The Boy Read Online Free

were about to resume their division of time into half-hour segments, and soon school buses would begin their artful rounds up and down dirt roads lined with latilla fences and red willows. Dust would rise, sounds would multiply, while all around, threaded in a near perfect circumference on the horizon, mountains solid and distant breathed out the quiet power of stone.
    Anna ran both hands through her hair. Sleep had come in tight-fisted spurts, between long spells of wakefulness during which her mind had turned tirelessly around the boy. The way he’d sat loose and cool in his young body as she grew stiff in hers, the way he’d propped his elbows on the counter behind him, careless and lazy—inured, it seemed, to the standard fluttering of the human heart in the face of probable rejection.
    As a rule, men approached Anna with circumspection. Those who pushed past the first exchanges nursed deep doubts, in part because of her situation—single mother, single head of household, single holder of insurance, single everything—in part because they sensed a roiling of dark particles beneath the affable exterior.
    “I listen to you and you know what I hear?” one of them had taken the trouble to write in a letter posted from the middle of the American nowhere. “The hiss of a pressure cooker.”
    Some approaches had been more sanguine than others, but they had been on the whole discolored by doubt, tainted by fear. Anna had had a single sustained dalliance since the big move, the duration of which she could calculate in weeks rather than months. Eva had never even met him. Thinking back to the handful of seconds spent sparring with the boy, feeling the texture of her own anger as he spoke, Anna realized that what had most incensed her had been his lack of fear. But why? Why deny a boy the recklessness of youth? Why attempt, with her dismissal, to reduce his flight to a pathetic crawl? The boy was just a boy, unshackled by age and circumstance, blind to the finality of the grave, deaf to the murmurings of the dead.
    Anna got up and went to the kitchen. A small voice rose from her daughter’s room.
    “Mamma?”
    Buried beneath the covers, Eva smelled of goodness and deep sleep. Anna pulled her gently onto her lap and they stayed sitting like that for some time.
    “Come on, my love, it’s time for breakfast.” She wrapped Eva in her polka-dotted robe, retrieved her slippers from under the bed, and together they walked to the dining room, where Eva sat waiting with ruffled hair and unfocused eyes for her bowl of cereal. At eight, the girl was old enough to get her own breakfast, but something in Anna could not, would not, give up the pleasure of feeding her own child.
    When breakfast was over, Eva brought her bowl to the sink, washed it, and laid it out to dry before crossing her arms and looking around with cold, critical eyes.
    “Have you packed my lunch?”
    “No.”
    “Have you fed Paco?”
    “No.”
    “Do I have any clean clothes?”
    “In the dryer.”
    “Mamma.”
    “What?”
    “You have to do a load of whites.”
      
    Anna knew legions of single mothers, agitated women at the mercy of their despotic offspring, but never had she come across a reversal of roles as clear-cut as that between Eva and herself. On the way out the door in the morning, it was Eva who emptied the trash, assembled the videos for return, made sure the dog was fed. What Anna neglected to do, Eva took care of with a roll of the eyes. “You were going to let poor Paco starve?” or, “You were going to pay more late fees?” Anna couldn’t remember when the turnabout had taken place, when she’d gone from being at least nominally in charge to having to travel the straight and narrow all the time. All she knew is that the transition had been wonderfully smooth—a wholly implausible, yet utterly welcome, balancing of forces.
    The first intimation had come one sleepy afternoon in the dead of winter when Eva, barely five, rolled out her