Free The Collected Stories of Lorrie Moore by Lorrie Moore

after a long awkward spell.
    "I don't take music," Bruno said with his mouth full. "I'm in All-State Woodwinds."
    "All-State Woodwinds! Interesting! Do you take any courses like, say, American history?"
    "They're studying the Amazon rain forest yet again," Zora said. "They've been studying it since pre-school."
    Ira slurped with morose heartiness at his wine—he had spent too much of his life wandering about in the desert of his own drool; oh, the mealtime games he had played on his own fragile mind—and now some wine dribbled on his shirt. "For Pete's sake, look at this." He dabbed at it with his napkin and looked up at Bruno with an ingratiating grin. "Someday this could happen to you," Ira said, twinkling in Bruno's direction.
    "That would never happen to me," Bruno muttered.
    Ira continued dabbing at his shirt. He began thinking of his book.
Though I be your mother's beau, no rival I, no foe, faux foe
. He loved rhymes. They were harmonious and joyous in the face of total crap.
    Soon Bruno was gently tapping his foot against his mother's under the table. Zora began playfully to nudge him back, and then they were both kicking away, their energetic footsie causing them to slip in their chairs a little, while Ira pretended not to notice, cutting his salad with the edge of his fork, too frightened to look up. After a few minutes—when the footsie had stopped and Ira had exclaimed, "Great dinner, Zora!"—they all stood and cleared their places, taking the dishes into the kitchen, putting them in a messy pile in the sink. Ira began halfheartedly to run warm water over them while Zora and Bruno, some distance behind him, jostled up against each other, ramming lightly into each other's sides. Ira glanced over his shoulder and saw Zora step back and assume a wrestler's starting stance as Bruno leaped toward her, heaving her over his shoulder, then ran into the living room, where, Ira could see, he dumped her, laughing, on the couch.
    Should Ira join in? Should he leave?
    "I can still pin you, Brune, when we're on the bed," Zora said.
    "Yeah, right," Bruno said.
    Perhaps it was time to go. Next time, Ira would bring over a VCR for Bruno and just take Zora out to eat. "Well, look at the clock! Good to meet you, Bruno," he said, shaking the kid's large limp hand. Zora stood, out of breath. She walked Ira out to his car, helping to carry his chair and salad bowl. "It was a lovely evening," Ira said. "And you are a lovely woman. And your son seems so bright and the two of you are adorable together."
    Zora beamed, seemingly mute with happiness. If only Ira had known how to speak such fanciful baubles during his marriage, surely Marilyn would never have left him.
    He gave Zora a quick kiss on the cheek—the heat of wrestling had heightened her beautiful nutmeg smell—then kissed her again on the neck, near her ear. Alone in his car on the way home, he thought of all the deeply wrong erotic attachments that were made in wartime, all the crazy romances cooked up quickly by the species to offset death. He turned the radio on: the news of the Middle East was so surreal and bleak that when he heard the tonnage of the bombs planned for Baghdad he could feel his jaw fall slack in astonishment. He pulled the car over, turned on the interior light, and gazed in the rearview mirror just to see what his face looked like in this particular state. He had felt his face drop in this manner once before, when he first got the divorce papers from Marilyn—now,
there
was shock and awe for you; there was
decapitation
—but he had never actually seen what he looked like this way. So. Now he knew. Not good: stunned, pale, and not all that bright. It wasn't the same as self-knowledge, but life was long and not that edifying, and one sometimes had to make do with these randomly seized tidbits.
    He started up again, slowly; it was raining now, and, at a shimmeringly lit intersection of two gas stations, one Quik-Trip, and a KFC, half a dozen young people