The Binding by Nicholas Wolff Page B

and wriggled when the Pats scored and Daddy squeezed him as they yelled and Charlie liked that even more. The sheet and the blankets were really for his father.
    Charlie folded the blanket back, smacked the pillow, and made the bed as best he could. He didn’t like Mrs. Finlay—she smelled like lotion and old cheese—but he had to go and say hi anyway. He grabbed his notebook and pen from under the Batman lamp on his dresser and wrote as he walked slowly into the hallway.
    GOOD MORNING , he wrote, then walked up to the chair and tapped on Mrs. Finlay’s arm.
    “Good Lord, Charlie,” Mrs. Finlay said, jumping. She stared at him and then at the notebook he was holding up to her, and she breathed out once shakily and tried to smile, but didn’t get all the way there. Mrs. Finlay was wearing a blue sweater with a lace-looking design around the neck and watching some cooking show.
    “Good morning to you, too.”
    BREAKFAST , he wrote.
    “Do you need my help?”
    NO , he scribbled quickly. He knew where the Trix was and the milk, and he didn’t want her pancakes because she always burned them.
    “Okay, then. Scoot along.”
    He headed down the long hallway that connected the two parts of the house. The light was dim in here, the walls painted red like you were inside a blood vessel in his book This Is Your Body . Charlie’s bare feet made little pat-pat noises on the hardwood floor. He was only a few steps in when something made him stop.
    The pictures. They were lined up on the left side of the wall, two feet above his head. The right wall was blank because all his mommy’s pictures were gone now. She’d taken the photos when she’d left and gone to Portland, Oregon, to live with her sister who had a baby but no husband. Charlie was going to see his mom this summer in Oregon. He hoped she had the pictures up, because he missed seeing the faces of his other grandpa and his aunt Natascha, who lived in Australia, and all the others. It was like she’d taken one whole side of the family with her when she left. The right side of the hallway where her pictures had been was empty now, but you could still see the outlines of the missing pictures and the little holes where the nails had gone.
    But he still had his daddy’s side. Charlie approached the first picture. The man was wearing a funny hat that Daddy said hunters wore, and he was standing there with a big shotgun, leaning on it and looking into the camera with a big, tired smile.
    Grandpa , Charlie thought. Charlie had never met him; he’d died in an accident when hunting deer up in the woods. That’s why people wear those orange vests , Daddy had said. So more grandpas won’t die from pure stupidity. Charlie guessed that meant that some other man had thought Grandpa was a deer and shot him by mistake. Charlie didn’t want to go hunting in the woods, ever, and he shivered when he heard the echoes of gun blasts from the Raitliff Woods that came every fall when Daddy said the deer were running and the hunters were catching them.
    He moved on, his stomach not rumbling anymore. Every time he came in front of a picture, he would whisper the name in his mind. Great-grandma and Pops were next. They were wearing dark, uncomfortable-looking clothes, and he didn’t like to look at Great-grandma’s eyes because she looked mad, but Daddy said she was just ornery. Ornery was an old-fashioned word for mean . Charlie studied Pops’s weird glasses—the frames looked heavy and odd, as if they’d been made in a fire or something. Pops was fat and bald and had a bushy mustache and bushy gray eyebrows and he was smiling, and Charlie wished he knew Pops more than anyone else on the wall. He bet Pops ate apple pie—Charlie loved apple pie—and burped afterward like his daddy and liked to play marbles or some old-fashioned game, but Charlie would have been glad to learn any game to play with good old Pops.
    Uncle Matt was next. Uncle Matt was ten years old in the picture,