Pictures of You by Caroline Leavitt Page A

dressed as if they were going to a party, his father still in his business suit and tie, his white hair swept back, his mother in a fancy blue dress, her bobbing reddish curls cut to her chin. They hugged him and then Sam, and then Charlie’s mother took his arm. “We’ll stay as longas you need us,” she said. “I’m telling you, you’re going to have to throw us out.”
    She tilted Sam’s chin. “You poor baby,” she said. Sam studied the ground. Charlie shot her a warning look. “Don’t you look tall!” she said quickly, and Sam stretched up to show her and Charlie felt a flash of relief.
    He gave them the spare room, new sheets for the double bed. He kept waiting for skirmishes that evening, but to his surprise, there were none. Sam seemed delighted they were around, and didn’t wait for affection but claimed it for himself, trailing after his grandma, taking his grandpa’s hand. Sam wanted to show them the garden in the backyard, his computer games, puzzles, and the books he was reading. “Whatever you need to do, you go and do it,” his mother told Charlie. “We’ll watch Sam.”
    “He acts like he doesn’t believe she’s dead.”
    “What do you mean he doesn’t believe it?” his father said. Both his parents stared at him.
    Charlie raised his hands. “He’s in shock,” Charlie said. “In denial. He was in the car with her. I tried to tell him, but he refuses to talk about it.”
    “You know, I read in the
Times
, recently, that even infants grieve,” his father said. “They experience loss. They may never remember their mother or their father who died, but on some deep cellular level, they know—and they grieve.”
    Charlie was exasperated. His father always pulled something out of the newspaper instead of discussing his own emotions. The few times when Charlie had come to his father as a kid, wanting advice, his father just quoted other people. “How do scientists know that?” Charlie asked, his voice rising. “How could anyone say that was for sure?”
    “I don’t know. They just do.”
    His mother took his hands. “Well, then, Sam doesn’t have to talk about it right now,” she said. She shook her head. “Poor baby,”she said, and, for a moment, Charlie didn’t know whether she was talking about him or Sam.
    Charlie stopped trying to talk about things with his parents, but he discovered right away that it was a godsend to have them there anyway. He took a nap that evening and woke to find his mother doing the laundry, though in Manhattan she had a laundress. Meticulously, she separated whites and darks, she poured in fabric softener and bleach at just the right time. “What, you think I never did this?” she said.
    His parents helped get Sam to bed, his mother reading Sam a story in a funny voice, his father making Ricky Bear dance. As soon as Sam was tucked in, his mother took Charlie’s arm. “Come on, let’s sit out on the front porch,” she said. “You need to relax. I brought some wine from our cellar, a perfect little red.”
    The night was cooling down and there were stars in the sky. Charlie’s mother opened the wine and poured it into glasses she set on the porch table. “Let it breathe,” she said, and then she moved her chair closer to Charlie, patting his arm encouragingly.
    “Does he seem okay to you?” Charlie asked, and his mother shrugged.
    “Leave the kid alone. Plenty of time for misery later,” said his father.
    “We haven’t talked about the funeral,” his mother said. “I know this is upsetting, but you can’t just leave the body at the funeral home. Would you like me to call people for you? Have the arrangements been made? Are you going to let Sam come? I think you should.”
    “No funeral,” Charlie said. He had only been to a few funerals in his life and every single one of them had seemed barbaric to him. “She was cremated.”
    “Cremated! But you still have to have a ceremony. People expect it. They need it.”
    “I don’t