Ernie's Ark by Monica Wood Page B

actually thought about sending him flowers, but I wouldn’t want him to take it the wrong way.”
    “What other way is there to take it?” Bruce said.
    Francine stopped chewing. “I can think of at least twelve.”
    But Bruce was getting up, acting the wounded husband, an act that Cindy recognized as the righteous indignation of a sinner. She caught a glimpse of his face as he turned from the table, his eyes fixed in the middle distance, where the student he was screwing floated hotly, half in and half out of her paint-smattered shirt, her pinkish breasts turned up and asking.
    Kenny pushed his plate back. “You’re a sculptor, Dad,” he said, switching to his true target, his voice well aimed and soft with condescension. “Cindy dumped the guy for you. What’s to worry?”
    “You’ve got your facts out of order, Kenny,” Cindy said, mortified. Was this what everybody thought? Was this what Danny thought?
    “Kenny always has his facts out of order,” Bruce said, turning around. “Which is just the damnedest thing for a kid who knows everything.”
    Kenny scraped his chair back—a hard scrape that changed the tenor of the room. “Then let’s do it, Dad,” he said, staring his father down. “Let’s put the facts in order. What do you say, Dad? Want to put the facts in order?”
    Cindy held her breath, sensing a plate-rattling showdown in the works, a bad one, a naming of names, a litany of things Kenny knew about his father that Cindy did not want Francine to hear. But Bruce apparently had other plans. Before Kenny could wind himself up another notch, Bruce had slammed out the door and his car was spitting up ice as he screeched into the street. Kenny slipped into his room, eerily wordless, leaving Francine and Cindy and a glory of leftovers.
    Cindy remained where she was, Francine silent across from her, until the sound of Bruce’s car faded far around the corner. She waited for the air to settle, for the kitchen clock to take over the management of time. Then she took up her fork, and Francine did likewise. They finished eating.
    “I like what you put on the carrots,” Francine said.
    Cindy thanked her. Then: “I didn’t leave one man for another, Francine. I would never do that.”
    “I know you wouldn’t,” Francine said solemnly. “Kenny’s a jerk.” She took up some plates and put them in the sink. “You want to see what I’m working on?”
    Cindy followed Francine to her room. This is what her evenings came to. She sat patiently, the way she had so many times since she had become Francine’s default mother. Bruce’s first wife had moved to London and showed no signs of ever coming back. The photograph on Francine’s desk hadn’t been updated in years, so it was impossible to know what she looked like now, but Cindy felt a profound, unwanted kinship with this woman who knew what it was like to be Mrs. Bruce Love: that peculiar loneliness, the kind that intensified the nearer he got.
    “Watch this,” Francine said, presenting a scanned image of Cindy on the computer screen. The image startled her. She looked like a movie star holding flowers so vivid you wanted to eat them. A little flutter happened inside her, a feeling like, God help her, a bud opening. She thought, I’d buy flowers from her. I’d buy anything from her.
    “How’d you do that?” Cindy asked.
    Francine grinned. “Magic.”
    From downstairs came the sound of Kenny slamming out of the house, then the more distant
rrr-rrr-rrr
of Cindy’s car struggling to start in the cold.
    “He didn’t even ask you,” Francine said. “I don’t like him anymore.” Finally the engine turned over, and Cindy relaxed.
    “When I was little he used to ride me around on his handlebars,” Francine said. “I was his favorite little kid of all time.”
    Cindy did not know how to answer this.
    Francine shook her head—gravely, as if presiding over a death. Cindy thought something might be wrong with the computer, until Francine