Body Language

Charlie Watts

Jeremy watches his father watching the waitress. She’s cleaning their table with a big red rag, moving from corner to corner to corner. When she’s done, she straightens up and touches Jeremy’s mother’s arm. She tells them to sit, saying it like she’s talking to a dog. Sit. Good boy. Jeremy wants to bark, but he knows that would not be prosocial.

Jeremy does not like the salt and pepper shakers in the center of their table. One is in the shape of a lighthouse, the other a lobster boat. They are stupid because you would never want holes in a lighthouse and with the fishing boat, the holes would be on the bottom, for the tank that holds the lobsters, not on the deck. A better idea would be lobster traps with the salt and pepper in a glass box in the middle. Then it would make some sense even if it was still stupid.

His mother hands him a shiny menu and he begins the process of choosing either a burger or a fish sandwich, working through the set of texture and flavor questions that will give him the correct answer. In the corner of the restaurant, he sees a boy that looks like he’s also twelve and three-quarters years old. That boy is sitting with his chair turned the wrong way around and his chin resting on the chairback. He has very long hair, especially compared to Jeremy’s #2 buzzcut. His legs are spread out around the chair and they are jiggling, making a noise Jeremy can hear if he does the eye-squeeze trick.

Sybil is looking at the waitress and thinking she’s got a nice ass. A solid, well-built ass that’s not afraid of its own shadow. She’s also patting her son Jeremy’s forearm because he’s fussing with the salt and pepper shakers. She wants him to calm down before he starts kicking the table legs. Sybil does like her own body, but she’s not as robust as this waitress. She’s on the phone all day with her Medicare clients and not getting 30,000 steps slinging lobster rolls, but she does some yoga and feels she hasn’t entirely gone to seed. She is, however, having a bit of a battle with her new haircut. Her sister Maggie calls it “the flying wedge.” The way the stylist arranged things, with most of Sybil’s newly recolored and hot-oiled hair slung over to the left, she has to hold her head at an angle to keep the hair from flopping into her eyes. It’s causing an actual crick in her neck.

The waitress returns and asks about drinks. Sybil wants iced tea, sweetened, no lemon. Her husband David is having the IPA, as expected. Jeremy wants a Coke, but she amends to Diet Coke. And waters for everyone, please. Then she finds her purse under her seat and digs out a packet of Kleenex for Jeremy. She knows it will take him some meaningful amount of time, owing to all his rules, to get the first one out of the package.

Sybil wants to get a tattoo. Apparently, she’d come to the right place for field research. Is there anyone here without a tattoo? Jesus. The main obstacles for Sybil are the whole it’s a permanent commitment thing, some nagging concern about whether tattoos are a form of self-mutilation, and the fundamental quandary of what, actually, to get. She can see her grandmother’s pinched apple-face of disapproval. Some mornings she rolls over in bed, extends one arm up toward the ceiling, and imagines the whole of it, from her knuckles to her shoulder, decorated in dark grey and red vines. There would be obscure symbols and a secret face hidden in the leaves that only she would know about.

David is both pleased that they have an IPA he enjoys — just enough haze to make the flavor profile pop — and annoyed that he’s sitting with his back to the take-out line. It’s not that he’s been in the military or had some past trauma. He just doesn’t like wondering if someone might be looking at him. He should have taken Jeremy’s spot, which would have given him a clean view of the line and the comings and goings from the kitchen. He shrugs it off, puts his hand on his wife’s hand, and sees that they are featuring a steak burrito as a lunch special. A strong favorite. And, he reasons, acceptable because he’s planning a bike ride for later, so the protein blast makes sense.

The waitress returns with their drinks. Her forearms are incredibly ripped, he notices, and he wonders if it’s just waitressing or if she has a specialized lifting routine. He leans back in his chair, making room for her and smiling.

“What else are we thinking?” she says, pulling a notepad from her rear pocket and a pen from her hair. David likes that her eyebrows have up-ticks at each end; to him, they are saying hell yes.

After they order — a process complicated by Sybil’s over-rule of Jeremy’s choice — David takes a long sip of his beer and returns to considering his plan to bike solo across the country. Back and forth. Southern route going west. Northern for the trip home. Three or four months, he figures, if he could do seventy-five miles a day. He’s only at sixty miles a week now, but that’s because he’s time constrained. What if he had three or four mornings a week just for riding? Game changer.

David holds his beer glass in front of him on the table and begins to formulate the sentences required to tell Sybil that he’s planning this trip. It seems like a good time. Public place. Not too loud. He’s only mildly uncomfortable. Their food arrives.

Jeremy’s choice had been fish fingers, but his mother said he would never eat them. She did not accept his counter-argument — today is Saturday and Saturdays are different — despite several fist-squeezes. The waitress puts her hand on his right shoulder as she sets down his plate. He feels the outline of every finger and can sense that her skin is not entirely dry. He does an eyes-closed three-count. There are dark lines on his grilled cheese that make the bread look like a sweater he would not wear to school.

The long-haired boy is eating a very large hamburger. It’s as big as his face. The boy has now turned his chair around the right way. But instead of sitting normally, he has one leg tucked up under his butt. This is how the girls in Jeremy’s school sit — one foot under, elbows on desk, hands covering mouths and cheeks. Jeremy tried it once and ended up falling out of his chair. Everyone got very excited. His mother called this a flub and said he shouldn’t worry about it. She had touched his hair, then, so he knew it was an important moment.

Jeremy fits his sandwich to his mouth and continues watching the long-haired boy, who is himself in mid-bite. Sauce and other bits drip onto the boy’s plate. When he pulls his mouth away, smiling, Jeremy can see parts of the mushed-up bun and burger. It makes Jeremy think of butterscotch pudding. Everyone at the long-haired boy’s table is laughing.

Jeremy feels two taps on his wrist from his mother. This means he has been looking at something too long and he’s supposed to look at something else. He wants to keep looking at the long-haired boy, but he also knows he’s promised his mother, many times, to be proud of going with the plan. In this case, turn away and look at your own food. There are chips and a pickle on his plate and he moves them off onto the table. His father puts them, quickly, on his own plate and says Jeremy.

Sybil likes this town for three reasons. Distance is one. Far enough from home that coming here is something of an event. But not so far as to require any significant management of Jeremy or David, which would of course defeat the point. The second is the rock shop, a gallery featuring a staggering number of unremarkable rocks. Jeremy seems to receive the names of the rocks, and their places of origin, as interesting news bulletins. Huh, see this? Amethyst from Tuttletown. Go figure? David is good at playing along. Perhaps he is not playing. Finally, Sybil loves the long, flat beach that borders the town. She’s planning to walk there while David takes Jeremy to the rock shop. She will get her heart rate up. Experiment with her hairdo in the wind. Watch the other people on the beach and try to imagine what it is that they experience as freedom.

Sybil sips her iced tea and thinks again about the tattoo idea. She knows that part of why she’s going down this road is because of her friend Doris. Sybil and David had met Doris and her husband Chuck at birthing classes before Jeremy was born. She and Doris had the immediate connection of recognizing that their husbands were equally disconnected from the upcoming life change — present but not accounted for was their joke. However, the thing about Doris, as opposed to Sybil, was that she didn’t give a crap what other people thought about her husband or her laugh or the fact that she loves the super-long press-on nails. Just loves them. Jeremy and Doris’s daughter, Mae, had gone to the same pre-school and elementary, so they’d gotten to be friends during the endless school committee meetings and inefficient fundraisers. Now they were taking a yoga class that gave them time to yak a bit in the changing room. That’s where Doris had basically flashed her crotch in Sybil’s face to show her the blueberry-blue genie head she’d had tattooed high up on her inner thigh. Doris had just come from the shower and was still steamy. The paralysis that came over Sybil — a blockbuster on-rush of excitement, shame, and high-pitched ear ringing — was unlike anything she’d felt since puberty. All she could do was blink and smile before Doris snapped out her towel and rewrapped it around her pink torso, laughing as she twirled away in a gust that smelled like sex and eucalyptus. It was at that moment that Sybil had the idea, new to her, that perhaps she could do something that no one would expect her to do.

 Sybil watches her husband claw Jeremy’s chips and pickle off the lunch table. She presses her teeth together and sets down her lobster roll.

“How’s your food?”

“Good. Really good.”

David, sensing that there may be a foreign substance on his chin, plucks another napkin from the dispenser and wipes. Because David is the bookkeeper for a restaurant supply company, he’s familiar with both the type of napkin in the dispenser and the maker of the dispenser itself. He will not miss his job when he quits it to do his bike ride. In truth, it’s more of a contract gig with benefits than a real company position. But the hitch is losing medical insurance. This is what he needs to figure out. Sybil will insist. He adjusts his feet under the table and accidentally kicks her.

Two years prior, David had had a heart attack while doing nothing. Literally. Just being a 45-year-old white male with no known pre-existing pathologies, waiting for a software update to finish. Without warning, everything went sideways and he did a face-plant into a tangle of computer cords. The petroleum smell of the carpet burned his nose. Then things went entirely dark, like his signal got lost. He woke up in an ambulance with a woman holding an oxygen mask over his nose and mouth. He remembered her saying hey, sweetie. Ultimately, he had to get a pacemaker and start a complex blood thinner regimen. No real restrictions on exercise and biking, however. Just be reasonable, they told him. What David dislikes is that there’s no endpoint. It’s not a treatment plan he can complete. He hates that.

David sees their waitress pushing through the double doors with an enormous tray of dirty dishes notched up on one shoulder. Her corded forearms keep the tray rock solid. A moment ago, he’d watched her load it, stacking plates and glasses with such precision that it seemed as if she’d mapped out a plan in advance. David sucks in his stomach and sits up.

Jeremy finishes the correct amount of grilled cheese sandwich and returns to the Kleenex his mother had given him before the food arrived. He positions the package so that he can study it and do his counting, but also so that he can again watch the long-haired boy. The boy is using a knife and fork to eat his hamburger. Jeremy thinks about asking his mother if that is part of the plan but the effort of trying to explain what he's talking about is too much. Jeremy determines that there are eight Kleenex tissues left in the pack, having counted the individual folds twice. He closes his hand over the package to make it go away.

Now something big happens. The long-haired boy is telling a story or maybe he’s singing a song. He’s chopping the air, his knife and fork in his fists, and he hits the edge of his sky-high milkshake glass and there is, all at once, a wave of bright white milk on the table and a whole set of adults and children shrieking and laughing. They keep laughing as they pile napkins on the slurry. The long-haired boy is standing up. He's not even touching his chair! Their same waitress goes over with a rag and a small bucket and she’s laughing too as she begins to clean up. It’s all impossible to understand.

“Jeremy,” his mother says. He feels her wrist taps and tears his eyes from the scene. But it’s still there in his head, the way the milkshake traveled under every plate and glass. Nothing holding it back or slowing it down.

Sybil moves Jeremy’s glass of Diet Coke a few inches toward the center of the table and thinks, well, yes, in certain ways, Jeremy is a lot easier than most kids — especially now that they have the diagnosis and something of a support team. She takes up her iced tea and flushes with shame at the memory of having left three-year-old Jeremy alone for an unconscionable number of hours during a party at a friend’s house. David was not there so she’d been letting loose — drinking, laughing, touching people. But she spasmed when someone across the room used the word retarded, dumping her drink down the front of her shirt and yelling Jesus Christ! Hours and hours ago, she’d left Jeremy sleeping in a spare bedroom and had not checked in since. Every part of her body hyper-compressed, bracing for impact as she ran to the bedroom. He was not on the bed. He was not in the room. He is not okay. Now everything will be different. As she spun back toward the hall, her eye caught a momentary pattern shift and she realized that Jeremy was kneeling on a bench next to the room’s only window, his nose touching the glass and his arms down at his sides. His hands were two tight little fists. He looked like a prisoner waiting to be cuffed. Sybil collapsed next to him. The rest of the party pushed in around them, filling the room. Jeremy didn’t start to bay — that was the best label they could come up with for his other-worldly form of crying — until one of Sibyl’s friends buzzed his lips on the top of Jeremy’s head in a supposed gesture of affection. That was it. They had to leave.

“I have an idea,” David announces.

David’s voice interrupting her memory causes Sibyl to hiccough. Once. Twice. Jeremy bites his lower lip. She knows he is trying not to react to all the commotion; that he is doing a lot to manage himself. She smiles, but also dips her head down and to the side. Keep it together, kid.

“What is it?” she asks.

For her tattoo, instead of something so provocative, like Doris’s bad trip genie, Sibyl wants something organic. Earthy. Indigenous in a way that wouldn’t be offensive. A plant that no one else would recognize…? A bird known for its remarkable self-sustaining characteristics…? A single word that would convey, equally, fuck you and I appreciate you…? She wants it to be red and black and placed on the side of her torso where someone would see it if she ever wore a bikini again or if the wind caught the hem of her t-shirt. There and gone in a flash. People would say wait, does Sybil have a tattoo? That’s kind of a surprise.

“I am planning to bicycle across the country.”

“What?”

“Out and back. Both ways.”

Announcing his plan feels like the first moments of shooting down a water slide — a brief but distinct surge of terror and then the reassuring comfort of knowing, okay, no more waiting for it, now we’re just in it and we’re dealing with it. He hadn’t been on a water slide for seven years — not since they had tried the disastrous experiment of having five-year old Jeremy go along with David down an S-curved slide at a low budget water park overlooking the coastal highway — but he remembers the feeling. After Sybil had taken Jeremy to the car to calm him down, David had gone back and done the slide a dozen more times, trying to see if he could erase those first moments of fear.

He takes a bite of his burrito and chases it with a long pull from his beer.

“Is this a real thing?” Sybil asks. David continues to stare at his beer.

“Yes.”

David becomes aware of Jeremy’s heel drumming. The kid could rattle his shoe against the floor as fast as any drumstick. It is, honestly, kind of incredible.

“Jeremy,” David says. The shaking stops, but he can hear his son’s breathing get immediately more labored.

“When did you get this idea,” Sybil says, sucking on her iced tea and looking at him without blinking.

David looks down and focuses on his lunch, pushing fries into ketchup. He does not yet want to see what’s going on with Sybil’s face. While he had been told that he wasn’t particularly good at reading the room, he did know the three modes of Sybil’s face: yes, no, and doesn’t register. The no was the easiest to detect because her right eye would almost completely close.

He says, still looking at his food, “Not sure. I saw a thing on my phone about a guy, like a guy my age, doing this. He was raising money for a disease.”

Linking the ride to a charitable cause — something he hadn’t been planning but that sounded excellent out loud — gives David the energy to look directly at Sybil.

Doesn’t register! No closed eye. He finishes his beer and continues.

“I think it will take about three, well, maybe four months.”

He sets his hands flat on the table in a way that seems to interest Jeremy.

Sibyl is wiping her mouth with her napkin, looking over at the table with the very, very loud family. They are playing some kind of guessing game, half of them blurting out words while the other half laughs.

“That’s a lot,” Sibyl says. And then again, “A lot to work out.”

David realizes that maybe the charity angle wasn’t enough. He should have developed the budget first, put the numbers together in a way that he could easily refer to if Sybil had any questions. He presses his teeth together and narrows his focus to her right eye.

When the explosion happens, so close that Jeremy cannot give it a location, he thinks maybe he had known, in advance, that it was going to happen. This is because the thunderclap that replaces, for a long two-count, every other sight, sound, and smell in the restaurant with a flat-handed punch to his ears, is not even scary. Or painful. In fact, Jeremey feels bodily relief. His muscles activate, fixing him against all the movement around him. He holds his breath and tries to memorize the feeling, wrap it up and store it away, until the moment slips by and it’s back to screaming and yelling and general pinpricking. Glasses and dishes break. People leap in crazy ways out of their chairs. Messes explode everywhere. There is no plan. His mother springs herself forward across the table, pawing to get ahold of his hands. His father bends forward in his chair, arms crossed tight around his chest. A cold liquid from the table drains directly onto Jeremy’s kneecap.

The next thing — which happens at the exact moment when Jeremy looks at the spot where it happens, another sign that perhaps he knew about all this way in advance — is a man bursting through the kitchen double-doors. His arms are stretched forward, zombie-style. Streams of silver smoke trail from his globe of wiry hair. His whole face is blackened. Even his lips and the lids over his eyes. He looks like the characters in the low-quality video game Jeremy plays on his phone when his mother says screen time is available. Now, he feels her arms tighten around him — she’d managed to get over to his side of the table and wedge herself behind him on his chair. Everything falls on the floor except the lobster boat pepper shaker. His mother says Jesus H. Christ in a whisper next to his ear. Jeremy knows that Jesus H. Christ was nailed to a cross, so that’s different. But Joan of Arc was burned. That’s more the same.

The burning man continues through the restaurant, stamping toward the front door. People fall away. They don’t know what to do, Jeremy thinks. They don’t know where to put their hands. Or their feet. They don’t know what the plan is.

The man reaches the front door. It opens when he hits it, but, at the same time, the glass in the top half shatters, causing a fresh wave of general screaming. It is at this moment that his mother squeezes his shoulders and says stay with your father. She bends him forward and throws her leg over his head and launches herself across the room and out the door after the burning man.

“Sybil!” his father says, straightening, but not standing.

 Jeremy gives himself a three-count and allows his leg, the one with the wet knee, to bounce. His mother would say no, but she is busy now and this is without a doubt a special moment. In all the commotion and his mother’s gymnastics, he has lost track of the long-haired boy. What he discovers, once he reorients, is a surprise. The long-haired boy is not in or on or around his chair. He’s not even at his table. He’s over against the wall and there are two adults kneeling next to him. Jeremy can’t see his face, but he can see that the boy is hitting his head against the wall and the adults are crying and yelling at him and trying to hold him. They’re grabbing his hair, in fact, but they can’t get him to stop. Jeremy does not like head banging. It’s not for him. Another adult pulls the long-haired boy away from the wall so he can’t bang. They should tell him it’s not part of the plan. The boy is still fighting them. They are failing to move him. Jeremy can see that the adults are swearing. It’s the word you are never supposed to say. Does the long-haired boy know that word? Is it helping him to hear them saying it?

Jeremy stops shaking his leg and tapping the table. What he wants to do is to stand up. And when he does, he feels an incredible synchronization between his legs and his stomach and his back and his shoulders. They are all working together without any active management from Jeremy. He just rises, like an inflatable lawn Santa, every bit of him filled out and full. And all he does, once he’s standing and smiling a half smile down at his Dad, is to clap. Clap three times with his flat dry hands. And that’s all that it takes. The restaurant goes immediately quiet. So quiet that all he can hear is the rolling of one last plate, spinning on the floor. He looks, and the long-haired boy is looking at him, tear-stained and shaking. It’s fantastic. Fucking fantastic.

Sybil springs over the wash of broken glass at the front door and reaches the burning man just before he steps off the sidewalk into the street.

“Hey. I got you,” she says, hovering one hand in front to slow him down and the other in back to keep him from falling over. She has no idea how much of him may be burned. The smell of him – his burnt head, his burnt arms, his burnt eyebrows — stings her nostrils. Her eyes are watering or she’s crying. She doesn’t know which.

Sybil works to keep the man still, although she can tell he’s trying to move. He wants to get out of his skin, of course. She knows that. She sets her hand, very lightly, on his ribcage, trying to create stability. Now she can feel his thundering heartbeat.

“I want you to turn with me. We’re going to walk. Just slow. Here on the sidewalk. Can you do that? Can you walk with me?”

She’s talking to him, maneuvering him, pretending to know the right thing to do. She’s not a nurse. She has no medical training. She knows about medical bills and claims procedures. But, she realizes, she also has twelve years of Jeremy and his beyond-the-norm ability to go board-stiff and utterly silent. Her friends would say oh, honey, all kids do that, and she would think you don’t have a clue. Jeremy’s stamina for resistance — especially in the early years — had forced her to develop an alternative approach. Brute counterforce was useless. Instead, she’d learned to bring forward — to literally expel through the tips of her fingers – a kind of stillness that could, if she worked it right and if David didn’t get involved, unlock whatever tangle had clenched Jeremy into steel. You can do this, Sybil.

She touches her tongue to her top lip and continues walking forward with the burned man. And then, suddenly, another person joins them, plugging in just as Sybil had — one hand very lightly on the man’s stomach and the other on his back, just below Sybil’s.

It’s their waitress. She has her shoulder hitched up to hold the phone against her ear.

“I’ve got 911 on the phone,” she says to the burning man. “The ambulance is coming, Lenny. They’re on their way.”

She is calm but purposeful, as if she’s managing a huge lunch rush. She and Sybil are quite close together, clearing the space in front of Lenny as they shuffle forward.

“The stove went out,” she says to Sybil, leaning forward slightly. “Our propane tanks are all fucked.” Her breath smells like buttered rolls and Sybil pulls it in, trying to override everything else.

“I hope—” Sybil says, but then understands that she has no idea what she’s hoping.

The waitress talks to the 911 operator, explaining more as they, without any obvious communication, turn Lenny back around toward the restaurant and the crowd now gathered on the sidewalk. Sybil can see David and Jeremy. They are standing just off the sidewalk. David is looking at her as if she’s a stranger.

When the waitress reaches up to adjust her phone, Sybil sees through the gap in her shirt that this woman’s breast is tattooed. A spider web that disappears under her work-a-day white bra but also spreads back, traveling around and apparently over her left shoulder. High up, just above the collar bone, there’s a fierce looking wasp. It’s got human hands that are curled around two different strands of the web — rattling the lines either as a warning or to get free.

“Yeah. Please. We’re out here on the sidewalk. Right in front,” the waitress says.

They arrive at the scene of the shattered front door and pause. Sybil hears the ambulance sirens and wonders if Jeremy will begin to echo the call. Without words, Sybil and the waitress shift Lenny slightly forward, readying him. The waitress lets go of Lenny and rubs her face with both hands like she’s taking a very hot shower. Sybil puts her arm around the woman’s shoulder, letting her hand cup the place where she knows the web is printed on the woman’s skin, wondering just how close her fingers are to that wasp.

David is pleased that despite the hubbub and the salty dirt smell — taste, really — of the burning man, he’s remembered not to take Jeremy’s hand or grab him by the shoulders. While hugging is not David’s instinct with Jeremy or, frankly, anyone, the situation and the unexpected involvement of his wife prompted a wave of desire to wrap his arms around his son. It would not have gone well.

Now they are out on the sidewalk with everyone else. Atypically, Jeremy has chosen a spot in the middle of the crowd. He seems to be interested in another boy who is having an epic tantrum. The kid is crying hard and flopping himself against his parents. The boy’s hair comes down to the top of his butt. Except for Jeremy, everyone is looking at the burned man walking with Sybil and their waitress. David feels paralyzed by all the inputs: comparisons between Jeremy and the kid having the meltdown, surprise at Sybil’s central role, all the people behind him, looking over his shoulder. And how will all this impact his bike ride later in the day?

When the ambulance comes into sight, David imagines himself springing into action, arranging the crowd. Making space. He’d wave the truck into position and snap open the rear doors to receive the stretcher. He believes, despite the lack of training or any prior experience, that all the necessary knowledge would come to him and that he could be the guy that was there, moving with grace and selfless determination to enable the rescue of a tragic burn victim. He feels a throb in the general region of his pacemaker and pokes his fingers in-between the buttons on his shirt to rub the flat lump of scar tissue that’s been there since the surgery.

One squawk of the ambulance horn clears the crowd, and the professionals are out of the truck and with the burning man before David can even pull his hand from inside his shirt. Sybil and the waitress interact seamlessly with the professionals, transferring custody of the burned man as if they’d done this a thousand times. Jeremy has drifted slightly back into the crowd, away from him, apparently to maintain his sightline on the upset boy, who is now, along with his adults, down on the sidewalk, still flailing.

David studies the waitress, who is now crutched against Sybil like a longtime teammate, as she responds to questions from the paramedics. From where he’s standing, David can see that Sybil is looking at the waitress’s mouth as she answers questions. Their faces could not be more than five inches apart. David feels suddenly as if a glass cylinder has dropped down around him, separating him from the crowd. It changes the sound patterns, but also sharpens his vision, enlarging the scene like wrap-around reading glasses. He can see how Sybil is holding the woman, anchoring her, one hand resting on her far shoulder and the other on her arm. David narrows in on Sybil’s fingertips. They are twitching, pressing and releasing, against the skin of the woman’s bicep in what looks to David like an autonomic way.

David is having trouble breathing. He sits down on the sidewalk and covers his face with his hands. He does not know if anyone is looking at him or if anyone is bent down, extending a hand.

Now he opens his eyes and discovers that a dog has wormed its way through the crowd and is standing next to him, his drooly tongue hanging at the level of David’s face. The dog smells like cooked liver. David does not know anything about dogs, but he decides it’s a sheep dog because he can’t see the animal’s eyes through all the curly salt-n-pepper hair. The dog sits, as if in solidarity, and David feels himself smile, now suddenly enjoying the cocoon of other people’s legs.

What he feels, in a definitive way that arrives as equal parts surprise and relief, is that he does not want to go on the bicycle trip. In fact, he feels more desire to sit exactly where and as he is, than he does to go anywhere or see anything new. That is the feeling that blankets his body. Like a dog dreaming, David thinks. Stretched out long across all three cushions of a couch, belly full and paws twitching. Following every leap and twist across rivers and downed trees and stone walls. Sticking the landing every time with a nice sharp crunch of leaves and snow. Eyes not even open.

Jeremy moves a one-count away from his father so that he can watch, without obstruction, the long-haired boy. With all that is happening, Jeremy feels certain there is no plan. Therefore, it is acceptable to do watching. He makes fists with his hands and jams them into the front pockets of his pants. Sounds blur together and then recede, making it easier for Jeremy to see.

What is he seeing? The long-haired boy sitting cross-legged on the cement sidewalk, picking at the rubber soles of his sneakers. His adults have made a hut around him with their bodies, but Jeremy can still see the boy’s face. It is wet and Jeremy thinks maybe it would be sticky if someone was to touch it. One of the adults is managing the boy’s hair, pulling it together in the back and trying to organize it with their hands. This boy jerks his head and the adult stops. Then — just as in the restaurant — the boy looks directly at Jeremy. Without hesitation, the boy puts his thumb in his mouth and begins to suck.

Jeremy feels enormous. He feels tall and stout. He stands rock-still, as if against a fierce wind, and returns the boy’s stare. The boy’s lips pulse as he sucks. Jeremy touches the back of his teeth with his tongue and imagines walking forward through the crowd, going up to the boy and saying are you ready and the boy getting up, shaking off his adults, and coming along beside Jeremy until they walk clear of all the extra details and noise and come to a salt-water pond where the first stone that Jeremy throws skips nineteen times before sinking into the black and the stone that the long-haired boy throws gets caught by a fish jetting up out of the water and winking at them in such a stupid way that it sets both boys to laughing and they fall together in a heap on the shore and nothing ever again feels like it felt before.