Free City Boy by Jean Thompson Page A

everything. From shame or discretion or both, he hadn’t told anyone before, but now he felt as if a curse had been lifted, as if he’d grabbed hold of the world and beat it in a fair fight. “Go ahead, tell me I’m nuts,” he concluded.
    “You’re nuts. She sounds like a real piece of work.”
    He was annoyed, he hadn’t really meant her to agree with him. “Hey, she was in crisis.”
    “You are already so whipped.”
    “Give me a break.”
    “You know one reason I wish I was really really good looking? People are so much more willing to make excuses for you.”
    “And to you I say, phooey.” He felt dangerously happy. He wanted to drive a car too fast or swim for miles in a cold ocean or at the very least stay up all night thinking about her, which was the only real available option. Nothing had happened between them yet and nothing might, he knew that. It was almost beside the point. He was in that exalted, engulfing phase of love and possibility, where hope was just as good as actuality.
    Jack called her the next day. The hell with playing it cool. Her voice on the phone was cautious and a little amused. “So you’re not going away until I go out with you?”
    “Stalker, that’s me.”
    They agreed that they should do something low-key and nonalcoholic. They met at Lake Front Park and walked among the joggers and promenading golden retrievers and Taiwanese soccer players and anyone else lucky enough to have free time on this blazing-warm October day. The air was hazy and the high-rises that lined the shoreline to the south receded into the shimmering distance, resembling some science fiction cityscape on another, less complicated planet. The lake was flat and calm and as they walked they occupied themselves with gazing at it, relieved to have something to look at besides each other. But perhaps because of their history so far, they soon began talking in a way that was nearly intimate.
    Chloe said, “You should have just gone ahead and done it to me. What a miserable girly trick.”
    “‘Done it to you,’ what kind of talk is that? Not to mention all the effort of having to make bail.”
    “I wouldn’t have told anyone. I would have felt too stupid.”
    Jack squawked out a laugh, too surprised to be hurt, but she said quickly, “No, God, I didn’t mean you were somebody … I meant I was the idiot.”
    “Thanks, I guess.”
    “Of course I liked you, or I wouldn’t have … Look, I wouldn’t be here now.”
    They both sighed, as if they’d gotten past some important point. Jack turned to look at the blurred horizon of the lake. If you squinted at it hard enough, it resolved itself into separate bands of color, shades of gray, azure, steel blue, black. He tried to comprehend the enormity of it, three hundred miles of water that led you into still other waters. He said, “This is the first time I’ve known I was going to see you. Every other time was a surprise.”
    “Maybe you’d like it better that way. I could just sort of materialize, pitch a fit, then disappear.”
    “No,” said Jack. “I like it like this. Knowing just how long I’ll have to wait.”
    She gave him a blue and startled glance. For a moment he thoughthe’d gone too far. Then she tilted her head, as if he might make more sense viewed sideways. “Just who are you really, Mister Stranger?”
    He began to tell her. Some of it he’d just figured out himself. He was a man willing to dive in over his head. It didn’t matter where the current led him. And perhaps this was what Chloe sensed about him, that willingness. He talked, she talked. They tested the waters. In the days and weeks and months to come, they could be forgiven for believing the hardest part was behind them.

Three
    M rs. Lacagnina had a married daughter who lived in Berwyn. Every Sunday she arrived to take her mother to church and then out to dinner at a cafeteria. The daughter was stout and fiftyish, with black hair polished to a hard shine, and a