Read Little Boy Blues for Free Online

this explanation, and sick of doing anythingso strange that I had to be constantly explaining myself to people.
    “They’re what?”
    I was surprised to discover that she was interested, or at least interested enough to listen to my explanation and not go and get her mother. So I just kept talking, saying more than I’d intended just to hold her there, sitting across from me. Finally she got bored and thrust Ken back into my hands.
    “He needs his jacket on,” she said irritably. I didn’t mind. I was out of danger. I didn’t even care that she made me keep playing Barbie until my aunt called me home for supper an hour later.
    “Sugar, go help your aunt. Melita, I told you to call me when you wanted help.”
    Aunt Melita was almost to the picnic table carrying a tray with a pitcher of tea and four glasses filled with ice.
    “It wasn’t any trouble,” she said.
    Uncle Tom drove up a few minutes later with the watermelon. We were waiting for him to come back from the kitchen with a knife when my mother said, “Daddy used to love watermelon. Mama would send one up to the icehouse in the morning and in the afternoon she’d get one of the colored boys to go get it, and then they’d call Daddy at the store and tell him. The only way you could get Daddy home from that drugstore in the middle of the day was to tell him you had a watermelon.”
    “Papa did love watermelon,” my aunt said. I thought it was odd that my mother called her father Daddy and Aunt Melita always called him Papa, like they had two different fathers.
    We were almost through with the watermelon—Mother cautioning me every other bite about swallowing the seeds—when she said, “I know I’m not even going to want to think about eatingsupper after this. We should’ve thought of this earlier.” She put her fork down—I wondered why grown-ups liked to eat watermelon with a fork—and went on: “I just don’t know why some people eat so much.” Even I knew she was talking about my uncle, who had a potbelly that hung over his pants.
    “Well, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with watermelon,” my aunt said.
    “You know as well as I do the Bible warns us against gluttony,” Mother said, reaching for her tea.
    “Can I have some more?” I asked.
    “Yes, you can,” my uncle said enthusiastically. “Not going to hurt a skinny little boy like you.”
    “Tom just thought he was doing something nice we could all enjoy,” my aunt said.
    “Oh, Melita, I’m not criticizing Tom. He can eat whatever he wants to eat. I was just making an observation. Honey, you’re way too sensitive. You can’t be like that. You’ll have people worrying about every little thing they say around you. If I can’t make a simple comment without you getting upset, then we can’t talk about anything.” She frowned and rattled the ice in her glass. “Other sisters talk. I don’t see why we can’t.” She turned to me. “Did you know that when President Kennedy was a boy, his father would gather the family around at suppertime, and quiz them about current events?” I knew what current events were from
My Weekly Reader
. I wondered if President Kennedy ever sat around in his wet bathing suit.
    “Oh lookee,” Mother said. “There’s a kitty cat.”
    “My kitty cat.”
    “Your kitty cat. Since when did you get a kitty?”
    “That’s Milk Whiskers.”
    “Milk Whiskers. That’s a funny name for a cat.” At home we had a parakeet named Pretty Boy. Pretty Boy had originally been named Orville, after Orville Wright, until we went away for two weeks to visit my cousins in Ohio and my mother had sent the parakeet to stay with her friend Ethel. When we came back, Ethel had renamed the parakeet Pretty Boy. I had complained, because Orville had been my idea and I thought it was funny, but my mother told me it was too late to change back because it would just confuse the bird.
    “He’s big, isn’t he?” Mother said. “Where did he come from?”
    “He