The boys were standing side by side next to the dishwasher in the kitchen when Branwyn entered the room. Minas, wearing his golf clothes, stood frowning over them. When she walked in, he smiled for her. This was probably why she 2 6
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found it so hard to leave: the happiness that she felt in everyone’s eyes whenever she entered a room.
“Eric threw a ball and broke a pane in the greenhouse wall,” Minas said.
“What?” Branwyn asked.
“Eric wasn’t careful, and he broke a window.”
“Is that true, Tommy?” Branwyn asked her son.
“Yes,” Eric said.
“No,” Tommy added. “I did it. I threw overhand and broke the window.”
“But I made him do it,” Eric said. “I kept tellin’ him to throw overhand. He didn’t wanna, an’ so it was my fault.”
Minas looked at Branwyn, bewildered at the turn of events. He often felt like this around her. He was so straightforward and certain, taking up facts like Tommy collected stones. But he never looked closely enough at what he saw.
Without Branwyn, he often thought, he wouldn’t have understood the children at all.
After the boys had been chastised, they went out to play catch again. Branwyn and Minas sat at the butcher- block kitchen table.
“Will you marry me, Branwyn Beerman?” Dr. Minas Nolan asked for what seemed to him like the hundredth time.
Branwyn sighed and took his hand. She shook her head gently.
“Why not? Don’t you love me? Don’t you think I love you?”
She didn’t answer him. Her life for the five and a half years before had been like a dream. A rich and handsome doctor, a brother for her son, her son’s survival, and the flower garden.
All of these things made Branwyn so happy that sometimes, when she was all alone, she cried.
At first she refused the doctor’s proposals because she felt 2 7
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that he needed her for Eric and not himself. His headstrong son would only heed her for the first few years. She thought that maybe Dr. Nolan looked on her the way he saw Ahn, a domestic with a few other qualities. But as time passed, she came to believe that he loved her as a woman. They went everywhere together. When they stayed in hotels, she was automatically registered as Mrs. Nolan. After a time marriage seemed like the right thing.
But then Elton came into Ethel’s Florist Shop not long after Tommy’s sixth birthday.
She hadn’t seen the tall, fine-looking Elton in Tommy’s whole lifetime, but he still made her heart skip and her breath come fast.
“Hey, sugah,” Elton said as if he’d only been away for the weekend.
“Don’t sugah me, Elton Trueblood. That’s the last thing in the world I am to you.”
Elton smiled, and Branwyn kept herself from bringing her hand up to still her breast.
“Don’t be like that, baby,” he said. “You know I just wanted to come an’ see how you doin’ an’ what’s goin’ on.”
“Your son is six years old an’ he hasn’t even met you,”
Branwyn stated.
“That’s why I’m here,” Elton said. “I want to know about my boy.”
“Why?”
“Does a father need a reason?”
“The way I see it, you’re less a father and more like a sperm donor.” Branwyn had been waiting for years to hurl that insult. But the minute she did, she realized that all it proved was how strong she still felt about the man.
“Baby,” he said. “Tommy is my son.”
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“How you know his name?”
“Your mother told me,” Elton said with a sly smile. “I know all about you, sugah. Your doctor boyfriend who won’t marry you —”
“At least he don’t mind a woman with a child. At least he don’t mind if that child sit on his lap and ask what the stars is made’a.”
But Elton would not be hurt.
“Come on and have lunch with me, girl,” he said. “Tell me about my boy.”
She said no and told him that she had to get back to work.
When he left, she breathed a deep sigh but still didn’t feel that she had gotten enough air.
