The Illusionist by Dinitia Smith

honey.”
    *  *  *
    A half hour later, after I had finally gotten Bobby to sleep, and Dean and I were in our own bed, I turned to Dean, but he rolled away from me to the other side of the mattress. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
    He mumbled into the pillow, “Jealous.”
    â€œBut why? I don’t get it. I love you. You know there’s no one else.”
    â€œI can’t help it. It’s the thought of it. . . . Let me be. Let me try and work it out.”
    And that night, for the first time since I had known him, he didn’t make love to me.
    I couldn’t sleep. I lay next to him, listening for his breathing. And he seemed to fall asleep without difficulty, as if he didn’t need me. But it was hours and hours before sleep came to me.
    *  *  *
    Then, the next night, he made love to me again, as if nothing had happened, as if all his anger had disappeared. We had finished making love, and though I was satisfied, I felt only half complete,that there was this whole other realm of pleasure— his pleasure—to be explored. I whispered, “What about you? ” These were things we talked about only in darkness.
    â€œDoesn’t matter,” he whispered, smoothing the hair back from my forehead. Then he kissed it. “What counts is seeing you happy.”
    December 10. We are a little family! Bobby has a daddy now. We’ve got our little routine down. It is real winter now. The pipe in the bathroom froze in the night and we had to go to Dad’s house. My dad likes Dean, maybe he doesn’t see so well, Dean is just one of my friends to him. It’s funny how the brain gets dull with age to protect people, and everything is concentrated on your own survival. There was not much damage to house from the water. Mr. Jukowsky put in a new pipe section I feel like we got the asthma under control because of the mask at home. Dean lost his job. Now I have to support three of us but that doesn’t matter because we are all together now.

C HAPTER 11
CHRISSIE
    Saturday mornings, I’d see Dean and Terry and the boy shopping at Food Mart. Or on Washington Street on one of those bright winter Saturday mornings when the sun is shining and there is a surge of happiness in town and everyone is released at last from their overheated homes where they’ve been fighting with each other and the kids have been driving them crazy with cabin fever and they come out joyously into the sunny winter morning.
    Some stores on Washington Street were boarded up, but people still came downtown on Saturday mornings. As if they were trying to recover something that had been lost, the sense of a real town, a vital community.
    Dean would glance up and spot me and give me that secret smile. He would help Terry with the boy. Reach inside the truck for the child, carry him like he was his own. Really loved that kid, it seemed.
    I’d see them go in the balloon shop on Washington Street, then they’d stop in at Uncle Dom’s Pizza.
    Terry had a grave way of walking, she was taller than Dean by about an inch. Terry was so serious, and you could see the weariness on her face sometimes. Always focused on her boy, worried about her boy. She’d held herself together after her boyfriend, Eddie Lasko, the father of her kid, took off and left her stranded with the kid. She’d gotten herself a job and raised the boybasically by herself, with a little help from her dad, and her dad was sick too.
    They were a weird trio—Dean and Terry and Bobby. But not any weirder than the deadbeats who hung out in downtown Sparta. The young women without teeth, the retarded people. The obese people with their pale bodies. People leaning out of their windows over the street, shouting at one another across the way, fighting. Women worked up on drugs, with their tottering, swaying gait and their arms flaying out, hookers stumbling on high heels. All those people