Weep for Me Read Online Free

teller, if ever. You think about marriage and about educating your kids and then wonder if the school they go to won’t be a place where they learn how to harden an arrow tip in a camp fire.
    The bloodhound face of the newscaster, his mournful voice and tragic eyes, all seemed to tie in with the restlessness I had felt all day. I watched him, broadcasting to millions, and I was just one little guy watching like a million other little guys, all of us like rabbits in a big lab. All you could do, when they started experimenting on you with radiation, H blasts, and flame throwers, was plan on being one awful quick rabbit.
    I was a lab rabbit who spent every working day behinda bronze grille, handling the stuff that made the world go round.
    After the dishes, Ed and Mom settled themselves to watch a TV program that neither Jo Anne nor I cared for. I raised one eyebrow at Jo Anne and scissored my fingers.
    “We’re going for a walk, Mom,” she said.
    “Take a sweater, dear. You don’t want that cold to get worse.”
    She went up and changed from a cotton dress to a wool skirt and wine-colored sweater. Under daylight time, dusk was still an hour away. Her parents had darkened the living room to make the TV screen bright. We walked slowly down the narrow residential street. Jo Anne was born in that same house. If it were not for the big elms, the careful tending of the small yards, the clipped hedges, the houses themselves would look pretty shoddy.
    People sitting on their porches spoke to us. Kids raced around on bikes and roller skates. An ice-cream bike came down the road, bell tinkling. I bought us both ice cream on a stick and we ate it as we walked.
    “You’re acting odd, Kyle,” she said.
    “Odd?”
    “I don’t know. Far away.”
    “I wasn’t aware of feeling far away,” I said stiffly.
    “Well, at dinner you were looking at me sort of … speculatively. Like I could be some girl you didn’t know.”
    That had been exactly what I was doing. I had been trying to look at her with complete objectivity, as though meeting her for the first time. But it annoyed me that my expression should have been so obvious. “Colds must make you imaginative,” I said.
    She took my arm, hugged it close to her body. “Hey, we even
sound
married, mister.”
    “Practicing, maybe,” I said lightly.
    Still holding my arm, she looked down and scuffed her heels. “Kyle?”
    “What, baby?”
    “Do you ever wonder whether we’ve made a mistake, waiting so long? I mean you’re twenty-nine and I’m twenty-eight. Daddy and Mom treat us like kids, but wearen’t really. When Mom was my age, I was seven years old.”
    “You don’t look a day over fifteen, baby.”
    She looked up into my face, her eyes solemn. “Let’s not joke about it. We’re going to start a baby just as soon as we can, Kyle.”
    It gave me an odd, trapped feeling to hear her say that. “How so?”
    “Well, we could be selfish and have some time to ourselves first, but that would mean I would be over thirty, maybe, for the first one. And they say a first baby when you’re over thirty is pretty difficult. Remember, when I was measured that time, he said I wouldn’t have an easy time.”
    “Let’s get married and then talk about it, baby.”
    “They say men are jealous of babies when you have them too soon after you’re married.”
    I stopped. “Look, I don’t want to be difficult. Let’s just change the subject. Shall we?”
    She gave me a hurt look. “Of course, Kyle.”
    When the street lights went on, we were near the neighborhood shopping center. We had a coke in a booth in the drugstore. She sat across from me. The counter was packed with high-school kids. I looked across at Jo Anne. I had been thinking, all along, that she looked exactly the way she had in high school. I saw that I was wrong. Jo Anne didn’t look like any high-school kid. Not with those tiny parentheses at the corners of her mouth. Not with the little parchment areas under