Read The Company You Keep for Free Online Page B

morning. I can feel the early silence of the suburban street, the chill spring air moist with the dew from the lawn, the shafts of light through the kitchen windows with their stained oak and bull’s-eye molding. Your room. Your room, which I visit in dreams. The sun flooding through the blue Dr. Seuss curtains Molly gave us when we moved in, the curtains moving in the breeze, your body supine, so perfectly relaxed, arms around your head and head in a pillow of brown hair.
    I can see you, waking in the silent room, opening your brown eyes into the morning light and, after a moment of recollection, sitting up on the side of the bed and delivering yourself of a wild, arms-akimbo stretch. Isabel Miriam Grant, seven years old in the spring of 1996. Your face, which was very round and distinguished by Julia’s cheekbones, was of enormous vivacity; your eyes, huge and intense. You had, in fact, a particularly American type of baby-boom beauty, the union of the regularity of your mother’s long-standing American features, which had participated only in British and Protestant bloodlines since the 1600s, and your father’s European irregularity, a long Mediterranean gene line, also protected by community, at least 500 years back to Spain. You had what is called a “rosebud” mouth, full lips always pursed, but the speed and intensity with which you talked mitigated against its roundness, for you had to tighten its corners in order to get out all thewords you wanted as quickly as possible—in this, too, you showed both of your parents, both of whom were, in their ways, primarily verbal people. Your hair, also brown, fell far down your back, and already you had the tic of brushing it out of your eyes.
    I can close my eyes and see you. Quickly you registered what was going on in the house—the early morning, your father still asleep. Then, moving silently and with determination, you dressed in bell-bottoms, a tank top tight over your still baby-round stomach, sandals. Perhaps you came to my room, watched me sleeping for a moment. But you did not wake me. For the fact was, what awaited you in your father’s house on a Saturday morning was a bowl of granola and a book, whereas if you could get out the front door without waking me and across the lawn to Molly’s, you would be able to avail yourself of a wide-screen color TV with satellite service, eggs and bacon, and possibly even a little time with your hero, Molly’s son Leo, in the event that Leo had both gotten home from his night’s adventures and not yet gone to bed.
    So, with the faultless egocentricity of a seven-year-old, you beat a quiet retreat and, still in your bare feet, ran lightly over the lawns to Molly’s house.
    I only woke, that Saturday morning, when the sun slipped over the eave of the roof and cast light over my face. Then I, in turn, finding your room empty, went out the front door in my bare feet and across the lawns to the next-door house. Here, I found Molly sitting on the front steps, smoking and reading the paper, while inside the screen door you were watching Pokémon. Without a word, I corrected both of these infractions: first I entered the house to turn off the TV, kiss you, and serve myself coffee. I came out the door again, removed Molly’s cigarette from her hands, and threw it into the bushes. Then I leaned back against the doorjamb with my coffee.
    “Godammit, Moll. Leo’s going to get you hooked again.”
    Molly did not look up, and her black bangs, reaching to her big glasses, made her face, from this angle, impregnable to me. As for you, you had by now wandered outside and sat down next to her on the steps,regarding her open paper with curiosity, the pair of you united in your absolute lack of interest in me. Silence reigned while I drank my coffee, watching the two women in my life, then you, entirely disregarding the fact that you had willfully disobeyed me and been caught, asked, “Dadda, who’s George Bush?”
    “He’s a