Free Little Children by Tom Perrotta

nice to have a nasty old wino in my corner.”
    “Bertha’s my best friend. And I won’t have you talking about her like that.”
    “You know why she likes you, Ma?” Ronnie was giving her that hard, pitiless look, the one that scared her sometimes. Like he saw right through everything and everyone, to the worst truths you could imagine. “Did you ever think about that?”
    “Don’t,” said May. “Don’t do this to me.”
    Ronnie let out a long, weary breath and buried his face in his hands. Then he smiled meekly, doing his best to be a good boy.
    “I’m sorry, Ma. I know you’re trying. But sometimes that just makes it worse.”
    May couldn’t really blame him for being discouraged. It was bad enough that his own sister refused to talk to him or let him anywhere near her kids, and even worse that he couldn’t find a job, not even collecting garbage, or delivering pizza, or bagging groceries. All the applications had a question about your criminal record; you got in trouble with your parole officer if you lied, and nobody would hire you if you told the truth. And then those posters started showing up with his picture on them, spreading the ugly rumor that he’d been involved in that poor girl’s disappearance five years ago. But the police had looked into all that. He’d been called in for questioning three times—once by the FBI—and nothing had happened. If Ronnie had had something to do with that, they would have arrested him, wouldn’t they?
    “Come on,” said May. She held up the personal ads page of The Bellington Register . “There are two whole columns of lonely women here, and only a handful of men. The odds are on your side.”
    Ronnie lit a cigarette and gave May the same incredulous look he’d been giving her since he was a teenager, as though she were some sort of fantastical creature never before seen on earth.
    “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “Why wouldn’t one of these women want to meet a nice person like you?”
    “I’m not a nice person,” Ronnie said. “I’m the scum of the earth.”
    “You did a bad thing,” May admitted. “But that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person.”
    “I have a psychosexual disorder, Ma.”
    “You’re better now,” said May. “They wouldn’t have let you out if you weren’t.”
    “They let me out because they had to.”
    Ronnie lit a fresh cigarette, sucking on it like a kid drinking out of a straw. May felt panicky, like maybe one of her breathing attacks was coming on. Her inhaler was upstairs by her bed, next to her denture glass. She wished she’d thought to bring it down.
    “Well, maybe if you found a girlfriend”—she paused for breath—“closer to your own age, you wouldn’t have the bad urges so often.”
    “I don’t want a girlfriend my own age,” said Ronnie. “I wish I did.”
    “Look at this one,” said May, choosing an ad at random. Even with her reading glasses on, the print was painfully small. “‘ Lovely green eyes. Kindhearted DWF, 33, looking for friendship and maybe more. Nonsmoker preferred .’ Whoops, forget her. How about this one? ‘ Full-figured mama, midforties. Likes swing dancing, Everybody Loves Raymond, and lazy Sunday mornings. ’”
    “Full-figured,” chuckled Ronnie. “She’s probably three hundred pounds. The black guys in jail would go for her.”
    “So what if she is? Maybe she’s a nice person inside. Maybe she’d appreciate it if someone gave her a chance and didn’t make her feel bad about the way she looked. Maybe she’d be willing to overlook another person’s faults as well.”
    Ronnie took another drag and exhaled two neat jets of smoke from his nose, just the way his father used to do. If Pete had been kinder and more reliable, May had a feeling Ronnie would have been a happier child. Maybe the other boys wouldn’t have picked on him so much, or maybe he’d have known how to defend himself when they did. But her ex-husband was a liar, and a cheater,