Read Online The Boy Who Could Draw Tomorrow by Quinn Sinclair - Free Book Online

pressuring him. Tons of work must have piled up while he was away. Yet it was the same for her, wasn't it? Didn't she have a new job, too? And hadn't things also backed up on her desk while they were in Pensacola? But she'd made time, hadn't she? Didn't Sam come first?
    She cleared the table and left the dishes in the sink, and then she took Sam into their new living room and read to him, listening between sentences for Hal's key in the door.
    She didn't hear it.
    At last she gave up and marched Sam off to his room. It was while she was helping him into his pyjamas that she remembered.
    "You get to do any drawing today?"
    He shook his head. "We had assemblies and songs and things like that. Miss Putnam said to leave our things in our cubbies."
    "I see," Peggy said, wondering how to begin. She looked at her watch. "You want to wait up a little longer for Daddy?"
    "Is it okay?"
    "Maybe another half-hour." She opened the backpack and took out his things. "And you could draw a little—since you didn't get a chance today."
    She sat on the bed while he flipped through his pad for a fresh sheet.
    "Tell you what," Peggy said when she saw the pen poised over the page. "Draw me. Draw Mommy."
    "You bet," Sam said, and began.
    When he was finished, he put down his pen and carried the pad over to the bed.
    "Oh, honey, that's really wonderful," Peggy said, no longer able to stop herself. She had to know. "Except don't you think I'd look prettier with a necklace?"
    "Necklace coming up," Sam said, and went to seat himself at his worktable again.
    ***
    When the eleven o'clock news was over and he still wasn't home, she lifted the phone to try Hal's office. But what good would it do? The switchboard would be closed and she didn't know the new direct number.
    Peggy lowered the receiver, kicked off her shoes, and went to sleep with her clothes on. It must have been after three that she was vaguely conscious of his presence in the room, his familiar rustlings in the dark. When she felt him busy at her body—his hands turning her, Hal's gentle labors working off her dress, then pantyhose, her bra—Peggy tried to make herself wake up. But a thousand ropes pulled her back down into sleep again, even as she felt her hips lifted and her panties slipping from her legs.
    "Darling," she heard Hal say as if he whispered from a faraway room, but somehow it got mixed up with another faraway voice and the image of a fat man sitting on a stool.
    ***
    When the alarm went off, Peggy got up without looking back at the bed. She closed the bathroom door before she turned on the light, then sat down on the toilet and let her head down into her hands. She was reaching her hand out to the faucet to run cold water on her wrists when she saw it. It was draped over the tap, twisted into three loops to keep it from sliding off into the sink.
    She stood up and slipped it into her hand. The chain was slender and gold, and the cameo that was suspended from it a faint, luminous pink. She looked at it, then hung it from her neck and looked at herself reflected in the mirror, the cameo like a third pale nipple newly risen between her breasts.
    She trembled with a feeling that was like a great crashing of noise which no one but she would ever hear. For a long time she stood staring at herself, until fear and excitement made her turn away, still so stunned that she never saw the word he'd scrawled in soap across the glass.
    FORGIVE
    ***
    Forgiveness was the last thing on Peggy's mind as she raced Sam through breakfast and got him dressed for school, doing everything as quietly as she could so as not to disturb Hal.
    "We'll just let Daddy sleep and do the best we can," Peggy said when there was nothing left but the necktie. Hal had tied the damn thing yesterday. She knelt in front of him and chewed at the inside of her cheek. After five or six tries she got something that looked as if it might pass.
    "Take a peek," she said, and turned him to the mirror. "You approve?"
    He