Free Dance Real Slow by Michael Grant Jaffe Page A

briefly before he runs from the room, crying even harder.
    The dinner dishes cleaned and stored, I sit on our front porch and read the
Tarent Times
, the town’s only daily newspaper. Most of the stories are national, taken from the AP or UPI wires. There is a serial killer in California, near Los Angeles, who stabs his victims in the throat with a six-inch ice pick and leaves Coca-Cola bottle caps over the bloody holes, earning him the nickname Coca-Cola killer. Hurricane Felicia is stalled a few hundred miles off the coast of Florida, trembling, preparing, and the United States Weather Service is quite sure she will slam into land, somewhere above Fort Lauderdale, within the next twenty-eight hours. They are hoping by then Felicia’s winds will have diminished, pruning her to a tropical storm. Locally, a gooseneck trailer truck carrying several enormous elm trees from Montana jackknifed on Mercer, where it funnels into two lanes. A crew took four hours to lift the cab from its ditch, inching a chain and pulley rig, carefully, deliberately, so as not to snap loose the logs. There is also an announcement, boxed in the lower left corner of the front page, banning leaf burning.
    It has turned breezy again and soon it will be winter. Our first full winter in Tarent. Mrs. Grafton is removing laundry from a clothesline she has strung between twothin poplars. The earth climbs, leaving the sun a smear of wax against the butterscotch stalks of wheat. Mrs. Grafton cannot see me now, it is too dark, too dark even for me to read. I am wearing a T-shirt and my arms are cold, so I cross them on my lap, sandwiching them between my belly and thighs. Calvin is no longer crying, or at least I can no longer hear him. It is very quiet, with only the sound of barn swallows, the light tap of wood against wood as Mrs. Grafton drops her clothespins into piles, and the occasional shush of a passing car.
    Inside, I do not see Calvin. I don’t want to see him because I am still angry, not only with him, but with myself. For overreacting. And for teasing him with the man-o-war, telling him that I was going to take it back to Dr. McLure. I read some more, in the living room, with a low-hanging floor lamp dispersing jaundiced yellow. After an hour I head upstairs, stopping at Calvin’s room before retiring to my own. The only light is from the moon, coming in through the window, and I flip on a hallway switch. Calvin’s animal coloring book is creased open near the center of the floor, to a picture of a hippopotamus, partially greened. His crayons and markers are scattered about, the farthest one, a burgundy, at the door. The bed is empty, stripped. I see his quilt, blue with astronauts and space ships, leading from the closet, where Calvin is lying face-down on the floor, sleeping, the quilt wrapped like a serpent about his body. Shoes and clothing rail a twisted pathway to a stuffed panda at his stocking feet. Calvin is making gentle noises, a soft, raspy snore rumbling from deep in his throat.
    Because he is my son and because I love him morethan anything else in the world, more than I can imagine loving anyone else, more even than I loved his mother, I crawl in beside, my torso jammed deep into the closet, with my legs stretched over a hooked rug. I wrap my arm around Calvin, gingerly, and soon it tingles and becomes numb, but I do not move, leaving it resting over his tiny body like a wreath. Calvin’s eyes flick, his wispy lashes brushing my cheek.
    â€œCal, how come you’re sleeping in here?”
    He is tired and answers slowly. “I just wanted to,” he says, remaining still. “That’s all.”
    Kate’s labor was not a long one; it was not as excruciatingly painful as she expected, she told me later. Calvin came early, by almost a month, and I was in Cleveland at the time for my father’s four hundredth coaching victory, an early February game against Stanford. The Eastern Ohio athletic