The Tenderest of Strings by Steven Schwartz

Author:Steven Schwartz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Regal House Publishing
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

17

The summer turned hot. Harry hung out with Ben at the pool or at the new library where there were some ramps to skateboard. He watched his mother starting to show and sometimes imagined horrible things that could happen to the baby, including how little its head would look in a guillotine basket.

“That’s neat your mom’s having another baby,” Ben told him, and Harry smiled, clenched his teeth, swallowed past the moment. “I would have liked a brother or sister, but my mom can’t have any more children. She takes second best delivering them.” Ben’s father lived in Alaska and Ben was going to visit him soon. He’d remarried. “I don’t really get along that well with him and his new wife. She’s too strict.”

Ben’s mother took them lots of places during the summer, Water World and Elitch’s in Denver, up the Poudre Canyon camping and rafting, to Wyoming for Frontier Days, to skate parks and movies and a concert at Red Rocks. Harry’s dad was hard-core into exercising when he wasn’t at the paper, and his mother was throwing up a lot from the pregnancy and resting in bed. She’d said she’d feel better once the first trimester passed and then they’d do things, but even so they didn’t do much together. She bought baby clothes and fixed up part of her bedroom into a nursery and sat on the porch a lot and rocked by herself. He saw she was miserable at times and he saw too that his father was miserable in his own way and he wanted sometimes to say a nice word, but everything came out snapped off, as if he had crocodile jaws with four thousand pounds of pressure behind them, even when he said pass me the salt on those rare nights they all ate dinner together. The bright spot was hanging out with Ben and his mom, and he thought he would ask if he could go live with them and then the baby could have his room when it was born. But every time he was about to ask, he’d see his mother’s face draped in sadness like a black hood, and he’d shrink away from her, shrink far away.

He wished he could be as ignorant as Jamie, who couldn’t wait until the baby came. Once, on the verge of telling him, just to shake things up, just to make Jamie a little crazy too, Harry said, “Do you know where this baby came from?”

And Jamie, annoyed at the suggestion of his naivete, answered, “Duh, I guess it wasn’t a stork.”

“That’s right,” Harry said. “Most def. Not a stork,” but left it at that.

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