Read Where the God of Love Hangs Out: Fiction for Free Online Page B

butterfly-style.
    “Clare, you want to tell his mother, his grandmother, so the poor woman doesn’t have a stroke when she sees him?”
    Clare wants to stay, but Nelson is nestled on the kitchen counter, resting so comfortably against William, she has to go tell his grandmother the bad news and let William be the hero. (Isabel told her that when baby Emily cried in her crib, Isabel and William would stand, locked hip to hip, in the doorway, each trying to get to her first, each trying to persuade the other that it didn’t matter , that they just didn’t want to trouble the other. Clare could not imagine Charles fighting her for the privilege of changing Danny’s diaper.) She turns around for a last look, and Nelson is laughing into William’s chest; Zeus holding Ganymede beneath his dark wing.
    Nelson’s grandmother raised three boys and one girl, and an accident that does not involve a broken limb or serious impairment is, as far as she’s concerned, the best one can hope for in this treacherous world.
    “He’s fine,” Clare says. “He cut his forehead on that granite coffee table. You know.” They have both banged their knees, badly, on that coffee table, and they both watch Nelson walk out the door, followed by William, and they both think that if Clare and Nelson had not been playing checkers, if Nelson had been helping his grandmother in the garage, like the good boy he is, he would not be marching toward them, a wounded boy soldier, with two pale-pink Band-Aids, already darkly bloodstained in their centers, laid above his beautiful eyes. His shirt is ruined.
    “I have some plain white T-shirts,” Clare says. “I know you’re pressed for time.” She holds the door for Nelson, and he slides into the backseat to stretch out. His head hurts and there were no cookies and it seems like years ago that he was jumping Clare’s pieces and killing her queens where they stood. He puts his head on the pile of coats.
    “Don’t bleed on those coats, little man. Are you okay? Do you want me to drop you at Auntie’s?”
    “No.” His friends will be at the church. It will look like he has been in a big fight, which he sort of has, and that will be pretty cool. Clare turns the topcoat inside out so the silky lining is against his cheek. No one but Clare would do that for him. “I’m okay. We can go.”
    “I’ll go back and get a T-shirt,” Clare says.
    Nelson looks at his grandmother in the rearview mirror. He is not going to, and he doesn’t think his grandmother will expect him to, or let him, wear one of Clare’s own white T-shirts to the church Fall Festival, and a T-shirt that belonged to her husband would fit him like a dress. His grandmother smiles at him in the mirror and shakes her head at Clare.
    “Don’t you worry—probably some fine shirts in the backseat. Nelson can have his pick. Bye, now.” She steps on the gas, like that, and they are off, down the driveway.
    Nelson sits up to see Clare waving to him and the fat man giving him a salute. He lies back down on the black silk and replays the last few minutes of the game until they get to church.
    “My ankle is killing me,” Clare says. “How’s your hip?”
    “He’s a big boy.”
    “Yes, he is.”
    “He’ll play basketball, I guess.”
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake. Is that what you’d have said about Adam?”
    Her son Adam is six-three, and although William is fond of him, the kid is such a sport of nature, he always hoped his Emily, tall and broad-shouldered, would never take a shine to him because their children would have been freaks, some kind of advanced-race humans, who would have lost all control of their huge, flailing limbs.
    “Adam? That boy could beat Adam at one-on-one now. I love you.”
    So it is not a discussion of the limited options for nonwhite children, and it is not a discussion of the hideous fate of young black men, and there’s no reason to talk about Adam right now. Clare cannot stop staring at her watch. The