The Best Thing for You by Annabel Lyon Read Free Book Online Page B

the doorway. “Way to infringe my privacy, Mom.”
    “Have you eaten?”
    “You have.” He makes a face. “You smell spicy. Did you bring me any?”
    “No.” I figure he was masturbating. “How was your field trip today?”
    He flushes.
    “Come for a run?”
    Amazingly, without hesitating, he says, “I gotta change.”
    Downstairs I find Liam surveying his office. “Something’s missing,” he says.
    “Air?”
    “A sofa.” I tell him Ty and I are going out for a bit. “Take your time,” he says.
    Ty’s waiting for me in his basketball gear. He waits while I lock the front door and tie the key to my shoe. So far we’ve run together maybe half a dozen times this year. He’s got good intentions and a good clean form, fast, but my endurance pisses him off, discourages him, so I say, “I just want a small one today,” and hope I’m not too obvious.
    The beach is crowded with strollers and runners, good citizens released from work, bankers in singlets, girls with their girlfriends and dogs. Ty and I, I’m thinking, make a nice pair, a nice picture: healthy lifestyle, healthy relationship, nice clothes, smooth. The business with the police gives us an urgency, an aristocracy the people around us lack. We pass them like cattle.
    “Scary day?” I ask.
    He waggles a hand.
    “Talk. If you can’t talk, you’re going too fast.”
    “I wasn’t scared.”
    “Was Jason at school today?”
    He’s speeding up. “No.”
    “Was anybody talking about him? Like, asking where he was?”
    “No.” I point to the next fountain, meaning: let’s make for that. “Mom, Jason’s not very popular. Kids wouldn’t really be curious about where he is. They wouldn’t notice.”
    “Are you?”
    “Curious?”
    “Popular.”
    He’s matching me, stride for stride. He’s growing up. “I’m all right.”
    “What does that mean, all right?”
    A clot-calved biker is filling his water bottle at the fountain with one hand, talking into a cellphone. We prowl, waiting. When he’s finished we take turns. The water is icy. Ty gargles.
    “You haven’t answered my question.”
    “I’m extremely popular.” Then, startling both of us, “I’m the love god.” The biker, who in his Mao-collared spandex shirt had retreated to lean against a nearby tree, grins and toasts my son with his water bottle.
    “Hail,” I say.
    “Were you popular in high school?” We start back, loping gently now. It’s the kind of question that makes me suspicious. I can see wanting to change the subject after that love god crack, but it’s a little too sitcom for him, too sweetly earnest. Though perhaps it’s no different from me enjoying the image of the pair of us, imagining people must look at us running together and smile. And today can’t have been a good day, by high-school standards: he drew attention, which is never good. So I try.
    “I was a brainy girl,” I say. “My friends were not the trendiest, but I wasn’t lonely either. We went to dances and stuff. Is that what you mean?”
    “What about Dad?”
    “Dad and I didn’t go to the same high school. We met in university. You know that.”
    “I know. I mean, was he popular?”
    “Listen to me carefully,” I say. “Your father was a geek and I took pity on him. Anything he tells you different is an evil lie.”
    “Did you have other boyfriends than him?”
    “Zillions.”
    “Did you really have green hair?”
    I sigh. “You know I did. Long ago in a land far, far away, when I was very angry about things like greed and insincerity and classical music and world hunger.”
    “Mom Vicious,” Ty says.
    “I was very big on breaking the bonds of convention. I was very big on destroying illusion in all its manifestations. The illusion of good manners, the illusion of capitalism, the illusion of responsibility to an irresponsible government, the illusion of beauty –”
    “But you became a doctor.”
    I poke him in the arm. “Stop listening to your dad so much, okay? The