Free For Today I Am a Boy by Kim Fu

. . .”
    â€œCome inside!” She turned and headed for the door. I had no choice.
    I followed her into her kitchen and set down the pan. I felt uneasy that I had been there before. “Where’s Mr. Becker?” I asked.
    â€œHe works on Saturdays.” She dug out a jar of orange-tinted glass with a checked lid and a tied ribbon. “Here you go,” she said, beaming. “Homemade.”
    â€œThanks.”
    â€œCan I tell you a secret, Peter?” In the dim kitchen, her hat shadowed her eyes. Her grinning mouth became her whole face. “I’m just so happy. I have to tell someone.”
    I held the jar close, as though it could protect me.
    â€œI’m pregnant,” she said. She tilted her head to the side. “Oh, I hope the baby has dark hair, like you and your sister.”
    I dropped the jar. I wanted it to shatter, but it only made a dull clank and rolled away. “We’re not family.” That wasn’t what I meant to say. I meant to call her a bitch, a home wrecker, a slut. None of those words came.
    Her smile remained. I still couldn’t see her eyes. “I didn’t say we were.”
    I said, nonsensically, “Get out of my house.” Then I turned and ran from hers.
    Â 
    Mr. Becker sold insurance in a mall in another town. He took the six-thirty bus home and arrived at precisely seven forty each day. Mrs. Becker had dinner ready at precisely seven forty-five. The bus was never late.
    One evening, not long after I left the jam on the floor, a van hit a pickup truck and spun out into the oncoming cars. Mr. Becker’s bus sat in traffic for an hour, behind another bus, behind a car, behind a wall of flares.
    At seven thirty, Mrs. Becker went into the garage with an armful of sheets and towels. She rolled them up and stuffed them under the garage door. She got into the car they didn’t use—their insurance had lapsed—and turned on the engine, leaving the driver’s-side door hanging open.
    â€œShe wanted me to find her,” Mr. Becker said in the bar that morning, staring into the drink I’d bought him. “I would have come home in time on any other day. You see? It was an accident.”
    I see her, sometimes, leaning back in her seat, clutching a pear-size baby in her hand, staring into its tiny, sloping eyes, its body hard as plastic, its crown of dark hair no larger than a fingerprint.

4
From Germany with Love
    A DELE WASN’T TAKING her premed requirements. I listened from around the corner, where Bonnie and I always hid. Father was on the phone in the hallway, talking in his dangerously calm voice, soft as wet concrete. “Transcript,” he said.
    Then: “Because I’m paying for it,” he said.
    Adele sent her transcript by mail without comment. I thought this was characteristically elegant—a written, impersonal confession that conveyed no regret. She had transferred into the arts department and was majoring in German language and literature. Her grades were high. My father waved the transcript around the kitchen, snapping the wad of paper as it wrinkled around his thumb. “Why?” He turned to Bonnie and me, silent at the breakfast table. “Why?”
    Mother busied herself peeling a pear. “A boy.”
    And she was right. Adele sent us a picture. London, Ontario, where she went to school, was only a couple of hours away. She could easily have brought him home, just as easily as our parents could have gone to get her. They could have dragged her from her dorm room by her ankles, cut her hair, kept her in her room until she came around. I’m sure they talked about it. Instead, there was another flat, factual phone call. Was she going to go to med school? No. Then there would be no more money.
    Bonnie and I managed to look at the picture before it was thrown away. His name was August and he was disappointingly unhandsome: he had blond, wilted hair and the overbite of