.
After