Free Labor Day by Joyce Maynard Page A

together, would be suspended in the air. Hesitate in the act of lifting it and turning, and the whole thing would fall apart. Flip too fast, and you could miss your mark.
    A person needed a steady hand, but also, a steady heart. This is a moment about faith and commitment, Frank said.
    Up until now, Frank and I had worked alone, just the two of us. My mother had only been watching. Now he put a hand on her shoulder.
    He said, I think you can handle this, Adele.
     
    Some time back—I could no longer remember when this wasn’t true—my mother’s hands had begun to tremble. Picking up a coin from the counter, or chopping vegetables—on the rare occasions, like today, when we’d have some kind of fresh produce to cut up—her hand would sometimes shake so violently on the knife, she’d set down whatever it was she’d been cutting up and say, Soup sounds good tonight. What do you think, Henry?
    Times she wore lipstick—rare times we went out—the outlines didn’t always match her lips exactly right. It was the reason she’d mostly given up her cello, probably. On the frets, she had a natural vibrato, but she couldn’t keep her hand steady on the bow. Something like what she’d attempted that afternoon—stitching his pants—was also a challenge. Threading a needle, impossible. I did that part.
    Now my mother stepped up alongside the counter, next to where Frank had been standing with the wine bottle that had served as our rolling pin.
    I’ll try, she said, taking the circle of dough between the fingers of her two hands, and folding it over the way Frank showed her. He was standing very close. She held her breath. The circle of dough landed just where it was supposed to, on top of the peaches.

    Perfect, honey, he said.
    Then he showed me how to pinch along the sides, to fix the top crust to the bottom one. He showed me how to brush the top with milk, and sprinkle sugar on, and pierce the dough with a fork in three places, to let the steam out. He slipped the pie into the oven.
    Forty-five minutes from now, we’ll have ourselves a pie, he said. My grandma had a saying: even the richest man in America isn’t eating tastier pie than we are tonight. That will be so for us.
    I asked him then where his grandma was now.
    Passed on, he said. His voice as he said this suggested it might not be a good thing, asking more.

CHAPTER 8
    T HAT SUMMER, MY BODY HAD BEEN changing. The fact that I’d grown taller wasn’t the main thing. My voice was deeper now, though stuck in an undependable middle range where I never was sure, when I opened my mouth to speak, whether the words that came out would be in the old high register or my new lower one. My shoulders were as thin as ever, but my neck might have filled out a little, and hair had started to grow under my arms, and lower down too, in the place I had no words for.
    Here too I had changed. I had seen my father naked, and the sight had made me ashamed of my own body. Peewee, he called me, laughing. But Richard was younger than me, and I’d seen him in the shower too, and the sight had confirmed what I had already guessed. There was something wrong with me. I was a boy raised by a woman. I was a boy raised by a woman who believed this about men: Men were selfish. Men were unfaithful, and untrustworthy, and cruel. Sooner or later a man would break your heart. Where did that leave me, my mother’s only child, a boy?
    Sometime in the spring, it had happened for the first time: the stiffening in my groin, my private parts—this was my mother’s term—pressing against the fabric of my pants at odd moments in the day, in ways I had no power to control. Rachel McCann would go up to the chalkboard to work out a math problem, and her skirt would rise up over her thigh, or I’d catch a glimpse of the crotch of Sharon Sunderland’s underpants, when she was sitting on the bleachers above me at assembly, or I’d see someone’s bra strap, or just the fastener of some girl’s