Free Eden Close by Anita Shreve Page B

scraped knee, would choose his mother's embrace instead of his; and he has felt it himself, more recently, watching a flicker of hesitation pass over his son's features when Billy leaves his mother to come away with Andrew for an evening or a weekend.
    But, in an instant, as he grasps Billy's hand or ruffles his hair, the hurt is gone, healed, as quickly as it came. While for Edith Close, there seemed to be no healing, no respite from her own imagination.
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    T HEY WERE FRIENDS , good friends, for a year, possibly two. He was fourteen and Eden was eleven. Before that time, she'd been uninteresting as a playmate, though she'd always possessed the inherent fascination of a celebrity by dint of her arrival. And before she was eleven she whined a lot, having learned early that the thin grating sound was the only one that seemed to penetrate the thickening fog of preoccupation
that surrounded her mother, and that it worked miraculously with Jim, who couldn't bear to see his daughter unhappy, no matter how absurd the cause. But by the age of eleven, she'd seen, looking across the yard, that Andy and his friends were considerably more interesting as potential companions than her distant mother and her too attentive father or the girls at school, who had never quite been friendly. And being clever, not to say manipulative, she was quick to intuit that acceptance by these older boys required radical surgery. Thus Eden became, for a brief and happy period in her life, a tomboy.
    He remembers vividly the day she first came to them. He and Sean and T.J. were fiddling with their fishing rods by Andrew's back stoop, getting ready to head out to the pond to catch some catfish before supper. It was September or October, Andrew thinks, a school night, because he'd had to finish his homework before he could go. But early in the year, before hockey practice had started. It was muggy; they were in T-shirts, enjoying the last taste of summer and summer pleasures before the cold set in in earnest.
    T.J., who was always the quickest of the three, had his rig ready to go, leaning against the side of the house, and was executing an idle tap dance in the dirt by the stoop, his sneakers raising puffs of dust around his feet.
    "Come on, you guys," he said impatiently. "It'll be dark soon, and anyway I gotta be home by supper or my old man'll cream me."
    "Take it easy," said Andy lightly, threading his line through the guides. "We've still got two hours."
    But it was Sean who was having trouble that day, his line hopelessly tangled in a knot he'd been working on with no results for twenty minutes. His brow was knit into a furrow, and his face was nearly as red as his hair from his frustration. T.J. and Andy were both waiting for him to blow,
Andy more than a little worried that Sean would suddenly yell
Shit,
with Andy's mother chopping vegetables right beyond the screen. And then that night at the supper table, there would be the lecture about bad language and comments about the company Andy kept. Though his parents liked T.J., who had, even at an early age, the gift of charm and who had developed a talent for salesmanship, mostly of himself, they were nervous about Sean.
    Sean's parents were well known in the town. Both were heavy drinkers, but their reputation had been earned because of their fights: legendary sharp-tongued battles heard through the open window of the apartment they lived in with their three children over the TV repair shop; bitter tirades in the shop itself while embarrassed customers pretended to be studying the contours of a picture tube; or silent, ugly tableaux seen through the rolled-up windows of the family Pontiac, Sean's mother's lined and dead-white face turned toward her husband, who would, like his son, grow red from his fury.
    As a boy, Sean was visibly chagrined by his parents' displays of temper, even though, as he grew into his teens, his own temper would betray him when he least wanted it to. But T.J. and Andy