Child of My Heart Read Online Free Page A

corner of my eye. He drew a few more sketches and then, answering to no call, like a man alone in a room, he slowly stood, paused, and then, still standing, leaned over the desk to draw the pattern once more. Flora and I by this time had gone through the magazine and she now had me by the hand and was pulling me toward a basket of books beside her father’s desk. He looked up and saw her and smiled distractedly, and then he looked at me. He took off his glasses. He had that delicate, almost crinkling, thin skin you see in old men. The piece of charcoal was in his hand and had dirtied his fingertips. He gave me a different kind of smile, rolling the charcoal between thumb and forefinger, taking me in. His white hair moved as if caught in a soft breeze.
    “I hear you’re a babysitter par excellence,” he said—not the way I would say it, but the way someone who really spoke French would say it.
    I told him I just liked children. He nodded slowly, as if this were a sad but complex piece of information, and then, putting on his glasses, he turned back to his sketch. He signed it with the charcoal and then handed it to me, over Flora’s head.
    “Take this home and frame it, then,” he said.
    “It’ll help you put all your own kids through college.” It was unremarkable enough—a loop, a line, a thing like a chicken leg—also vaguely Oriental. The paper was thick and lovely, though. After he left (strolling toward the door as if it were an arbitrary destination, although I could see when he opened it the headlights of the car where she sat, I could hear the impatient idling of the engine), I placed it between the pages of a Life magazine and put it on the table by the front door so I wouldn’t forget it. I thought less of how it would help me to put my kids (all my kids) through college than of what an embarrassment it would be to him if I didn’t bother to take it home. He might well have been a genius, a famous artist, a man whose signature and doodles were valuable, but I was fifteen and pretty and I didn’t doubt for a moment that I was the one with the advantage here.
    The next morning, Flora asked for me as soon as she woke up and then cried when she understood that I wasn’t still in the house, and so her indulgent mother called me to ask if I’d like to take Flora for a walk in her stroller, and then asked if I would do the same every day after school and then full time when summer came. If summer comes, she said, with some melodrama, because it had been cold and damp and overcast for weeks, and she was, she said, bored, bored, bored to be out here so early in the season. Out here only so her husband could work. She turned her nose toward the gray studio, where you could see two single light bulbs hanging in the window, burning into the driveway’s gloom. It was a new use of the word for me: I had never before associated drawing and painting with “work.” I liked the idea. And I was beginning to like their house, which was long and low and full of plate-glass windows and smelled delightfully of her Chanel and his pipe smoke. I already liked Flora.
    My parents were none too pleased with the arrangement, since it didn’t seem to offer as many opportunities for mingling with wealthy potential boyfriends that sitting for stockbrokers or lawyers or plastic surgeons did, but I reminded them that Daisy was coming and that spending the day with Flora would mean spending the day with Daisy, too, whereas any of my usual mother’s helper jobs would leave Daisy on her own until I returned. Poor Daisy, I said, deserved a good summer for a change, and my mother—whose pity for Daisy was a marvelous vehicle for her disapproval of my father’s sister—rolled her eyes and repeated, “Poor Daisy,” and the course of my summer was determined.
    The first thing we have to do for you, I told Daisy, is not so much unpack your clothes as unwrap them. She sat on the floor beside me, her thin legs straight out so we both