Free Pay It Forward by Catherine Ryan Hyde Page A

and he’d been the best husband a woman could ask for. A good man is a good man.
    Maybe Trevor’s mother would get married. Nice for the boy if she did. She’d never met Trevor’s mother but knew she would like her, because look what she had produced with her own womb and her loving care. A boy who could love a garden for a sick, arthritic woman who couldn’t love it enough.
    “You have a good woman there,” she said quietly, out loud, to the handsome, refined man in the window, who of course did not hear. “A good woman with a good boy. You take care of them. I know you will.”
    When she arrived home at last, winded and sore chested, Richard was blissfully gone.
    She took a hot bath and laid herself, coughing, to bed, knowing that whatever happened now, the garden was tended. The porch would take a coat of paint. Tomorrow she’d make some calls, some arrangements. After that it didn’t matter.
    Even if the thing that latched onto her next was a bad one—pneumonia, or the Asian flu. Even if she couldn’t pull through this time, it wouldn’t matter. Everything was tended, or would be by then.
    Sleep felt heavy and all consuming, like the comforting mouth of death as she imagined it, holding as it did her Martin and a long, much-deserved rest.

Chapter Eight
A RLENE
    S he slipped in to say good night to Trevor the minute Mr. St. Clair left. And he didn’t leave a moment too soon. What was it, anyway, about that man that always made her feel she was missing the boat on something, and why couldn’t she shake the notion that he was doing it on purpose?
    Trevor lay on his bed, doing homework in his lap.
    “Gotta go to work, honey. You still got the number by the phone?”
    “Sure, Mom.”
    “And Loretta’s?”
    “Know it by heart. You know I’m not scared. I never am.”
    “I know, honey. But I am.”
    “I’m a big kid, Mom.”
    “You sure are, honey. That you are.”
    She sat on the edge of his bed combing curly strands of hair off his forehead with her fingers. She knew he probably didn’t like it, smacking as it did of the preening one gives a much younger child, but he did not complain.
    He looked so much like his daddy it was spooky, even with hiseyes cast down, and if he’d raised them right at that moment to look into her own, she might have had to look away. He never did, though.
    “Honey?”
    “Yeah, Mom?”
    “You weren’t trying to…”
    “What?”
    “No. Never mind. I gotta go.”
    “No, really. What?”
    “You weren’t trying to…like…fix me up with Mr. St. Clair. Were you? I was pretty sure you weren’t.”
    Those Ricky eyes came up to find her and she somehow didn’t pull away. “Why? Don’t you like him?”
    It hit her in the stomach like a fastball, something she could really feel, to know that he had. Even though she wasn’t sure why it should seem so important. And then, looking down at Trevor’s homework, she saw the sheet of paper with Trevor’s idea sketched out on it. Circles like the ones Jerry had drawn in the dirt, between comets, when they both believed for a flash of a moment that a life could really change.
    Or maybe even two lives.
    The circles were blank, all except the top three. The first wave. One had Jerry’s name written inside, then scratched out, which made Arlene suddenly, overwhelmingly sad, as if his chance had gone up just that quickly. The second said Mr. St. Clair, also scratched out, which also made her feel something, though she could neither name it nor get along with it. The third said Mrs. Greenberg, which thankfully meant nothing at all. At least this Mrs. Greenberg wasn’t on her way over with flowers—at least, not as far as Arlene knew.
    Her own words didn’t sound quite right at first. “Well, actually, Trevor, no. I don’t think I do like him. He makes me kind of nervous. Why? Do you like him?”
    “Yeah. Sure I do.”
    “Why?”
    “I don’t know. I think it’s because you can say things to him. And then he says things