Women with Men by Richard Ford

Little Léo, who'd just been running from one room to another, waving a wooden drumstick, stopped stock-still in the middle of the floor and stared, shocked by his mother's kissing a man he didn't remember seeing before.
    “Okay. Now I must go,” Joséphine said, releasing his face and hurrying to the open window which overlooked the street and the park. She was putting on her eye shadow, using a tiny compact mirror and the light from outside.
    Joséphine was dressed in a simple white blouse and a pair of odd, loose-fitting pants that had pictures of circus animals all over them, helter-skelter in loud colors. They were strange, unbecoming pants, Austin thought, and they fit in such a way that her small stomach made a noticeable round bulge below the waistband. Joséphine looked slightly fat and a little sloppy. She turned and smiled at him as she fixed her face. “How do you feel?” she said.
    “I feel great,” Austin said. He smiled at Léo, who had not stopped staring at him, holding up his drumstick like a little cigar-store Indian. The child had on short trousers and a white T-shirt that had the words BIG-TIME AMERICAN LUXURY printed across the front above a huge red Cadillac convertible which seemed to be driving out from his chest.
    Léo uttered something very fast in French, then looked at his mother and back at Austin, who hadn't gotten far into the room since being hugged and kissed.
    “Non, non, Léo,”
Joséphine said, and laughed with an odd delight. “He asks me if you are my new husband. He thinks Ineed a husband now. He is very mixed up.” She went on darkening her eyes. Joséphine looked pretty in the window light, and Austin wanted to go over right then and give her a much more significant kiss. But the child kept staring at him, holding the drumstick up and making Austin feel awkward and reluctant, which wasn't how he thought he'd feel. He thought he'd feel free and completely at ease and on top of the world about everything.
    He reached in his pocket, palmed the wooden egg and knelt in front of the little boy, showing two closed fists.
    “J'ai un cadeau pour toi,”
he said. He'd practiced these words and wondered how close he'd come. “I have a nice present for you,” he said in English to satisfy himself.
“Choissez le main.”
Austin tried to smile. He jiggled the correct hand, his right one, trying to capture the child's attention.
“Choissez le main,
Léo,”
he said again and smiled, this time, a little grimly. Austin looked at Joséphine for encouragement, but she was still appraising herself in her mirror. She said something very briskly to Léo, who beetled his dark little brow at the two presented fists. Reluctantly he pointed his drumstick at Austin's right fist, the one he'd been jiggling. And very slowly—as though he were opening a chest filled with gold—Austin opened his fingers to reveal the bright little green egg with gold paisleys and red snowflakes. Some flecks of the green paint had already come off on his palm, which surprised him.
“Voilà,”
Austin said dramatically.
“C'est une jolie oeuf!”
    Léo stared intently at the clammy egg in Austin's palm. He looked at Austin with an expression of practiced inquisitiveness, his thin lips growing pursed as though something worried him. Very timidly he extended his wooden drumstick and touched the egg, then nudged it, with the shaped tip, the end intended to strike a drum. Austin noticed that Léo had three big gravelly warts on his tiny fingers, and instantly a coldwretchedness from his own childhood opened in him, making Léo for an instant seem frail and sympathetic. But then with startling swiftness Léo raised the drumstick and delivered the egg—still in Austin's proffered palm—a fierce downward blow, hoping apparently to smash it and splatter its contents and possibly give Austin's fingers a painful lashing for good measure.
    But the egg, though the blow chipped its glossy green enamel and Austin felt the