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

those little sharp silver instruments. Kids used fine as the Novocain.
    “It smells like paint in here,” Robert said.
    “The smell’ll be gone in a day or two.”
    “I guess if you painted we’re going to stay,” he finally mumbled. His voice was hollow, deep, with grace notes of tears.
    “It’ll get better, Ba. You’ll see. You’ll make more friends, play sports, figure out the fun things to do around here. Maybe once I get a job we’ll find a bigger place.”
    “Can I write to Anthony?”
    “No,” I said. I rubbed my hand along his arms. There was yellow paint around my cuticles, faint autumn moons. “This is really hard, I know. You’re being so good about everything. And maybe someday things will be different. I don’t know yet.”
    “I have homework,” he said.
    “I know, Ba, but I want to talk for a while.”
    “I want to do my homework first.”
    We sat together on the couch after dinner, watching situation comedies, families fighting and making up in the span of a single half-hour, while an unseen audience laughed at everything they said or did. Direct conversation had never been the way to engage Robert; I had always had to wait through the silences for his words to swim up at me. It was like the time Bobby and I had spent a week in the Bahamas and gone snorkeling off a steep reef, how the bright fish would appear from the dark navy shadows of the sea, dart past, disappear. That’s how Robert’s words were, small pretty fish swimming up at me and then disappearing into the depths. After we put our dishes in the sink, two cheap china plates, two forks, a saucepan, Robert sat next to me, my arm around him. From the time he was a little boy he had rubbed a strand of my hair idly against his cheek when we sat side by side. It was an automatic tic, a habit like thumb-sucking or nail-biting; it had driven Bobby nuts. “It’s fucking weird, Fran,” he said. Now that my hair was short Robert couldn’t do it anymore, but I dipped my head down close to him, so that at least my hair was near, so he could smell it, sense it. I was letting it grow a little bit, as much as was safe.
    “Bennie’s parents came from Cuba,” he said, his eyes bright in the glow of the TV.
    “A lot of people came here because the government was bad for them. A lot of them came to Florida. It’s the farthest south you can go in the United States before you get to Cuba.”
    “His mother can’t speak English that much. Like Mrs. Pinto, the way she mainly spoke Italian.”
    “It’s really hard to learn a new language if you’re older.”
    “Jonathan in our class says people in America should only speak English. That’s stupid. Everybody in Brooklyn speaks another language. Or lots of people.”
    “I wish Bennie would teach me some Spanish.”
    “How come you don’t know Italian?”
    I shrugged. “I know how to say ‘What a beautiful face’ because every lady in the neighborhood used to say that about you when you were a baby.” He wasn’t looking at me but I could see that he was smiling slightly.
    “Jonathan says he has a pool in his backyard.”
    “The lady I had coffee with the other day, the one I told you has a girl in fourth grade? They have a pool, too.”
    “Above ground or in ground?”
    “What?”
    “Jonathan said his pool is in ground. He said above ground pools were cheap.”
    “The lady I met, Mrs. Roerbacker, her pool is sort of both. Because it’s built into the deck in back of their house but it’s sort of above the yard. You’ll see. She wants you to come swimming.”
    “Jonathan is kind of a jerk,” Robert said, leaning into my shoulder, his hooded eyes at half-mast, black onyx glinting from beneath the lids and the heavy fringe of lashes.
    I could hear his breathing deepen, could hear the second hand of the old kitchen clock jerking around, hear the faint sound of a car out on Poinsettia. Both of us started to nod off. Sleep had become a refuge in which, for at least a few hours,