Free A Gesture Life by Chang-rae Lee Page B

crime?”
    “Yes, yes,” Veronica cries, half-covering her mouth. “She raids the blood closet in the middle of the night. She’s a ghoul, a vampiress. She needs it to live, but only the blood of young boys and girls, which she can smell through the packets.”
    “I hope this means I’m safe.”
    “No one is safe,” Veronica states, almost seriously enough to alarm me. “But you, Franklin, you are. Even though you’re young at heart.”
    “You think I am? Young, I mean.”
    “Definitely,” she tells me, her voice buoyant again, the verve of fourteen. “But in a good way. Not like the boys at school, who areall incredibly lame and stupid. You’re young like things are always beginning. Which I think is great.”
    “I always thought people your age think being grown up is most fashionable.”
    “Not me, I guess,” Veronica says, handing me a stack of magazines, a book of word games, and an old jigsaw-puzzle box of the
Mona Lisa,
whose famous mien, I am beginning to think, is the expression of a young woman concealing a pure feeling of joy. “I don’t want to grow up yet. It’s too much trouble. And I don’t care if I’m not cool. I can wait.”
    And so this we do, together, in my private room. I’m lucky, for since cable television finally arrived at the hospital, the patients are reading far less, and as they don’t require that the candy stripers come around to them as often with material, I have Veronica’s company for pretty much as long as I (and she) wish. She lives in the town of Ebbington, just east of Bedley Run on the far side of a large county reservoir, beside which the two villages are situated. Though Ebbington is not at all the sort of place Bedley Run is; mostly it’s a working-class suburb of drab, unadorned homes and small motel-style apartment complexes. When you drive through town you notice how the trees hang a bit too closely over the streets, how the bushes and grasses are keenly in need of pruning and edging and clipping, how the main thoroughfare is rife with chain businesses and towering signs that glow and rotate and blink. In the older, quieter part of town, there are what seems a disproportionately high number of auto repair garages and beauty salons and churches and bars, all half-failed and dilapidating in their own fashion, and one’s perception is that whatever uniqueness and charms Ebbington once had are being inexorably absorbed by larger, external presences both unknown and invited.
    Veronica’s mother is a Bedley Run police officer, whom I’ve come to know casually in the course of being a village merchant; her father, who used to be an officer himself (and the police chief of Ebbington, in fact), lost his life in a somewhat notorious local incident in which he was caught in a crossfire between his own officers and a group of out-of-town gamblers and loan sharks with whom he was enjoying the evening. I remember in the newspaper articles the mention of his wife and infant daughter, who was Veronica, and the question of whether they would receive his pension benefit, given the unusual circumstances of his death. They did not, and I was one of the few who took an interest in their welfare and wrote and called in support of Veronica’s mother when word got out that she had applied for the officer’s position in Bedley Run (our town’s Chief Hearns being a longtime acquaintance of mine). After she got the job, Officer Como would often double-park her cruiser right in front of Sunny Medical while she got her lunch down the street at the deli or around the corner for takeout chicken, as if she was letting everyone know that she would be extra vigilant over my store, which mostly meant warning off the petty vandals. We rarely exchanged more than a few words, always simply a wave and a greeting, and it wasn’t until Veronica mentioned yesterday what her mother did for a living that I put together who they were.
    It particularly heartens me, in light of this, to see