She still ran his bathwater, lest he be chilled or scorched. She sat on the edge of the tub and talked to him, so he would not be alone.
"He likes it when I talk to him," she said.
"Well, I hope he gets tired of it before he goes to college," I said.
I have read of boys in plastic bubbles who had more adventure. The woman and boy lived on a dead-end street, what suburban people call a cove. The boy was allowed to ride his bicycle only on that street, never out of sight. I would watch him, circling, circling. I thought of a hamster on a wheel.
I had believed that being a boy was about getting away with things, just short of murder, and if you got lucky, you could still be a boy when they lowered you into the red clay. What troubled me most was not that he was bound, but that he did not seem to mind it.
I was born into a people who could cuss the horns off a bull, before revival and after dinner on the ground, but he lived in a world rated G, with candy sprinkles on top. Once, in the car, I let slip a
damn or
hell or some other entry-level curse, and the boy puffed up like a toad and said his mother would not allow me to speak in such a vulgar fashion.
"Well," I said, and looked up, down, left, and right.
