When she got home Ed was on the couch with his eyes closed and the headphones on. She stood there waving both arms, trying to draw the gaze of his inner eye. Then she went into Connell’s room.
He was lying on the floor in his baseball uniform. It touched her to see how cute he looked in it. It was small on him; he had grown a lot over the past year, and his arms were wiry and long. He had begun to fill out in the upper body. She wondered how concerned she should be about how much time he spent in the basement lifting weights. She’d heard it could stunt his growth, but there was so much else to worry about lately, and she was just glad he wasn’t getting into anything really destructive.
He’d had the sense to take off his mud-caked cleats, but the rest of his uniform sported a layer of that clayey dirt that never came off in the wash.
“How did it go?”
“We lost. I stink. I walked nine guys.”
He was flipping a ball to himself and catching it; it was coming close to hitting his face. One toss would have crushed his nose if he hadn’t turned away at the last second.
“You’ll get better.”
“I threw pretty hard, though,” he said, a proud smile spreading across his face.
“Just don’t dent the garage door,” she said. “I don’t want to have to spend money on yet another one right now.”
He nodded. “Dad came to the game,” he said.
“Really?”
“He did something weird.”
She felt herself begin to panic. “What happened?”
“He wigged out on me after the game. I had to stay and help with the ball bag and bases and stuff. Dad went to get the car. When I got in, he started screaming at me. I’ve never seen him like that before. He kept yelling, ‘You kept me waiting! You kept me waiting!’?”
“Well, it’s not good to keep people waiting,” she said halfheartedly, wondering if he could hear how tenuous her solidarity with his father was at the moment.
“I couldn’t leave all the bats and stuff. My coach asked me to help. And I wasn’t that long, I really wasn’t. He screamed all the way home.”
“Your father’s going through a hard time right now,” she said. “You can’t take it personally.”
“I didn’t ask him to wait for me. I didn’t ask him to come.”
“He loves going to your games.”
“Whatever.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Mom, you weren’t there. He was crazy.”
A careless toss caused the ball to roll out of reach and he sat with his hands on his knees looking like a little man, already beleaguered by experience. He was a smart kid; he knew some kids had fathers who beat them or simply weren’t there. Still, it was hard to see him disillusioned. Normally she was jealous of the bond between the two of them, but now she wanted to defend it.
“Daddy has a thing about being made to wait in the car,” she said. “You can’t take it personally. I’m sure he’s sorry.”
“He made us sit in the driveway for half an hour so he could apologize.”
“See,” she said. “There you go.”
In bed that night, though, she confronted Ed.
“Connell said you flipped out on him.”
“I lost my temper.”
“He’s just a kid, Ed.”
“That’s not going to happen again.”
“It had better not. I don’t give a damn what your father did to you. That boy’s not him.”
? ? ?
She parked a few blocks away and walked to the realty office on the chance that the agent hadn’t seen her car the first time. The ruse would be exposed eventually, but she liked being taken seriously as a contender for these places. It was like when she was younger and would ask that a certain item be placed on hold at a store. The cashier would write her name on a slip of paper, and she would be granted time for consideration. The mere idea of possessing it in that allotted limbo was sufficient to quench the desire for it and she would almost never come back to complete the purchase. Perhaps it could be like that with the expensive houses; a few minutes in them could inoculate her against the need to live in them.
The office was in the center of Bronxville, and though it was sandwiched between two boutique shops, it had the feel of an old dentist’s office. There was paneling on the walls, a thin blue carpet, and a few worn desks on either side of an aisle that ran through the center. The desk chairs didn’t have wheels. The office made Eileen feel she was not completely out of her realm. One other agent talked quietly in the corner.
Gloria wore her brown hair cut short, like a politician’s. There were ghostly remains of blond in it. She wore a navy business suit with what looked like a silk blouse. Her teeth were bright white, and level and straight enough that they could have been caps. She was around Eileen’s height.
Once again, Gloria extended both hands in greeting. Eileen wondered whether this was something she had learned in a real estate textbook. And yet, she found herself succumbing to it as she had to the potpourri. They sat at the desk.
“Why don’t we start by talking about what kind of house you’re looking to see? Is there a style you’re particularly interested in?”
Eileen had no real grasp on the terms of art that governed houses. Colonial? Edwardian? Tudor? These were terms she’d heard. As much as she’d always wanted a house in the suburbs, it was an abstract desire. It was about what the house represented: polish, grandeur, seclusion, permanency.
“I liked the house I saw last week quite a lot,” she said.
Gloria looked surprised. “I thought it hadn’t appealed to you.”
“Well, yes, that’s true. In some ways it didn’t. But in many ways it was a perfect house.”
Gloria looked like she was weighing whether to let her off the hook or not. Then she smiled. “It has to be a perfect house in every way,” she said. “That’s what I want for you.”
“Thank you.”
“If you don’t mind my asking, was it a matter of price?”
“Not at all,” Eileen said. “Money wasn’t the issue.”
Gloria raised her brows. “Okay,” she said, clicking her pen into action. “Well, if I’m going to find your future home, I’m going to need certain guidelines.”
“Of course,” Eileen said.
“Why don’t we just start from the top, Eileen. It’s Leary, right?”
“Yes.”