Read The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears for Free Online

the movies tonight,” Naomi would say.
    “He was just here,” I would tell her.
    “Was he looking for me?”
    “Of course. I think he was even a bit sad when he left.”
    Henry drove us to concerts and plays, and on occasion to the summer homes we created for ourselves along the coast. Once he forgot to pick Naomi up from school, which was why, she explained, she hadn’t been able to see me that day.
    “Henry,” she said, “messed up big time.”
    Henry was responsible for the broken radiator in my store one afternoon. He was responsible for the dwindling supply of candy one week. On better days he gave us advice on our taxes, suggested investments, brokered deals, and when life turned unexpectedly, bore the brunt of our failures and mistakes, our disappointments, accidents, mishaps, frustrations, and angers.
     
    The only rule Judith had for Naomi was that she always had to be home before five, just as the early winter sun was beginning to set. Judith picked that hour because it had been at roughly that time of day that a young man had approached her on her way home from my store and asked her if she liked to suck black dick. As she was walking past General Logan, the young man pulled out his penis and then broke out in laughter and went running back to his friends, who were watching from the benches only a few feet away.
    “It wasn’t scary,” Judith said. “Just humiliating. Which is maybe even worse.”
    If Naomi wasn’t home by four-thirty, Judith came to the store to pick her up. How long Naomi stayed was always a matter of her own choice. On the afternoons I was busy she left almost as soon as she arrived. “You’re boring,” she would tell me, and she would leave angry, or she would stay until the last possible moment, eager to do anything except return to her mother. Judith not only tolerated her daughter’s fierceness, she loved her all the more for it.
    “You know, I keep wondering what I would have done if Naomi had been there when that kid came up to me. I keep thinking that she would have handled it better than I did.”
    How Judith handled it was by turning around and walking slowly past her house until she found a bus stop, where she sat and cried for just a minute.
    “I told myself that if I looked determined enough, he couldn’t touch me. My hands were shaking so hard I had to clasp them in front of me while I walked. I could hear him laughing with his friends for about a block, and then they just stopped and moved on.”
    We had all of our conversations in front of Naomi, with Judith on one side of the counter and me on the other, Naomi sitting on a stool somewhere in between the two of us. She was looking through the real-estate ads in the back of the Washington Post ’s Sunday magazine while Judith told me about the incident.
    “I would have kicked him where it counts,” Naomi said, her eyes still supposedly focused on the ads.
    “I don’t doubt for a second that you would have, honey.”
    “Why did he say that to you?”
    “I don’t know. I think he thought it was all just a joke.”
    Judith leaned over and caressed her daughter’s hair. “We should go. It’s getting late,” she said.
    “You want me to walk you home?”
    “No. We’re fine. Plus, I got my little kickboxer with me.”
    Naomi let her mother pick her up off her stool, and she even let her hold her for almost a minute before she wriggled herself free. It was six-thirty on a Friday night—late and dark enough to have brought out a few of the kids who would settle onto the corner for the rest of the evening. The two of them walked out of my store hand in hand, past a few snickers and “Psssssts” and “Heys” as if they were oblivious to everything besides each other.

3
    K enneth calls me at home early the next morning just as I’m about to leave my apartment.
    “Why aren’t you at the store yet?” he asks me. It’s the first thing he says, and the only reason he called to begin with. He’s been