A Hope in the Unseen Read Online Free

something he’s done since he was a small kid, coming home alone to apartments and tiptoeing, with a lump in his throat, to check if intruders were lurking inside closets and under beds.
    It’s not a very big place—two bedrooms, a small bathroom, a kitchenette,and an attached living and dining room—but it’s one of the better apartments that he and his mother, Barbara, have lived in. He’s even got his own bedroom in the far back corner.
    He flips on the switch. It’s like a bear’s winter cave of strewn matter—a thick padding of clothes, magazines, rubber-soled shoes, books, loose papers, and more clothes.
    Cedric turns on his beloved Sony Trinitron, a 19-inch color TV that his mother rented for him in ninth grade from a nearby Rent-a-Center (just paid off a month ago at an astonishing total price of nearly $1,500) and flops onto the bed. Like his proclivity for spying on street hustlers, the TV is a vital element of Cedric’s secondhand life. He loves the tube, especially the racy, exhibitionist afternoon talk shows, which he watches for a few minutes tonight before turning to the local news—the lead story about a shooting not far from here—and then flipping to
The Flintstones
, a favorite.
    He hears the thump of a door slamming.
    “Lavar, you home?” comes the voice—calling him, as his mother always has, by his middle name—but he doesn’t get up, figuring she’ll wander back. In a moment, Barbara Jennings, hands on hips, is standing in the doorway.
    In the sixteen and a half years since Cedric’s birth, Barbara Jennings has been on a path of sacrifice and piety that has taken her far from the light-hearted haughtiness of her earlier self—the woman with a blonde wig, leather miniskirt, white knee-high boots, and a taste for malt liquor. Cedric has seen pictures of that skinny young thing, a striking girl with a quick smile who, as he has discerned from his mother’s infrequent recollections, searched for love and found mostly trouble.
    She stopped searching long ago. Barbara is a churchwoman now. On weekdays she works in a data input job at the Department of Agriculture, where she has been for almost eleven years, and splits the rest of her time between a church in a rough section of Washington north of the Capitol dome and this small, messy apartment.
    Cedric looks her up and down and smiles thinly. Today, like most days, she has opted for a black dress and sensible shoes, an outfit most appropriate to her general mood, needs, and heavier frame. But herfeatures—her smallish nose and pretty, wide-set eyes—have held up well, even at forty-seven and without makeup.
    “I thought you would have made dinner by now,” she says, slipping a thin chain with her dangling Department of Agriculture photo ID from around her neck. “How long you been home?”
    “Only a couple of minutes,” Cedric says, turning back to the tube. “What we got to eat?”
    “I don’t know, whatever’s in there,” she says curtly before disappearing into her room to change out of her work clothes. Taking his cue, Cedric moves into the kitchen and begins breaking up ground beef into a frying pan. He pours in a can of navy beans, some oil, chopped onions, some pepper, salt, a little paprika, and other condiments. He does this without complaint or enthusiasm—it’s what he does most nights—and soon there are two heaping plates of steaming hash.
    “Hey, it’s ready and all,” he calls around a short breakwall behind the stove to Barbara, who’s sitting in a bathrobe on the white living room couch watching TV.
    Usually, he takes his plate to his room and she eats on the low, wide living room coffee table—each sitting in front of their own TV. Tonight, though, she clears away newspapers and unopened bills from the dining room table.
    “I haven’t talked to you in ages, it seems,” she says softly as they sit down to eat.
    “I’ve been around,” he says, grateful for her attentions. “Just been a lot going