wrinkled again as soon as he slept in it tonight, so why waste the time. Willard grinned to himself at a recurrent memory-that had been precisely his attitude toward bed-making when he was about eleven.
“Bye, Daddy,” Suze chimed.
Willard leaned over and kissed the top of her head.
“Bye. See you this afternoon.”
“Are you going to stay home today?” she asked, her eyes wide in surprise. “Are you sick?”
“No, hon, I’m just staying here so Mommy can get some rest after last night.”
“What happened to her?”
For a long moment, Willard was stumped. He didn’t want to mention the dead roaches he had swept away this morning, for fear that he would reinforce Suze’s incipient fears of the vermin. He noted that Will and Burt were watching intently as well, as if his answer to that question were the single most important event of the day.
“She probably just had a bad…dream,” he said finally, aware of the weakness of the excuse.
“Just like me,” Burt said.
“Yeah, after you watch one of those monster movies,” Willard said, tousling the boy’s hair. Burt ducked his head and escaped; Willard knew how the boy felt about that kind of display of parental affection and reminded himself to watch it in the future. The kids were growing up. They weren’t all that little any more. Still, his answer seemed to satisfy Suze, who took off across the damp lawn, her plastic Toy Story lunchbox thumping heavily against her legs. Burt followed, shoulders slumped, as if he were marching on his way to certain execution.
Will, Jr., stood just inside the doorway. He walked a mile or so to the junior high-a squat stucco structure bearing the highly original name of Ronald Reagan Junior High. Still, it had a good reputation in the district and so far Catherine reported that Will was doing all right-working hard, and not too far behind from the trauma of starting mid-year at a new school and settling into new routines. Classes there started twenty minutes later than at the elementary school, so Will’s departures had gradually become more leisurely as he became familiar with the way.
Willard noticed a pack of five or six kids Will’s age gathering on the front yard of a house several doors down.
“Those guys look like they’re about your age. Do they go to Reagan?” Willard asked, motioning toward the knot of giggles and laughter.
Will, Jr., glanced down the street. “Yeah,” he said noncommittally.
“Do you know any of them. From classes or anything.”
“A couple.”
“They seem like fun kids?”
“I guess.”
“Have you talked to them at all.”
“Some.”
“Why don’t you catch up with them and walk with them to school?” Willard was growing impatient at the boy’s apparent inability to take a hint any faster.
Will shrugged, an eloquent gesture in a twelve year old that carried meanings impossible for the boy to put into words. “Dunno.”
Willard looked closely at his oldest son. There was a look in the boy’s eyes that bothered Willard. They were hooded, masked, downcast, as if the boy were afraid that Willard would see into his soul and ferret out whatever problems he was trying to conceal.
“Well?”
“They said…”
“They said what?”
“Uh…nothin’, Dad. I just like walkin’ by myself. It gives me time to think.”
In spite of himself, Willard smiled at the sudden adult tones in the boy’s voice. Maybe there was even a hint of a crackling basso beginning to emerge.
“Well, don’t stick to yourself too much or it’ll get even harder to make friends.”
“Okay, Dad.”
“Now get going.”
Will, Jr., got going, trudging down the sidewalk, gripping the rolled-up top of his brown paper bag lunch. He had steadfastly refused the offer of a new lunch pail, arguing vehemently that such things were kiddie and no one else at school ever took a lunch pail.
Willard watched until his son disappeared at the bottom of the hill. He didn’t notice that Will, Jr., had carefully timed his progress so that in spite of the fact that the other kids paused occasionally to wait for other children to emerge from houses along the way, Will never quite caught up with them, never quite drew close enough for them to spot him lagging behind.
Willard closed the door with a sigh and slumped against it. Made it, he thought. Got them all off and didn’t wake either Sams or Catherine.
“Daddy?”
He looked down. There was Sams, the discolored satin edging of his blanket stuffed into his mouth, the rest of the blanket trailing him like a softly graying ghost. His night diaper hung askew, so sodden that it threatened to pull his printed Iron Man pajama bottoms down to the child’s knees. Willard smelled the pungency of urine and realized that he was not finished yet. One more child to get started this morning.
3
By the time Sams was changed, dressed, and fed-dry Sugar Crisps and a glass of milk, both of which Willard assumed would get mixed properly during the course of digestion-Willard felt as if he were ready for bed himself.
He carried Sams down the hall, wondering to himself how Catherine managed this day after day. No wonder she was tired and drawn.
He left Sams in the bedroom, happily engrossed with spreading colorful wooden building blocks all across the carpet in random patterns that sent him into fits of giggling.
Willard set the spring-action child gate across the door. There, that would keep him happy and out of the way for a while. Nothing in there can hurt him, Willard thought as he glanced over the room crowded with piles of toys. It’s been completely kid-proofed.
Willard returned to the front bedroom and looked in on Catherine. She was still asleep, but from the way the covers were twisted around her and pulled from the bottom of the bed, it had not been an easy sleep.
He slipped over to the side of the bed and touched her forehead with his hand.
“Huh!” She startled awake immediately.
“It’s okay,” he said quietly.
“What time…oh no, it’s late and I…”
“I took care of everything. The kids got off to school okay. Sams is up and dressed. He’s playing in the bedroom.”
“But…I…”
“You needed to sleep. So I let you sleep.”
She dropped her head back onto the pillow and smiled. “What about work?”
“You wanted me to stay home today and help out a bit.”
“I…did I ask you to? I don’t remember.”
“Well, you were pretty much out of it when I got up. Anyway, there’s nothing at work today that can’t be handled tomorrow, and you really did need to get some sleep. And besides, it was…uh…interesting to see what goes on around here on school mornings. I finally learned the proper way to make a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, compliments of Burt.”
He grinned. Catherine smiled back, but the movement seemed strained. There’s still some carry-over from last night, Willard decided, like the half-remembered echoes of a particularly bad nightmare that linger well into
