Consenting Adult by Laura Z. Hobson

and shame.
    She shoved back harshly from the table and left.

CHAPTER FIVE
    “H I,” J EFF SAID AS he flung open the door. He squeezed her shoulder in his new form of greeting but he did not look directly at her. “Is Dad home?”
    “He had a late meeting.” She reached up, and he stooped to the gesture, again squeezing her shoulder as she kissed him. “We might go out for dinner, if he’s kept too late.”
    “That would be great.” He never carried a suitcase for these once-a-month weekends, truncated during the football season in the fall and the baseball season in the spring to a mere Saturday night and Sunday, only an old B.O.A.C. airplane bag he had salvaged from one of their trips to England. This he called “my Boack,” clearly preferring its worn fabric to the handsome tweed and leather carry-all they had given him for his sixteenth birthday. He tossed it down now on a chair in the small entrance hall and made his way to the living room ahead of her, taking over the largest chair.
    He looked well, enough of his summer tan lingering to make his gray eyes brilliant, and his light hair was still sun-streaked as it was when he had left on Labor Day for early football practice. He had grown, she was sure of it, but it always displeased him to have her say, “You’re taller,” so she made no mention of it. Long ago when he was still small enough to be stood up against the kitchen door at birthdays, to have his height recorded, in a different-colored crayon from the ones that had ticked off Don’s and Margie’s progress upward, he had begun to fidget and finally to protest that he didn’t want to be “measured like how many hands high is a horse,” and it had become a family anecdote. But when he was ten, he had got hold of a can of enamel, when a neighbor’s apartment was being redecorated, and had painted out the whole series of marks, his brother’s and sister’s along with his own. She had been immoderately angry at him then, but he had never been measured since.
    Now she thought, He’ll be six-two or six-three before he’s through, a smugness of pride touching her, but with it a nip of the old anger at his vandalism in painting out three childhoods from that kitchen door. He would never understand that anger, not until he had children of his own.
    Children of his own. There she went again, up to her old trick of imagining the future. It would have to be the future she wanted, the future she needed; it could not be some other future that she could not bear. In her mind she apologized for her folly, apologized to whom, she did not know, for what, she did not say. It was an amorphous wrongness, that was all she could call it, a weaving softness of desire, instead of reality. Jeff had had four sessions with Dr. Dudley, and here she was envisioning him as a father of his own children. She made an impatient sound and was glad he made no response to it. He was leafing through a magazine, examining it with diligence, as if his entire attention were focused and active. It was hard for him to discuss Dr. Dudley with her; he had not mentioned Dudley the one time she called him at school, guardedly saying she “had decided to talk it all out with Dad.” He had said, “Well, okay,” but asked no questions, offered no comment. She hadn’t pressed him.
    “Hungry?” she asked now.
    “Yeah, some.”
    “Shall I fix you a sandwich? Dad could be held up quite a while.”
    “I’ll get a Coke.”
    He went to the kitchen, uncapped a bottle, and took it with him to the telephone. “I said I’d call Pete,” he said, dialing.
    “Didn’t he come down?”
    “Sure, but I’m supposed to check in with him.”
    “But you just left him” would have been the odious thing known as “parent stuff.” Ordinarily she took this without a tremor; the other two had had their own sets of regulations for parents, and she was long accustomed to the strictures, some quite elaborate, others pointless. But now with Jeff