Free I Want to Show You More (9780802193742) by Jamie Quatro Page A

crouching, about to leap down to the concrete stage from seven benches up.
    Hold on, she says to the man.
    Jonathan, she says, making her voice slow. I need your eyes.
    The boy turns and, briefly, looks. She watches his body soften, the subtle, reluctant quieting of his limbs. He will not jump.
    Sorry about that, she says into the phone.
    The man groans.
    I need your eyes, he says.
    Somehow it works better than Look at me, she says.
    The way you parent, he says. It tells me everything.

1.7 to Tennessee
    Eva Bock made her way along the shoulder of Lula Lake Road. She was eighty-nine—tall, bent forward from the waist. Her white pants hung from her hips so the hemlines of the legs pooled onto the tops of her tennis shoes. Her narrow lips were painted orange-red, and her steel-gray hair, tied up in a bun, smelled faintly of lemon. Loose strands hung about her cheeks and trailed down her spine. She wore a pair of headphones that created a furrow across the center pile of her hair. The cord fed into a chunky cassette deck/FM radio hooked onto the waistband of her pants. She was listening to NPR.
    In her pocket was a letter, addressed: Pres. George W. Bush, Penn. Ave., Wash. D.C. Seven envelopes she had thrown away before she felt her handwriting passed for that of an adult. The letter itself she dictated to Quentin Jenkins, one of the McCallie boys who went down the mountain for her groceries. Quentin wrote in cursive on a college-ruled sheet of paper. She preferred he type it, and considered offering to pay him an extra dollar to do so, but when she finished her dictation and Quentin read the letter back to her, she grew excited and snatched the paper from him, folding and stuffing it into an envelope. Then she realized she hadn’t signed the letter, so she had to open the envelope and borrow the boy’s pen. Quentin offered to mail it for her but she had made up her mind to deliver it to the post office herself. She took great pride in the fact that she, an eighty-nine-year-old woman, still had things to say to the President of the United States. It was a formal letter, protesting the war. She felt it her duty to place it, personally, into the hands of the government.
    A yellow Penske truck approached, honking. Eva set her feet a little ways apart and froze, looking straight ahead. She swayed from side to side, as if holding her balance on a log. In her freckled hand she carried a furled green umbrella, the tip of which she planted into the pavement to steady herself against the truck’s tailwind.
    When it passed she continued on, watching her feet take turns appearing and vanishing beneath her. One of her shoelaces was untied. The Lookout Mountain residents never honked. She had been walking this route, mornings, for as long as she could remember. Most locals slowed and made half-circles around her so she wouldn’t feel obliged to step off the pavement. The tourists would run her off the road if she did not stand her ground to remind them this was a residential suburb, where folks lived and worked and took morning walks.
    Eva felt short of breath, a bit light-headed. She’d been unable to finish her toast that morning, so eager she’d been to set off upon her errand. Three houses before the elementary school she stopped to tie her shoe. Sitting on the stone retaining wall beside the Sutherlands’ driveway, she crossed her left foot over her right knee. The angle was awkward; the laces draped against her inside arch. She rested, looking up Lula Lake Road, visualizing her route. Just past the school’s pillared entrance were a small pond and wooden gazebo; beyond the gazebo she could see the spire of the Methodist church, and beyond that were the bakery, City Hall, gas station, and convenience mart. Next came the Mountain Market and Bed and Breakfast. A brief stretch of houses. And then—with difficulty, Eva pictured herself reaching it—the four-way stop where Lookout Mountain, Georgia,