Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page A

the child in the mall he had estimated that the child was about four years old. For Daddy Love, this was a quite young child.
    By the age of eleven or twelve, the child was less desirable. The child was a pubescent. Daddy Love had little patience with pubescents and still less with adolescents.
    The younger the child, the more desirable. Though Daddy Love did not want a
baby
—hardly! In any case, a baby was too much effort. A baby required a female as a caretaker.
    An older child had obvious disadvantages: he would remember much of his old family, that would have to be cast off.
    This child in the mall, happily chattering as he petted plump white nose-twitching Easter bunnies in an enclosure, wasunusually alert, bright, and talkative. Daddy Love had been quite
ravished
!
    But, how ordinary the mother.
    Not coarse and vulgar like some. The woman’s face wasn’t luridly made up and her hair was a decent drab-brown brushed back behind her ears and her ears weren’t studded with a half-dozen glittering piercings. She wore jeans but not “skinny” jeans. She wore a belted sweater that looked hand-knitted. (The belt was twisted in back, which gave her a disheveled look of which she was blissfully unaware.) Her body was slender, stringy. She had no hips and virtually no breasts. (How had she nursed her baby? Her milk would be watery, curdled. This was not a
mother
.) She wore sneakers. On the third finger of her left hand she wore a plain silver wedding band advertising
Yes! Believe it or not, somebody married me.
She was perhaps thirty years old and not getting any younger: when her face wasn’t smiling, “lit up” by the most banal Mommy-love-and-pride, it was a frankly tired face. The husband would soon be unfaithful, if he hadn’t been already. Who’d want to climb into bed, sink his dick in
that
. For the woman was clearly ordinary, and hardly fit for the radiant child.
    The child’s skin was “white”—yet the child’s hair was very dark, kinky-curly. Daddy Love felt a thrill of discovery: was this a
mixed-race child?
    Daddy Love had never appropriated a
mixed-race child.
And Daddy Love was no racist.
    He’d trailed them in the mall. He’d been patient, and not-visible.
    In JCPenney, in Macy’s, in Sears, and in the atrium at the center of the mall. The Easter-bunny enclosure that drew children like moths to flame.
    Daddy Love’s shrewd practiced eye glanced quickly about—in such places, where small children are gathered, laughing, talking shrilly, with (usually) just a single parent nearby, and that parent (usually) the mother, you will often find, indeed Daddy Love invariably found, solitary men of (usually) middle age, standing at a little distance, not too near, not too
visibly near,
observing.
    Daddy Love wasn’t one of these. Daddy Love was no
registered sex offender.
    Trailing the mother and child outside the mall Daddy Love had known that his mission was just, and necessary, and could not be delayed, when he’d seen the mother pause and fumble in her sweater pocket for—a pack of cigarettes! And quickly light up a cigarette, as the child stood innocently by; several quick deep inhalations, as if the toxic smoke were pure oxygen, and the woman desperate for oxygen; then, with a gesture of disdain, casting the cigarette from her, onto a grassless area abutting the walkway, where other careless and selfish smokers had cast their butts.
    A smoker trying to quit. Failing to quit.
    A smoker who was ashamed of her weakness. And maybe it was a weakness the child’s father did not know about.
    It was God-ordained, Daddy Love must take this child as his own.
    Daddy Love hurried to his van. He would trail the mother and the child in the lot. He would not let them out of his sight.He had but a few seconds to make his move—he knew how precisely such a move had to be timed, from previous experiences. The narrow window of opportunity, as it was called, had to be coordinated with a clear field and no