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“Or go classic: the Butt-Clappers.”
“Like the Beatles.”
“With heavier percussion.”
Peter’s smile faded. He looked restless. He picked at his remaining half sandwich, tossed a grape and tried to catch it in his mouth.
Evan watched him, gauging the mood shift. Trying to be useful to a child did not come naturally.
“At school—” Peter stopped. Slid his finger into the opposite fist and gave it a squeeze.
“What?”
“Well, like, Mrs. Reimenschnitter says that you have to treat girls and boys the same. But that doesn’t make sense. ’Cuz I wouldn’t wrestle-tackle a girl, you know? I should be more gentle. And Uncle Wally’s different from Aunt Janet. And you’re different from Mommy.”
“How so?”
“She’s smarter.”
“Fair,” Evan said.
“And she wouldn’t like the butt-clapping joke as much.”
“She might.”
“Yeah, she might. She’d justpretendnot to.” Peter chewed his lip, lowered his eyes, and Evan could sense his thoughts lingering on his mother. “But girls treatmedifferent! So how am I supposed to know what to do?”
Evan knew the mnemonic device for the top ten pressure points for inflicting maximum pain in kyusho jitsu. But gender-awareness counseling for elementary students was far from his area of expertise. He prayed for an interruption, a distraction, an incoming rocket-propelled grenade.
But Peter pressed on. “I can’t ask Uncle Wally about this, ’cuz he’s always wrong about everything. And Aunt Janet just says the opposite of whatever he thinks, which should make her right, but weirdly it doesn’t. It just makes her different wrong.”
“I usually find,” Evan said, “that people will show you how they want to be treated if you pay attention. I’d think that’s something that Mrs. Durchdenwald—”
“Reimenschnitter!”
“—would understand. You can rarely go wrong by being gentle. Especially with girls.”
Peter pondered this. He took a slurp of Kool-Aid that left his lips glowing mime-red. “You’renot always gentle.”
Evan said, “No.”
“But only when you have to not be?”
“That’s right.”
A slight breeze stirred the golden leaves on the trees. There was a gopher-riddled lawn shaped like a kidney and a play structure that Wally had built with an abbreviated rock-climbing wall installed upside down. There was a rusting skateboard in the weeds, a sun-cracked Frisbee, and a cheap foosball table under the nylon awning of the porch. There was love here. But so much missing from the life Peter had before.
The boy stared down at his forefinger encased in his little fist, squeezing it in pulses that turned his knuckles white. “I read to Mom yesterday like they said to. And …”
“And what?”
“Tried to get her to squeeze my finger. But she didn’t. What if …?”
The wind riffled the blond cowlick rising to the side of Peter’s part. Evan could see him trying to muster the words and thought,Please don’t ask.
Peter folded his hands at the edge of the table. There was a formality in the pose that Evan found heartbreaking. “What if she doesn’t wake up?”
An agonizing question that deserved an honest answer.
