Free Strangers at the Feast by Jennifer Vanderbes

in the paper, and planned to run the New York City Marathon one day. “You know how much them Kenyans get for winning? A hundred G!”
    Spider claimed his people came from Kenya.
    Spider was also crazy about the Olympics. “Man, that’s so Carl Lewis,” he’d say. Or, “That jacket the gold medal.” A map hung over his bed with red pins stuck in Sydney, Atlanta, Lake Placid, Athens, Turin, Nagano, Barcelona, Seoul, Calgary—sites of the Olympic games.
    Spider got on Kijo’s case for not playing hoops. He said the only place a black man could succeed was in the world of athletics. But Kijo had the same trouble with his body as he’d had with speech. He snagged on things—desk corners, curbs. His hands and feet got in his way. It was like his body didn’t fit him right or wasn’t his.
    Spider looked Kijo up and down and smiled. “It’s a sad state of affairs when a man dresses like a ninja but can’t climb a tree.”
    “Heights,” said Kijo. “You know they make me dizzy.”
    “One, two, three, I’ll be up and through that window. Just hang till I let you in.”
    Kijo eyed the entrance for security cameras. Nothing. He pressed his face to the glass and saw an alarm pad inside, but it wasn’t armed. He peeled back the doormat. Then he stuck his fingers in the planter box.
    Kijo blew soil off the brass key. “Now who’s your daddy?”
    Spider laughed. “Maybe they left their wallets out here, too.”
    Kijo slid the key in the lock, but held it still for a moment. He could turn back, he could keep his promise to Grandma Rose.
    But then he turned the key and opened the door.
    Spider patted Kijo’s back. “Now they gonna know you don’t mess with Kijo.”

ELEANOR
    She’s mute ?” asked Eleanor.
    “The doctor says there’s no visible damage to her vocal apparatus,” Ginny explained. Then she rubbed the girl’s head, almost proudly. “She just hasn’t spoken.”
    A single mother raising a mute seven-year-old from India!
    Oh, Eleanor loved her daughter, but what a dung heap of liberation her generation had inherited. Ginny cared so much about her right to do things, she ignored the difficulties. The girls at Wellesley were reading Betty Friedan. Eleanor went to some meetings, sat quietly in the back during heated discussions about the movement . But she didn’t fit in, and she didn’t think they liked her much. These girls were too brazen, snotty even. She tried. Once, for a week, she stopped wearing a brassiere—though she certainly wasn’t going to burn anything for which she had paid good money. In her mind, that was precisely the problem—these girls were burning things, tearing down perfectly good traditions. But they all had fathers and therefore no clue what a house was like without a man around. Well, Eleanor had watched her mother toil alone after her father’s death, eating dinners in a quiet kitchen, chasing mice from the house with a broom when she was frightened. Eleanor was entirely uninterested in statistics and laws. She had always wanted a husband.
    Eleanor wouldn’t have the stomach for hopping from bed to bed, either. After all these years, she wasn’t even quite certain she liked sex. Of course, you could never say that. But as far as she was concerned,it was a fraught, sticky endeavor that left wet spots in the bed. She could not understand why her daughter made a sport of it.
    What a painful few years it had been watching her beautiful daughter, a daughter she had once been so proud of, approach her midthirties husbandless. Even Mavis Galfrey’s daughter, who lost two toes to diabetes, had married. Eleanor couldn’t understand it—there was the human-rights lawyer, the veterinarian, the street musician. There were men Ginny referred to as “casual things.” Eleanor would encourage her, ask how the relationships were going, ask if she wanted to bring so-and-so for dinner. She was frightened of what would happen to her daughter when she was gone. When Gavin was gone.