Curled in the Bed of Love by Catherine Brady Page A

for?” Nathan says as I lean toward him to kiss him good night.
    I straighten up. “No. What’s it for?”
    â€œThey believed that when you went to sleep, your soul went away at night. So when you woke up in the morning, the first thing you had to do was thank God for your soul coming back.”
    I smile at his “
they
believed.” The tiny mustard seed of faith is hardly sprouting in my son, but in me it finds tilled ground.“That’s beautiful,” I say. I lean down again, hoping to finish the conversation with a kiss and a hug.
    â€œYou stink,” he says when I release him. “You’ve been smoking.”
    I can’t deny it. Caught again. He’s old enough to have been drilled at school in the horrors of smoking. I don’t smoke in the house. I go out in the backyard to have a cigarette, just as I go out on the steps with Roberta at meetings, so I won’t poison the kids, so I can hide it from them. Still my son can smell it on me.
    After the meeting ends, Walter begs a ride from me again and starts in on my other passengers as soon as I pull away from the curb. Walter has elected himself to be the man who keeps us honest, just as he’s assumed the job of dictating my route when I deliver passengers, always working it out so that I bring him home last. I can feel the three people in the backseat holding themselves stiffly as if that will defend them from the ricocheting torment of his voice.
    â€œYou’re all such gluttons for punishment,” Walter says. “Can’t get enough of it. Because you’re hoping for the one punishment that will be enough, finally, to let you off the hook. Me too. I love it when my son throws the past at me. I deserve it.”
    After I drop off my next-to-last passenger, I’m scared that Walter’s
you
will condense to a vindictive singular. I’m waiting to hear him accuse me of all kinds of things for the rest of the ride, but he doesn’t. Instead he asks if we can’t go by my house on the way to his place. He’s just curious, he says. It’s on the way, isn’t it?
    Maybe I have to offer him this in exchange for his silence. I turn up my own street, feel the car’s engine strain on the hill, then slow down before my house.
    I point it out to him. An Edwardian in a row of Edwardians that face the street, packed tightly together with tiny, carefully plotted flower beds on their shallow front lawns, their steep second-story roofs vaulting each of the upstairs bedrooms.
    He puts a hand on my arm. “Stop,” he says.
    I stop. We look at the house, the pearly moonlike glow of light through the window shades that have been pulled down at all the windows.
    â€œI should have known,” Walter says. “Of course you live on a postcard street.”
    â€œWhy do you have to make that sound like a crime?”
    â€œWell, it’s not a crime, is it?” he says.
    We watch as a shadow drifts across the upstairs window. I’m proud of recognizing Nathan even in such vague outline. “That’s my son,” I say.
    â€œHow old is he?” Walter says.
    â€œTwelve.”
    â€œMy boy’s only a little older than that. Fourteen. You wait. He’ll turn on you then. They all do.”
    To get to Walter’s house in the Duboce Triangle, I will have to drive through the narrow streets of Victorians in Noe Valley, over one hill and then another, to arrive at streets of dark store-fronts locked behind iron grills and shabby-windowed apartment buildings. The city is so pretty, its softly folded hills offering such astonishing vistas, cupping miniature worlds in each valley, that it always comes as a shock to emerge into a pocket of poverty like Walter’s neighborhood. It’s mean of him to make me drop him off last; I have to lock all the doors as I drive back alone on streets where drunks collect like moths in the glow of corner liquor stores.
    I look again