Read Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace for Free Online Page A

gathered his things, she sat down on the couch, as if she had done this before, as if it were the mostnatural thing. I felt around inside my heart, and it was not so cold or hard. In fact, I even almost offered her a cup of tea because she seemed sad or maybe tired. I felt a stab of kindness inside, until her son came bounding out of Sam’s room, shouting that he’d gotten 100 percent on his arithmetic test and Sam had gotten two wrong.
    “Traitor!” Sam shouted from his room, and slammed the door.
    By bedtime, Sam said he forgave the boy but didn’t want to be friends anymore. I said he didn’t have to be friends, but he did have to be kind. At breakfast, Sam said he still forgave him, but when we got to school he said that it had been easier to forgive him when we were farther away.
    Still, several days later, when the mother called and invited him to come play that afternoon, Sam desperately wanted to go. She picked him up after school. When I went over to get him, she offered me a cup of tea. I said no, I couldn’t stay. I was in my fattest pants; she wore her bicycle shorts. The smell of something baking, sweet and yeasty, filled the house. Sam couldn’t find his knapsack, so I looked around for it. The surfaces of her house were covered with fine and expensive things.“Please let me make you a cup of tea,” she said again, and I started to say no, but this thing inside me used my voice to say, “Well . . . okay.” It was awkward. In the living room, I silently dared her to bring up school, math tests, or field trips; I dared her to bring up exercise or politics. As it was, we had very little to talk about—I was having to work hard making sure she didn’t bring up much of anything, because she was so goddamn competitive—and I sat there politely sipping my lemongrass tea. Everywhere you looked was more façade, more expensive stuff—show-offy I-have-more-money-than-you stuff, plus you’re-out-of-shape stuff. Then our boys appeared, and I got up to go. Sam’s shoes were on the mat by the front door, next to his friend’s, and I went over to help him put them on. As I loosened the laces on one shoe, without realizing what I was doing, I snuck a look into the other boy’s sneaker—to see what size shoe he wore. To see how my kid lined up in shoe size.
    And I finally got it.
    The veil dropped. I got that I am as mad as a hatter. I saw that I was the one worried that my child wasn’t doing well enough in school. That I was the one who thought I was out of shape. Andthat I was trying to get her to carry all this for me because it hurt too much to carry it myself.
    I wanted to kiss her on both cheeks, apologize for all the self-contempt I’d been spewing out into the world, all the bad juju I’d been putting on her by thinking she was the one doing harm. I felt like J. Edgar Hoover, peeking into the shoes of his nephew’s seven-year-old friend to see how the Hoover feet measured up, idly wondering how the kid’s parents would like to have a bug on their phone. This was me. She was the one pouring me more tea, she was the one who’d been taking care of my son. She was the one who seemed to have already forgiven me for writing a book in which I trashed her political beliefs; like God and certain parents do, forgiven me almost before I’d even done anything that I needed to be forgiven for. It’s like the faucets are already flowing before you even hold out your cup to be filled. Before forgiveness.
    I felt so happy there in her living room that I got drunk on her tea. I read once in a magazine that in Czechoslovakia, they say an echo in the woods always returns your own call, and so I started speaking sweetly to everyone—to the mother, to the boys. And my sweet voice startedgetting all over me, like sunlight, like the smell of the Danish baking in the oven, two of which she put on a paper plate and covered with tinfoil for me and Sam to take home. Now obviously, the woman has a little baking