Free Falling in Place by Ann Beattie

the movie theater, taking every occasion to get drunk.” “You don’t see him on every occasion,” his father had said. John Joel had curled up in the back seat and stopped listening to them. Listening to them made him tired, and the night was over, and pretty soon they would be back at his grandmother’s, where all the lights would be on, even though she and Brandt were asleep, so that when they came in they wouldn’t knock over any of the vases. Then, when everyone was finally in bed, he could go downstairs and open the cabinets and eat. He planned to eat the rest of the M&M’s, and to skip a few of them across the floor for Henri to chase. When his father put on the car radio, that meant that no one was to talk.
    “What are we doing this Fourth of July?” he asked his father on the ride into New York.
    “I hadn’t thought about it. What do you want to do?” his father said.
    “Are we going somewhere?”
    His father looked at him. His father was driving fast, and if his mother had been there, she would have made him slow down. “I just asked what
you
wanted to do,” his father said.
    “Nothing,” John Joel said. “I just wondered.”
    “Did you decide you liked fireworks?”
    “I like fireworks,” John Joel said.
    His father looked at him again but didn’t say anything. Then he put on the radio. “Hey. Billie Holiday,” his father said. “Listen to this.”
    They listened to the song.
    “Do you know who she was?” his father said.
    “Black,” John Joel said.
    “Black?” his father said. His father looked at the roof of the car, shifting in the seat to lean back, the way he did in his office when he got a phone call. “Yes,” his father said. “But I’m not sure that really gets to the heart of Billie Holiday.” The news came on and his father changed the station. “Maybe EldridgeCleaver would think so,” his father said. His father changed lanes.
    “The old Eldridge Cleaver.”
    “The last day of school Bobby Pendergast brought snakes to school. Things that are called snakes. You light them and they go
chizzz
and curl up and burn. They look like a black snake when they’re burned out.”
    “You want me to get some of those for the Fourth of July?”
    “On the Fourth of July when Mary’s curled up asleep, you can light
her,”
John Joel said.
    His father was changing lanes again. He looked at John Joel and cut the wheel, making the car swerve back to where he had been. When the driver behind him honked his horn, John honked back and flashed his brake lights. “Mary,” his father repeated. “A joke, right? I don’t really have to pay for a child shrink, too, along with an orthodontist.”
    “You don’t have any sense of humor,” John Joel said.
    “Don’t criticize me. It’s ten in the morning and I’m late for work so I can drop you at this orthodontist’s, who is the only acceptable orthodontist in the world according to your mother’s greal pal Tiffy whatever-her-name-is.”
    “You don’t know the name of her best friend?”
    “Well,” his father said. “Aren’t we finding fault with our old dad left and right today.”
    “Adamson,” John Joel said.
    “I don’t care what her name is,” his father said.
    “I was trying to tell you a really good joke the other night in the park, and you didn’t care about that, either.”
    “What joke?”
    “You don’t even remember.”
    “I hear a lot of jokes. That’s what you do in the workaday world, my friend: You fend off disaster and listen to jokes.”
    “I don’t want to go to the dentist.”
    “What do you want to do? Lie in the tree?”
    “I don’t always lie in the tree,” John Joel said.
    “You’re acting like a five-year-old today.”
    “You’re just taking me because she told you to.”
    “No indeed,” John said. “I’m doing my best to insure a happy future for my son, so that when he goes out into the workaday world, people will take him seriously. They don’t take short menor men with