Read Online The Age of Miracles by Ellen Gilchrist - Free Book Online

took it wrong.”
    â€œHe did it to be mean.”
    â€œOkay. I’m going to send you some books about what to do when your mother has a boyfriend. Hell, maybe I’ll send you Sophocles.” My daughter-in-law laughed. For a moment the tension wavered. Like a thermocline, the water of laughter invaded the heat. Then the heat returned.
    â€œIf he’s going to be around, I’ll come and live with you,” he said. “If you like me so much let me live with you.”
    Above us the beautiful light green leaves swayed in the breeze. Above them stretched the sky with its immensity and wonder. I looked into my ex-daughter-in-law’s wide brown eyes. We had fought this child’s father together. I had fought his father and grandfather and great-grandfather. We knew what we were up against. This will that grew stronger from generation to generation. That finally, in this child, had been mixed with her German, Dutch, and American Indian genes. Hybrid vigor. My Celtic craziness dissolved in more rational, cooler genes. Will and imagination and a sense of order remained of my genetic contribution. And the strongest of these was will.
    There he sat, in the passenger seat of his great-grandmother’s car, the end product of all this random genius , ready to defend his territory at any cost.
    â€œI’m going to send you a book about a man named Oedipus,” I said. “It will explain the psychological ramifications of this problem. Call me up when you’ve read it and we’ll talk about it.”
    â€œI don’t know what any of that means.” He raised his head and looked at me. Gave me the full force of his gaze. He’s an intuitive too. Nothing gets past him. There is no barrier between him and the world. Not a membrane to separate him from all that burgeoning wonder, all the glorious and inglorious knowledge of our being.
    â€œI will love you till I die,” I said. “I love you more than anyone. You are the dearest thing on earth to me.”
    â€œLet’s go back to the party.”
    â€œWe better,” his mother added. “I have to see about the little girls.”
    The day wore on into evening. The little girls went off to spend the night with cousins. My ex-daughter-in-law and her boyfriend went off to party with my nieces.
    I took my grandson to the mall. We bought some baseball shirts and a pair of striped shorts. We ate some junk food. We held hands and walked around and looked at things. He is five foot five inches tall now. As tall as I am. Soon it will be over, this part of it. The part when he was a child and I was his guardian angel. He will leave me and go off to the world. He will leave me here with memories of many days in many malls, of buying transformers and Lego sets and books and basketball shoes and posters of Jose Canseco. Baseball hats and tacos and pizza and frozen yogurt. Goofy golf and batting cages and long walks and bike rides and swimming pools. We have heard the chimes at bedtime, oh, the malls that we have seen.
    â€œI love you,” I kept telling him. “It’s okay if your mother has a boyfriend. It will make her stronger. Anything that makes her stronger, makes you stronger. We are a family. We stick together.”
    â€œI wish you lived where I do. I wish you lived next door.”
    â€œI wish I did too. I hate to miss a day of seeing you.”
    After a while the mall began to close and we walked out into the parking lot and watched the black teenagers forming into groups. I held his hand and let him find the car for me.
    We went over to my momma’s house and slept in my old bed. We snuggled down into the sheets from London. I pulled his fine strong eleven-and-a-half-year-old body into my arms and held him there. “You are my angel,” I said. “No one will ever take your place with me. Your mother and I love you more than you will ever know. No one will ever take her or me away from