The Whore's Child

he’d regretted immediately and which frightened him so badly that, needing to be alone, he’d gone to bed early that night, even though his mother kept coming in to check on him, convinced he was coming down with something. What scared him was that a careless wish, especially from
him,
might possess some untold power.
    At least that wish was something he didn’t have to worry about now, not after seeing Mr. Christie’s hand on Hugo Wentz’s shoulder. Having finished his instructions to the inattentive boy, Mr. Christie now trotted in from the mound and donned a catcher’s mask, telling another boy to grab a bat.
    Lin found it even easier to dislike his coach and sometime friend in the stupid catcher’s mask, the man who just last week he’d wished was his own father.
    â€œLook alive out there, Linwood,” he called out jovially, though Lin was aware of having done nothing to merit this warning. When Hugo Wentz’s first pitch sailed halfway up the backstop, provoking laughter throughout the infield, Lin joined in, not really caring if Mr. Christie might be disappointed in him.
    PERSONALITY
    One Saturday in early August, Lin and his mother took the bus to New York and then a train out into the Connecticut countryside, where her parents lived in a house with a swimming pool. Before they left, she’d gotten into an argument with his father because the trip meant he’d miss his afternoon with Lin. They were taking the trip, his mother explained, so they wouldn’t have to listen to Mr. Christie banging his ladder against the house all weekend, peering into whatever windows he was painting around. It was like living in a fishbowl, she said, though Lin had never seen Mr. Christie look anywhere but at the brush massaging paint into the dry wood. The job was taking too long, she also claimed, because Mr. Christie was doing it by himself. He said his regular partner was still sick, but she’d seen the man on the street and he looked perfectly fine.
    Unlike Lin’s other grandmother, Grandma Foster didn’t pester him constantly about why he didn’t come to visit her more often. She seemed to understand that there were things a ten-year-old boy couldn’t be held responsible for. Unlike Grandma Hart’s house, Grandma Foster’s was big and airy, and with the windows thrown open, breezes ruffled the curtains even on the warmest days. That two women the same age could be so different was baffling to Lin, who liked to think that age and experience would naturally lead to similarity. How did human beings turn out so different? The older people got, it seemed to Lin, the less they agreed on. According to his mother, the reason was personality, which, to his way of thinking, didn’t so much explain the problem as just give a name to something that still didn’t make any sense.
    He spent most of Saturday afternoon in the pool doing cannonballs off the diving board while the adults talked inside. He quit only when the sun slanted behind the roof of the house and the breeze turned cool. When he complained of hunger, his mother reminded him that Grandma and Grandpa Foster ate late, like civilized people. They liked to have cocktails first. His grandfather must have overheard part of this conversation, though, because a few minutes later he appeared on the deck with a big platter of steaks, and the new gas grill puffed to life; to ease the wait, Lin was given a stick of pepperoni to gnaw on, but only after he’d washed his hands and face.
    That night, as always, he slept in the downstairs den, on a sofa that folded out into a bed. The room had its own television, which he was permitted to watch as long as he wanted, but his hours in the pool had wearied him and before long he was asleep. He woke up once—someone had come in to turn the TV off—at the sound of voices from the foot of the stairs. “It’s not about the money,” he heard his grandfather say. And then, “What you saw in him in the first place is what I’ll never understand.”
    When they returned home late the next afternoon, his father was waiting for them at the bus stop in Uncle Bert’s car. Lin’s mother had been preoccupied during the entire journey, and when she saw the Buick, she looked like this was the last straw. “What’re you
doing
here, Tom?” she said when he picked up her bag.
    â€œWhat,” he said, dropping the