Love Invents Us by Amy Bloom Read Free Book Online Page A

while they were up there. He stood up and pulled his nightgown over his head, making a flannel column with his arms, so I could get a good look at his naked body. It was like his brothers’ but bigger, and I had more time to look. His thing was like a soft, taupey cigar. A cigar with a droopy little bow around it. He kept standing there, and finally I picked up the magazine again.
    “Any time, Benj.”
    “You are invisible,” he said from within the nightgown.
    “Oh, yeah. Okay, I’m invisible.”
    He threw his nightie across the floor and took the magazine out of my hands, making me look at his naked chest.
    “Do you want to play cards? I can teach you a game.”
    “Okay,” he said. “Strip poker.”
    “Definitely not. How about regular poker?”
    “You’re invisible,” he said.
    He dove onto the couch and began rubbing up against the cushions in this really disgusting way.
    “Oh, Max, Max, Max,” he squealed.
    “Come on, don’t be gross.”
    He kept pumping away at the cushions and finally just laythere shaking, his little butt sticking up like another cushion, round and shiny.
    “I’m going to look in my father’s room,” he said, and I followed him because I thought I should keep an eye on him and because I loved to look at peoples stuff.
    “You want to put something on? It’s cold in here.” It
was
cold. The Stones must have kept their bedroom at fifty, and Benjie’s whole body was covered with goose bumps.
    “Invisible,” he said, and headed for their dresser.
    Which was exactly what I would have done if I was by myself. The things I liked best about babysitting, in the three jobs I’d had so far, were the eating and the snooping, both unfurling through the evening, lushly inviting, any small wave of shame easily subdued by the prospect of being, for once, satisfied. I ate smoked oysters and caviar for dinner, having discovered that people’s pantries yielded up interesting hors d’oeuvres tucked away behind the flour and the Crisco and the onion soup mix. And I ate ice cream with my fingers and shook Oreo crumbs down my throat when I’d finished the box.
No one saw
.
    Benjie crouched in front of the dresser, his little thing dangling between his ankles. He held up a few pairs of his mother’s baggy white underpants, more like my panties than a grown woman’s, I thought, and then he put them back in the drawer. I certainly wasn’t going to make fun of his mother’s underwear, but if that was all we were going to find, I’d go back to the magazine and he could call me when he was tired. He held up a little plastic shield.
    “Athletic cup,” he said, putting it in front to show me how it worked. “My dad used to wear it for rugby.”
    I started looking around on my own. If I waited for Benjie, we’d never get to any good stuff. I stuck my hand under the bed, and then I got down on my knees. Under the bed and back of the closet had been the best places so far. I didn’t like going into basements, certainly not for the split garden hoses, rusty skates, and used tires that everyone kept.
    There was nothing under the bed, but in the back of the closet there were shoe boxes half filled with curling photographs. I let Benjie rummage in the underwear drawers. The pictures were of Mrs. Stone.
    She was naked, kneeling in one, on her hands and knees in the others, looking back at the camera with a stupid smile. Her long hair hung over one shoulder, and her rear end was dark with pimples and little creases and hairs. The whole thing was worse than her paintings. I put the photos back in the box and the box back behind Mr. Stone’s winter boots.
    “Let’s go,” I said. “There’s nothing here anyway.”
    “Look at this. It’s Greta.”
    I hated it when kids called their parents by their first names, like they were other kids.
    She is skinny and tall in the photo, taller than she looks now. Maybe it’s because her skirt is so short and her hair is short too, with bangs sticking out in