Free Tales from the Nightside by Charles L. Grant Page A

you?”
    “What?”
    “He follows you around like a goddamn pet because he’s afraid of losing you, and you won’t even buy him a lousy puppy or something. You’re something else again, Frank, you really are. I work my tail trying to help—”
    “My salary is plenty good enough,” he said quickly.
    “—this family and you’re even trying to get me to stop that, too.”
    He shoved himself to his feet, his chest brushing against hers and forcing her back. “Listen,” he said tightly. “I don’t care if you sing your heart out a million times a week, lady, but when it starts to interfere with your duties here—”
    “My  duties ?”
    “—then yes, I’ll do everything I can to make sure you stay home when you’re supposed to.”
    “You’re raising your voice. You’ll wake Damon.”
    The argument was familiar, and old, and so was the rage he felt stiffening his muscles. But this time she wouldn’t stop when she saw his anger. She kept on, and on, and he didn’t even realize it when his hand lifted and struck her across the cheek. She stumbled back a step, whirled to run out of the room, and stopped.
    Damon was standing at the foot of the stairs.
    He was sucking his thumb.
    He was staring at his father.
    “Go to bed, son,” Frank said quietly. “Everything’s all right.”
    For the next week the tension in the house was proverbially knife-cutting thick. Damon stayed up as late as he could, sitting by his father as they watched television together or read from the boy’s favorite books. Susan remained close, but not touching, humming to herself and playing with her son whenever he left—for the moment—his father’s side; each time, however, her smile was more forced, her laughter more strained, and it was apparent to Frank that Damon was merely tolerating her, nothing more. That puzzled him. It was he who had struck her, not the other way around, and the boy’s loyalty should have been thrown into his mother’s camp. Yet it hadn’t. And it was apparent that Susan was growing more resentful of the fact each day. Each hour. Each time Damon walked silently to Frank’s side and slid his hand around the man’s waist, or into his palm, or into his hip pocket.
    He began showing up at the office again, until one afternoon when Susan skidded the car to a halt at the curb and ran out, grabbed the boy and practically threw him, arms and legs thrashing, into the front seat. Frank raced from his desk and out the front door, leaned over and rapped at the window until Susan lowered it.
    “What the hell are you doing?” he whispered, with a glance to the boy.
    “You hit me, or had you forgotten,” she whispered back. “And there’s my son’s alienation of affection.”
    He almost straightened. “That’s lawyer talk, Susan,” he said.
    “Not here,” she answered. “Not in front of the boy.”
    He stepped back quickly as the car growled away from the curb, walked in a daze to his desk and sat there, chin in one palm, staring out the window as the afternoon darkened and a faint drizzle began to fall. His secretary muttered something about a court case the following morning, and Frank nodded until she stared at him, gathered her purse and raincoat and left hurriedly. He continued to nod, not knowing the movement, trying to understand what he had done, what both of them had done to bring themselves to this moment. Ambition, surely. A conflict of generations where women were homebodies and women had careers; where men tried to adjust when they couldn’t have both. But he had tried, he told himself . . . or he thought he had, until the dishes began to pile up and the dust stayed on the furniture and Damon said  does she sing pretty?
    It’s always the children who get hurt, he thought angrily.
    Held that idea in early December when the separation papers had been prepared and he stood on the front porch watching his car, his wife, and his son drive away from Oxrun Station south toward the city.