Red Baker Read Online Free Page B

a little shoulder fake and a stutter step, while Wanda yelled, “Watch out for the lamp, Red. No dribbling in the house,” and then I dodged for the ball, missed, and he would have been by me for sure except for the last-ditch Red Baker defense, the Fatherly Hug. I grabbed him, and the ball squirted free, bouncing onto the shag rug and knocking over the picture of Wanda’s mother, Ruth, which sat on the end table next to the couch.
    “You lunatics,” Wanda cried, but she was laughing with us. “Look what you’ve done to Ruth.”
    “Nothing time ain’t done worse,” I said, quoting the words of Buck, my old man five years’ dead.
    “Red!” Wanda said. “That’s no way to talk in front of Ace.”
    “Yeah,” Ace said, “you’re going to screw up all my values, Dad.”
    “Yeah,” I said. “Next thing you know the kid will be a teenaged alcoholic.”
    “No, glue sniffer,” Ace said. “Or ludes. I’ll get into ludes and hang out on the waterfront, bumming dimes.”
    “No way,” Wanda said, smiling at both of us and looking about ten years younger. “You’ll do nothing of the kind.”
    “What the hell?” I said. “This boy’s talking like a regular loon-a-tick.”
    I grabbed him again and wrestled him down to the floor. He was bigger than me, but I still had the upper-body strength on him.
    “Now you two cut that out this second. Red, you get upstairs and get yourself cleaned off, and Ace, you come out here and help me set the table.”
    “Okay, Mom,” Ace said. He picked up the ashtray with “Yellowstone National Park” on it, passed his hand over it, and made it disappear.
    “Ace?” Wanda said. “Don’t do that. You’ll break the ashtray.”
    “I don’t see any ashtray,” Ace said. “You see it, Dad?”
    “What ashtray?”
    “You two are going to drive me crazy.”
    “You mean that ashtray sitting over here?” Ace said, picking up the ashtray from the end table.
    “I don’t believe he did that,” Wanda said. “You ought to get into the movies, Ace. You’re getting real good with that magic.”
    “I just hope he’s that good with his studies,” I said.
    “Don’t worry, Dad, I’m tearing up the books. Got a fifty in a math test today.”
    “Ace,” Wanda said, “you didn’t.”
    Ace smiled and shook his head. “I forgot a few points. Got an eighty-five. I’m doing okay.”
    Wanda shook her head, and I took the opportunity and reached over and squeezed her hand. I thought she might jerk it away, but she held on to me tight and smiled again.
    “Now go get cleaned up, Red. I got a roast in the oven.”
    “Okay, okay …”
    I started up the steps and looked down on them standing there in the living room, smiling at one another, and suddenly I felt this thrill pass through me. Not like the one I had with Crystal. Something deeper that brought tears to my eyes.
    They were mine, my wife and child. The thought amazed me, like I’d been given a bright gift. There was no way I could let them down.
    I sat in the bath, letting the hot water soak into me, trying not to think of what lay ahead—the unemployment lines, the agonies of looking for work. Just be cool, lay back, take it one step at a time.
    I was half asleep in a blue daze, staring at the white tiles and dreaming of that sunshine highway with me and Crystal on it again, when Wanda came into the room.
    “I need to talk to you, Red,” she said, sitting down on the toilet seat with the pink, fuzzy cover on it.
    “I kind of figured this was coming,” I said, shutting my eyes.
    “Red, I’m not here to attack you. I don’t really care about tonight. I know how bad you feel, but there’s just something I’ve been thinking about. Stuff I’ve got to say to you.”
    I looked up at the mirror and the blue plastic shower curtain with white whales on it, and suddenly it seemed like I was in a hospital somewhere, being talked to by a doctor who was about to tell me how long I had left.
    “All right,” I said.