See You in Paradise Read Online Free Page B

diapers and powders and creams: all of it has driven Edward to conclude that babies are a brand name, they are a product. They are conventional. They are what other people want you to have. To hell with them, with their big round heads and skinny asses and button noses. He’ll take this: this guy.
    All he has to do is find Al and introduce her to the kid. He scans the crowd. There she is, standing in the sunlight with a skinny sort of ersatz Texan and his wife. He stands up and brushes his butt off.
    “Sit tight, Nate,” he says.
    “Whatever.”
    But as he draws closer to Alison and the Texans, he realizes it isn’t going to work this way. In fact, it isn’t going to work at all. That’s because a child is there, among the three of them, a child of about five with the long, asking-for-it face of a chronic sinus sufferer. The child is holding a busted wiffle ball bat, whitened and creased in the middle, where it’s been pounded against a tree. When Alison turns, her eyes are chaotically glittering, as if full of broken glass. She’s in love.
    Dammit, things ought to be simple. Nate fades away behind him like a Coke can tossed out a car window.
    “Hi!” he says to the four of them and presses his palm against Alison’s humid back. Nobody says anything except the doomed child.
    “Hello.”
    Edward thinks he should probably introduce himself to the adults, but he has a feeling he’s not going to like them. He bends over and says, “Who’s in charge here? You, sir?”
    The child says, “No, Mrs. Scott is,” and points across the park to the tall woman, the one who looked like she might fall over. Great. Great Scott! Perfect! The boy is cowering, so Edward stifles his laugh. Raymond is his name. It’s markered on his name tag in that new kind of printing they teach now, with little curlicues after all the letters, so that the children will find it easier to connect them someday, when cursive is taught.
    Edward feels a willful hand on his shoulder. He allows it to pull him up into a standing position.
    “Harlan Breece,” says the Texan, “Linda Breece.” Edward shakes the man’s hand and gives Linda a little bow. Then Harlan Breece shakes Alison’s hand, too. Edward tries goofily to shake Alison’s hand, but she rejects him with a nervous smile. Everyone, actually, is smiling. Meanwhile Harlan is sizing them up, and after a moment he turns back to the boy, his face confident and calm. Edward sees that Harlan has deemed them not worth worrying about. His wife, seeing this too, relaxes, and a blush blooms briefly. Edward understands that a competition has begun. He turns to Alison.
    “You ought to get into the shade,” he says, for she is deep red and illuminated by sweat.
    “I’m fine,” she tells him brightly. “Raymond likes baseball. His favorite player is … who is it?”
    “Sammy Sosa,” says Raymond.
    “Son,” says Harlan Breece, “you ever been to a real baseball game?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Well, somebody ought to do something about that.”

    “I want him,” Alison says. They are in the car with the windows shut tight, the AC pumping hot air into their faces. The children are climbing into a bus while someone with a clipboard checks off their names. The event is over. The two couples talked to the boy Raymond for a good twenty minutes, not moving an inch, despite the blazing sun: a contest for which the heat-toving Breeces (genuine Texans, as it happens) were genetically predisposed. The Breeces revealed that they lived on the lake, that Harlan was a judge. They’d acquired a child once before, a foster child, as Linda had suffered a “female problem” that left her unable to conceive. The boy had gone back home after a year. The implication was that the separation had crushed poor Linda, and indeed, Linda looked the part, with her moist eyes and weak chin, and the heavy upper arms Alison tends to associate with deep sadness. The Breeces had sold their ranch to a developer and moved