Real Life by Kitty Burns Florey Page A

maybe down the road to the old cemetery where his father liked to read the crumbling words on the gravestones, some of them from a hundred years ago or more. He laid his hand on Tiger’s rough, sun-warmed fur and concentrated furiously on sending messages through the window to his father’s sleeping mind: Stay overnight, stay overnight.
    His father didn’t stay overnight. In fact, he left before supper. He gave Hugo a snapshot before he left, a color photograph taken in front of his father’s old car, the Camaro. His father’s arm was around his mother. His mother was smiling a big smile. She was pregnant. Her hands were clasped on her stomach. Somebody’s cat was sitting on the hood of the car, washing, one leg in the air. His father wore a black jacket. His mother wore a sundress. She had long blond hair like Rose’s. His father wasn’t smiling at all.
    He gave Hugo the photograph without saying anything about it except “Hang on to this, kiddo.” Hugo wasn’t even sure it was his mother, but Rose told him later. And that was himself, Hugo, inside his mother’s stomach, under her white hands: he pictured a tiny silver fish swimming through green water. He put the photograph away somewhere, and then when weeks and weeks went by, and winter came, and then spring, and his father didn’t come back, he hunted frantically for it one day and finally found it in the dust under his bed. It reminded him immediately of that last day, his father saying, “He just drags me down,” and “That’s a load off my mind,” and Rose saying, “Permanently.” When his grandparents came to get him, he put the photograph in his jacket pocket and took it along, just because it seemed wrong to leave it behind. But he didn’t like looking at it: his mother was a stranger smiling into the sun, and his father looked unhappy, and all it did was remind him of his father and Rose laughing and getting high while he sat outside on the step.
    The Gilberts drove up to Rose’s place in Massachusetts on a dank day in early spring. Dorrie, bored and carsick in the backseat, listened fitfully to her parents’ talk. Anna wondered if Hugo collected stamps. “So many boys at that age are obsessed with collecting—with little finite groups of things they can control. Stamps, baseball cards, that sort of thing…”
    Her voice trailed off, and Martin took over. “Or chess. It’s just the age to learn chess. They enjoy rules, I think—control, as you say.”
    Dorrie wondered how they knew. Phinny at eight had been interested only in raising hell; control hadn’t been one of his interests, nor had rules, not to mention chess and stamp collecting.
    They talked about real estate. They were thinking of selling the house by the shore: it was too large, too hard to heat, worth too much to hang on to. They could sell it and buy another and still make a small profit. Martin was just about to retire; many of their friends had retired and moved away; there was no reason to keep the house, and they could use a change. Underneath all their chatter was the promise of Hugo, Phinny’s boy, whom they were going to fetch. Every word they said was charged with excitement. This was their second chance. Hugo would be a mini-Phinny, the as-yet-unspoiled son of their son. He would be their atonement.
    Phinny’s name was no longer being mentioned. Anna had cried almost constantly for a week after they’d gotten the news of his death. She cried all through the memorial service, cried every time someone spoke to her, cried randomly through the day and in the night. Dorrie, who had been staying with her parents, slept badly, waking in the dark to hear her mother’s wild sobbing and her father’s murmurs. Then, a few days ago, Anna had taken a loud sip of hot coffee, raised her head, and said, “Well, I suppose life has to go on,” and sighed and