Likes by Sarah Bynum (e novels to read online .TXT) 📗

and on Dorothy’s, it was very possible that his eyes were also leaking a little. The likelihood made him smile even more; that and the fact that—well, what do you know?—she did remember his name, after all.

A week after the performance, he came home late from work, and when he pulled the rental car into the driveway he saw his daughter sitting at the dining room table. She was framed photogenically by the room’s picture window. For a moment, he felt the vise in his chest tightening—Why was she alone on a Friday night? Why hadn’t Dorothy set up a sleepover for her? Why hadn’t anyone invited her to their house?—but as he climbed out of the car he saw that she appeared unperturbed and in fact rather happy, or at least happily occupied. She had her earbuds in and was making Christmas cards, the supplies spread in a glittering swath across the table.

When she spotted him outside, she immediately yanked out her earbuds, pushed back her chair, and hurled herself against the picture window, landing with a soft thud. Her cheek lay smushed against the glass, her arms were splayed, and while she still needed one leg to stand on, she’d lifted the other and pressed its bent shape to the window. What in the world. He had no idea what she was expressing, or rehearsing—but the gesture was undoubtedly directed at him. Out in the darkness he gave her a thumbs-up, but her eyes were limply shut. Not a muscle moved. It was all very realistic.

Was he witnessing the magic of dance? Of—what was it called when she was little?—creative movement? Somehow she had managed to convey through her body precisely what he’d been feeling since November: not crushed, not flattened, but flung, as if from an obliterating blast, against a hard, exposing surface. Spread, embarrassed, suspended, without the strength to open his eyes and survey the damage. He put down his computer bag and drew closer to the window. He tapped lightly on the pane but she didn’t flinch. Pressing his palm to hers, he wondered if she could feel his outline through the glass. He tried it with his other palm, and then his cheek. He raised and crooked his knee to match the angle of her leg. In sixth-grade theater class he’d had to do mirror games, but actually this was easier, because now he got to choose his partner. What was hard was balancing on one foot. When he started to wobble, her silent laughter made the whole window shake.

BEDTIME STORY

One long winter night, Ezra Washington’s wife walks in on him telling their younger child stories from his rollerblading days. The room is as dark as a coal mine and his voice floats sonorously from somewhere in the vicinity of the trundle bed. He is remembering a time long before the child was born, a time when he was a poor graduate student living in New York City with nothing but his own body and mind for entertainment. Saturdays were spent in the narrow park that runs alongside the Hudson River, him blading up and down the path very fast as if his happiness depended on it.

“She was coming straight at me,” he says. “To the right of me was the river. And to the left a pack of bicyclists. She was coming around the bend with a look of panic in her eyes.”

From the doorway his wife wonders silently if he is speaking of her, the younger self who, on the three or four occasions on which she’d joined him, may have worn this expression.

“She was going fast, too?” their child asks in the dark.

“No, not at all, she was clearly a beginner. Which made the situation that much more dangerous,” Ezra says patiently. He then explains how he called out to her in the instant before they collided. I’ve got you! he cried to the inexperienced skater as he grasped her by the forearms and guided her down between his legs until her bottom gently touched ground. “By then she was laughing,” he said. “That laugh you’d know anywhere.”

His wife doesn’t recall ever laughing while on Rollerblades. Her first wild thought is that all these years she’s been wrong about herself. But then the child shifts in his bed and sets the comforter to rustling and casts the story in an entirely new light. “She’s the one who plays the mom?” he asks. “With the big teeth and the long brown hair?”

“Well, I’d say it’s more of a reddish brown. An auburn color. But yes, that’s right,” Ezra says to the child. “Julia Roberts.”

“Julia Roberts went right between your legs,” the child confirms.

“Yes, but don’t repeat that,” Ezra says. “Better to say we crashed into each other. Or that Julia Roberts crashed into me.”

The child falls silent, as if committing this to memory.

Ezra adds, “It’s not an exaggeration to say she was the biggest movie star in the world.”

“Back then,” the child clarifies.

Fine, his mother thinks, back then, all children by their nature sticklers, but in fact the poor kid has no idea. Never will he know the stunned sensation of emerging from the darkness of a matinee on Senior Skip Day, speechless at what they’d just seen: Julia Roberts as an adorable streetwalker. It confounded the imagination. Whatever had possessed them to spend their day of mutiny in this ridiculous way? They would never forget it. A whole group of them milling about on the sidewalk outside the theater, boarding school students let loose on the world and now at a loss for what to do next, Ezra with his arm resting lightly across the shoulders of his girlfriend, Christina, his serious senior-year girlfriend Christina, and Christina looking shy and triumphant because already more than one person had said, You know, you kind of look like her …

Yes, she was there that day, witness to the spectacle of Ezra and Christina, and though she