Read Online Black and Blue by Anna Quindlen - Free Book Online Page A

didn’t even notice till after her husband was gone that she hadn’t saved one single chair. She was standing around in her own place for the better part of a week.”
    “It’s all right,” I said.
    “Sure, now?” Cindy said. “There’s a mess of stuff down there. Go look if you want. Some of it’s real nice. Well, not real nice, but presentable. And clean. Craig’s mother’s a real clean person.”
    Our kids give us courage, I think. The only way I’d gotten through Robert’s first day of first grade had been to remember the stalwart set of those little shoulders, and the thing that kept me in my seat during soccer games when the coach yelled at him was the dignified way he’d lift his bony pointed chin. And I thought ofhow he’d refused to let me unearth his fears about a new school, a new name, a new life, of how he’d decided to swim in alone in the stream of children I’d seen that morning, with only Bennie and his backpack as life preservers. He was beginning a life, a life as Robert Crenshaw, making a place for himself. And so would I. Goddamn Bobby Benedetto, so would I. Maybe I was supposed to hide behind my blinds, to make myself invisible. Maybe that was what Patty Bancroft thought would be safest. Maybe that was what most of the women did. Not me. I’d changed my hair and my clothes, my name and my address, so that I could live, really live. I needed a job, and a friend, and a shot at changing that closed-up little apartment, with its thin carpeting and colorless couch, into someplace that seemed like people lived there, lived ordinary uneventful lives.
    “Actually,” I said, “I could use some curtains.”
    “Couldn’t we all?” said Cindy Roerbacker, laying on the drawl plenty thick, her eyes bright, smile big, a smudge of lipstick on her teeth. “Girl, let’s decorate.”

R obert started his second week of school, liked the kids, liked his teachers, slept less, spoke more, although not as much as another kid would have done. And I splurged on a gallon of butter-yellow paint, to mark a month in Lake Plata, living through it, learning to let some of the fear out of the tight muscles in my shoulders. That’s how small the living room of the apartment was: one gallon of paint was enough. I’d hung a sampler in the kitchen that I’d found in Cindy’s basement: in cross-stitch it said, “May you be in heaven an hour before the devil knows you’re dead.” Mrs. Roerbacker’s old multicolored afghan hung over the back of the couch, and some throw pillows were plumped up at either end. From Cindy’s basement I’d taken an old oak rocker, a seascape in a maple frame, a chenille spread with blue and yellow pompons, a set of café curtains with cherries printed on them, and some drapes with stripes so bright they made you dizzy. “You sure about those?” Cindy said when we put them in the back of the minivan. She didn’t try to patronize me when she helped me carry all the stuff into the apartment on Poinsettia Way. She just looked around and nodded as though it was what you could expect from a divorce, a dislocation. That’s how she was, realistic but never grim. “You can work with this,” she said. It didn’t take long to paint the place, it was so tiny. But when I was done with the downstairs it looked like a feature in awoman’s magazine on decorating on a budget. Except that the venetian blinds were still closed tight. The overhead light stayed on all day.
    “It looks different in here,” Robert said when he came home from school and dropped his backpack on the table.
    “You don’t like it?”
    “It looks different.” At dinner he slumped over his buttered spaghetti, mumbling. School was fine. Bennie was fine. Mrs. Bernsen was fine. The spaghetti was fine. Fine is a kid’s way of telling you he doesn’t want to talk. I’d watched parents ignore that in the emergency room; fine, fine, fine, the kid would say, and Mom and Dad would probe deeper, like dentists with