Free The Adults by Alison Espach Page A

father should he dare show his face again. Mrs. Resnick pulled away from the embrace, and that whole time I was talking to some policeman who stared at my mother’s nipples on display through her sheer nightgown.
    The cop nodded some. “Right,” he said. “Looks like a suicide.”
    “A suicide,” Mrs. Resnick said aloud to nobody, to everybody, to the mailbox.
    The policeman led Mark and his mother to the cruiser. The car drove away and never turned on its sirens.
    “He threw raw meat out the window once,” Mrs. Bulwark said.
    “What?” Mrs. Trenton asked.
    “He threw a leg of lamb out the window once. I saw him.”
    “Why?”
    “Probably to prove some kind of a point,” Alfred said.
    “What kind of a point would that be?”
    “A man can do anything he wants,” Alfred said.
    “To think,” Mrs. Trenton said, and hung her head like nothing was possible anymore. “I had just promised myself that I would eliminate stress in my life.”
    “Go put on some real clothes,” my mother said to me as she went inside to yell at my father. I heard my father’s office door slam open, the knob hitting against the wall. “Victor!” she yelled. A man has died in the yard was supposed to be her next line, but instead, she said, “It’s a Saturday .”
    I sat on the stone stoop as the scene cleared, and everyone started to make their way back into their homes, dispersing in different directions like a compass made out of humans. They had lives too, which needed to start. They had to go inside, turn on their ceiling fans, call their distant relatives, and explain what happened to the poor Russian Jewish man down the street, the one who threw raw meat out the window, the one who was never happy anyway. They had to tweeze their eyebrows and wake up their children for Saturday soccer games, the girls’ teams named after flowers and the boys’ after cars (Richard had been on the Ferraris and Mark on the Volvos). They had to cut oranges into quadrants; turn off the cartoons; French-braid hair; brush teeth; think about socks, shin guards, and staying hydrated, Gatorade and brake fluid; and don’t kick the cat, don’t hang on the banister, pack the cooler with raisins and gluten-free crackers, edible ice packs, parkas in case the weather turned, and then explain to the kids in the backseat on the way to the field: the weather always turns; death finds us anyway.
    There was a man still standing on my driveway. It was Mr. Basketball. He was looking around, with a beagle on the end of a leash. He was in mesh shorts and a T-shirt that said PEPSI . He walked over to me on the stoop. He looked anything but professional. Like a college student. The picture of a man I might hang on my wall, if I had done things like that as a teenager.
    “Hi,” he said. His body was illuminated in front of me as he blocked the rising sun. We had never met before.
    “Hi,” I said.
    It was cold. October. I had run outside in my pajamas, white fleece pants, and my father’s I CLIMBED DIAMOND MOUNTAIN AND SURVIVED! T-shirt.
    And then I remembered: the bottom of my foot was bleeding.
    “Jesus,” Mr. Basketball said, picking up my bloody foot to see the tiny bits of glass wedged into the thick skin of my heel. In the light, the sole of my foot almost looked diamond studded. “Are you all right?” And he was the only person that morning to suggest I might not be all right.
    He took my foot in his hand.
    I nodded.
    He pulled out a Swiss Army knife from his pocket. Without even asking, he began to carefully remove each piece of glass with the tip of the blade. When he pushed too hard, I shifted uncomfortably, and he was gentler the next time. From far away, I imagined it looked like a holy offering, like a painting of Jesus washing a woman’s feet.
    “I like your dog,” I finally said. “What’s his name?”
    “Her. Her name is Penelope. And she’s not mine. I’m watching her for a friend.”
    “Hi, Penelope,” I said, and held out my