Free All the Lasting Things by David Hopson

has to pray the neighbors will keep their mouths shut. And remarkably they do. Forty years later, somehow, miraculously, Claudia does not know. But at this moment, Claudia is barely four. She is in my arms. She wears a green gingham dress and wants to climb onto the gurney with her. I stoop to where she can reach and say, Give Mama a kiss. Claudia fidgets and cries; she doesn’t want her mama to go. Evelyn puts her hand in mine. I give it a squeeze before they wheel her off. It’s morning. By the time they come back, it’s night. She’s in the recovery room, they tell me, asleep. We go to the nursery. Claudia passes out on my shoulder on the elevator ride up. There are other fathers at the window, men in loosened ties with their hands pressed against the glass, staring. The nurse waves to me in her starched whites, then wheels a glass bassinet to where I can see. A boy, says the man next to me. He claps me on the back like it’s the best thing in the world. A boy, he says. What do you know about that?

4.
    T hree weeks on Palmer Street put Benji in a mood. He liked the nubbled blue blanket from his boyhood bed and the almost arctic setting of the air conditioner he favored even in mild mid-September. He liked the season’s last tomatoes pulled warm and dusty from his mother’s garden and the sweating, fat-bellied pitcher from which she poured a heavenly homemade lemonade squeezed especially for him. After nearly a month, though, even these pleasantries had lost their charm, dulled by repetition, tarnished by daily tussles with Henry. And every time he complained to Claudia, trying to convince her that a modestly priced hotel was a better place to stage his recuperation, if only he could borrow a little cash, she said, “Forget it.”
    “But all this bickering,” said Benji, unafraid to ring the same bell more than once. “It isn’t good for either of us.”
    “So stop bickering.”
    “Easy for you to say. He’s not on you all the time.”
    But Henry’s being on him wasn’t the problem. He’d had forty years to get used to the taste of his father’s vinegary disposition, and he had. More than the arid plains of his father’s foul moods, it was the march over the peaks and valleys of Henry’s illness that scared and exhausted Benji, that made him long for the Motel 6. He had no interest in watching the slow, disconcerting descent or measuring the degrees by which illness reduced the literary lion to a shadow of his former self.
    Maybe Claudia was right: he had no right to complain. Evelyn made Benji’s lemonade and picked up the potato chip bags he left in his wake. With a few generous checks, she kept his creditors at bay. He didn’t have to worry about evading his roommates on rent day or making his share of the electric bill. His thankless run as Hamlet’s dead father had come to an early end. And perhaps best of all, he’d won the sudden interest of a girl who, before his fall, barely gave him the time of day. He had no clue why, but falling from the bridge had set a flame dancing over his head, and Cat, quick as a moth, headed straight for it. Maybe it made him tragic in a sexy sort of way. Maybe it reminded her of her brother, who, a few years after their parents’ awful death (airplane crash), finished a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and (accidentally or not) drove himself into a highway divider. Maybe she wanted someone to rescue.
    Whatever the case, she showed up daily to take him on the short walks he could manage in his big black boot cast or lull him to sleep with Molly Bloom’s soliloquy or, lately, late at night after his parents had gone to bed, gently jerk him off while riding the fingers of his one good hand. He was thirty-nine; she was twenty-five; and they were, out of fear of being discovered or uncertainty over what they were doing or perhaps merely in deference to the immobilizing silicone and plaster encasing two of Benji’s limbs, having sex like unschooled pubescent teens, but