Free A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You by Amy Bloom Page A

safe distance from his uncle’s feet. Uncle Lionel is sharp, is what Jordan’s parents say. Sharp as a knife. Ari, not really Uncle Lionel’s son, not really Jordan’s cousin, is sharp, too, but he’s sharpmostly in French, so Jordan doesn’t even have to get into it with him. Ari has Tintin and Jordan has Spider-Man, and Jordan stretches out on the blue velvet couch and Ari gets just the blue-striped armchair, plus Jordan has his own room and Ari has to share with Uncle Lionel.
    “You invite Ari to play with you,” Julia tells Jordan. “Take Corinne with you.”
    “He’s mean. And he only talks French, anyway. He’s—”
    “Jordy invite your cousin to play with you. He’s never been to America before, and you are the host.”
    “I’m the host?” Jordan can see himself in his blue blazer with his feet up on the coffee table like Uncle Lionel, waving a fat cigar.
    “You are.”
    “All right. We’re gonna play outside, then.” Ari is not an outside person.
    “That’s nice,” Lionel says.
    “Nice enough,” Julia says. It is terrible to prefer one grandchild over another, but who would not prefer sweet Jordan or Princess Corinne to poor long-nosed Ari, slinking around the house like a marmoset.
    Julia has not had both sons with her for Thanksgiving for twenty years. Until 1979 the Sampson family sat around a big bird with cornbread stuffing, pralined sweet potatoes, and three kinds of deep-dish pie, and it has been easier since her husband and in-laws died to stay in with a bourbon and a bowl of pasta when one son couldn’t come home and the other didn’t, and not too hard, later, to come as apitied favorite guest to Buster’s in-laws, and sweet and very easy, during the five happy, private years with Peaches Figueroa, to eat fettuccine al barese in honor of Julia’s Italian roots and in honor of Peaches, who had grown up with canned food and Thanksgiving from United Catholic Charities. With her whole extant family in the house now, sons and affectionate daughter-in-law (Jewelle must have had to promise a hundred future Christmases to get away on Thanksgiving), grandson, granddaughter, and poor Ari, Lionel’s little ex-step marmoset, Julia can see that she has entered Official Grandmahood. Sweet or sour, spry or arthritic, she is now a stock character, as essential and unknown as the maid in a drawing room comedy.
    “Looks good. Ari likes chicken.” Lionel walks toward the sideboard.
    Julia watches him sideways, his clever, darkly mournful eyes, the small blue circles of fatigue beneath them, the sparks of silver in his black curls. She does not say, How did we cripple you so? Don’t some people survive a bad mother and her early death? Couldn’t you have been the kind of man who overcomes terrible misfortune, even a truly calamitous error in judgment? It was just one night—not that that excuses anything, Julia thinks. She loves him like no one else; she remembers meeting him for the first time, wooing him for his father’s sake and loving him exuberantly, openhanded, without any of the prickling maternal guilt or profound irritation she sometimes felt with Buster. Just one shameful, gold-rimmed night together,and it still runs through her like bad sap. She has no idea what runs through him.
    There is a knot in his heart, Julia thinks as she puts away the ColorForms, and nothing will loosen it. She sees a line of ex-daughters-in-law, short and tall, dark and fair, stretching from Paris to Massachusetts, throwing their wedding bands into the sea and waving regretfully in her direction.
    Julia kisses Lionel firmly on the forehead, and he smiles. It would be nicer if his stepmother’s rare kisses and pats on the cheek did not feel so much like forgiveness, like Julia’s wish to convey that she does not blame him for being who he is. Lionel wonders whom exactly she does blame.
    “Let’s talk later,” he says. It seems safe to assume that later will not happen.
    L ionel watches Corinne and