Free Every Last One by Anna Quindlen Page A

younger, at a backyard party by the Donahues’ pool. Glen, who doesn’t like to dance, had watched the two of us as we jitterbuggedbarefoot. He’s a good dancer, Kevin Donahue, I’ll give him that. Ruby says Kiernan is a good dancer, too.
    By the time the stretch SUV had delivered all of them back to the house for breakfast, Sarah’s hair had begun to slip out of its upsweep in the back, and she had a faint spot on one side of her dress. Rachel’s gown was creased from sitting through the banquet-hall dinner of prime rib and mashed potatoes, and, I suspected, watching her date dance with others while she sat alone.
    Kiernan, too, looked as though the evening had been a disaster. His suit was streaked with dirt in spots, and he sat at one end of the long table in the kitchen, legs spread, arms crossed on his chest, eyes down. “No thank you, Mommy,” Ruby had said when I put a plate of eggs in front of her. The edges of her roses had begun their slow, sad deterioration.
    Glen thinks I am overinvolved with our children’s inner lives, especially Ruby’s. Before Ruby stopped eating during freshman year, he used to complain loudly that his parents never worried, and he was right. Neither did mine. Our children still find it astonishing that my father died and no one went to a therapist. Instead, my brother, Richard, turned into an adult overnight, standing at the head of an oak casket with his uncles behind him. He also became one of the least emotional people on earth, which I suppose may be something of an advantage for an oncologist. His patients die, and he prevails. Everything, as they say, is a trade-off.
    The wailing rises and falls from outside. “Somebody has to talk sense to that kid,” Glen says through clenched teeth. “Some of us have to get up for work.” I almost reply, “Both of us do,” but decide this is not the moment. Glen throws the covers aside. “You cannot go out there,” I hiss. “I’m going to take a shower,” he says.
    The grass is cold and wet on my bare feet. I fold my arms over my chest, conscious of the fact that I am wearing only my nightclothes.As I come outside, the noise stops, and the early-morning silence is resonant with nothing in it. A light goes on in our neighbor’s kitchen. He is a widower who liked our children better when they were small and went to bed at eight o’clock.
    Kiernan is sitting cross-legged on the grass. His tuxedo jacket is thrown over one of the wooden chairs in the backyard. The knees of his pants are sodden. I pat him on the shoulder. His face is all puckers, the way it was when he was little and he’d skin a knee and his mother would pour peroxide on it. “This will hurt,” Deborah always said, as though knowing would make it better, when it only made him cry more. First the promise of hurt, then the hurt itself.
    He sobs into his hands. His emotions are adult, his behavior childish. And then I realize that his emotions aren’t really adult at all. They’re too unguarded, too undiluted. In the words of Ruby Latham past, they are too authentic. If he were forty, and this woman he loves had left him, he would never sit in her yard and sob. He would say she’d always been a bitch, never been much. Or he would get drunk and try to turn another woman into her in a bar and then in bed. Or he would work too many hours, or play too much golf, or find some other way to swallow whatever he was feeling, preferring a rock in his gullet to his heart on his sleeve, preferring anger to grief, resentment to bereavement. Anything but this, this undisguised despair.
    “Honey, I think it’s time for you to go home,” I say softly. Kiernan puts his arms around my legs and presses his face against the side of my knee. I can feel him shaking beneath my flattened palm. I remember when I first saw his little moon face, when the Donahues moved in next door to us, when we all lived in smaller houses, little Cape Cods across town. “Hi!” he’d chirped,