The Heaven of Mercury by Brad Watson Page B

own. Then she said,
    -You have the gall to say that to me, when you hardly give him the time of day unless it suits your own fancy. When you stay at that newspaper office fiddling around until he’s almost ready for bed each night or already in the bed, and come in and tell him a story or just kiss him good night, then go to get yourself a drink and sit in this chair and ignore me. Meanwhile I get him ready for school in the morning, after you’ve gone early to have your coffee and breakfast with other men at Schoenhof’s and had yourself a shave at Ivyloy’s barbershop, and I take him to school and kiss him if he will let me and let him off, then go to school myself and teach a bunch of snotty brats all day, wishing a tenth of them were as sweet-natured and intelligent as my own child, and then I get out and go to pick him up again and take him home and fix him a snack, and let him go out to play, or I even play with him myself, help him put together his model airplanes, even throw him the baseball sometimes and chase his balls and comfort him when he frets he’s not as good as the other boys his age, and then I make his supper and make him do his homework and make his bath and make him say his prayers and put him to bed, and then sometime along in there you come home and fix yourself a drink and make some half-empty gesture toward being the most important man in his life and make no gesture at all toward pretending that you could ever want to be that in mine, and then sometime along around ten or eleven o’clock you go to your own room and go to bed. Sometimes you come in to tell me good night and sometimes you don’t. We are neither of us very important to you and yet you sit there like some righteous fool and lecture me on how I ought to show more affection to my son.
    He’d had no reply to all that, for right then it sounded like the truth.
    -I don’t know why you stay with me unless it’s for Eric’s sake, she said. -But I swear it doesn’t seem to me that you even care enough about him to stay for that reason anymore.
    He grew hot over that and said through his teeth, surprising himself at the surge of emotion that nearly brought quick tears to his eyes,
    -Who are you to say I don’t love my own child?
    -Well if you do, she said, you might do a little more to show it.
    Â 
    A LSO AT THE barbeque had been Earl’s sister, Merry, now married to the hapless R. W. Leaf, who sold insurance with old Junius Urquhart. She’d sat apart from everyone in a reclining lawn chair, surveying the scene from behind a pair of sunglasses, her long dark hair curled and brushed back, her lips a bright red, fingernails and toenails to match. She sipped what looked like a glass of bourbon on ice. Whenever Finus’s glance happened to fall on her, she caught it like a fish he’d cast a line to and sent back along that line the tactile reverberations of a slow, salacious smile. He absorbed it into his own tight grin and cranked his gaze away from her legs, crooked and slightly askew up on the footrest of the chair.
    Two days later, while Finus’s father was out for lunch, Merry strolled past the plate-glass window of the Comet , paused to look, then came in the door, little bell tinkling behind her like a fairy sprite announcing her entrance.
    -Hello, Finus.
    -Merry.
    -I’d like to place a classified ad in your newspaper, if the rate is right.
    She smiled, then unclasped her purse and pulled out a little notepad and tore off the top sheet, folded it, and handed it to him. He took it, looked at her standing there with an expression he could not quite read, then unfolded the paper and read: Meet me at 4:00, back lot of Magnolia Cemetery, in the oak grove.
    What he would say to Avis in his mind when she had demanded, once—just once she had allowed him to see how this had hurt her, and he couldn’t remember too many times she’d shown her vulnerable