The Committee of Concerned Parents

AARON HAD DISCOVERED HIS PENIS. WHENEVER HE HAD A SPARE moment—when he was watching TV, say, or listening to a story—his hand would wander southward, and his face would go all soft and dreamy. This new hobby coincided with a sudden leap forward in his potty training that allowed him to wear big boy underpants at home during the day (at night, during naps, and in public he still needed the insurance of a diaper). Because he often had to sprint to the bathroom at the last possible moment, he preferred not to wear pants over the underwear, and this combination of easy access and an elastic waistband issued a sort of standing invitation that he found impossible to resist.

Having been reassured by parenting books that childhood masturbation was a common and harmless activity—and believing in any case that each individual has a sovereign right of ownership over his or her own body—Todd and Kathy had made a conscious decision not to interfere with Aaron’s self-explorations. But sometimes they wondered.

“Did you do that as a kid?” Kathy asked. They were watching from the hallway as Aaron absentmindedly stroked his tiny manhood while watching a video of Clifford, the Big Red Dog.

“I don’t think so,” said Todd. It was hard for him to remember the specifics of his early childhood. When he tried, the only image he could regularly produce was his mother’s face hovering over him as she tucked him into bed at night, a luminous, looming, loving presence that he could still sometimes sense at the edges of his perception.

“I sure didn’t,” said Kathy. “My mother used to tell me it was dirty down there and to never ever touch it. Of course, she wouldn’t let me suck my thumb, either. She painted that awful sticky stuff on it at night to make me stop.”

“Eet ees puffeckly nawmal to zuck ze sum!” Todd exclaimed, doing the imitation of Dr. Ruth that Kathy used to get such a kick out of. He’d do it while they were making love, whenever he needed to get her to relax and experiment with something a little out of the ordinary. (Eet ees puffeckly nawmal to vare ze handcuffs!) That was one of her sweetest quirks (or at least it used to be): As long as you could convince her that the practice in question fell within the boundaries of “normal behavior,” she was up for just about anything. “Und ees puffeckly nawmal to be aroused by big red dog!”

Kathy chuckled politely, but her mind had already shifted to another topic.

“By the way,” she said. “Have you been doing the flash cards?”

“Not too much,” Todd admitted.

Kathy had recently purchased a preschool “Fun with Math” kit. She wanted to get Aaron thinking about numbers—recognizing numerals, counting to a hundred, maybe doing some rudimentary addition—and had made a unilateral decision that Todd would be heavily involved, even though he had repeatedly expressed his lack of enthusiasm for the project. The kid was only three, for God’s sake. His idea of a good time was smashing two trains together. He didn’t need to be worrying about math.

“I wish you’d give it a try,” she said. “I just want him to feel comfortable with the basic concepts. Just because you and I were bad at math doesn’t mean he should be scared of it, too.”

“I wasn’t bad at math,” Todd protested. “Except for calculus. I had some kind of mental block with that.”

Kathy turned back to Aaron.

“Honey?” She had to repeat the word three times at increasing volume to get his attention. “When Clifford’s over, we’re going to do our flash cards, okay?”

Aaron nodded—Todd thought he would have agreed to just about anything right then—and turned back to the TV. Todd kissed Kathy on the cheek.

“Oh well,” he said. “Better hit the books.”

“So how’s it going?” she said, making an unsuccessful attempt to sound casual.

“Fine,” he said. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I just worry about you sometimes,” she said. “I worry about us.”

He kissed her again, this time on the forehead.

“There’s nothing to worry about.”

 

Todd didn’t understand the point of certain skateboarding maneuvers. They weren’t always self-explanatory, like popping a wheelie or spinning a basketball on your fingertip. Sometimes it was hard to know what the boys were trying to do, let alone if they’d succeeded.

Tonight, for example, all of them were practicing a low-key move where they scootered along at a leisurely clip, crouched down like a surfer, and then hopped into the air for a split second. If the rider was skillful, the board clung to the soles of his sneakers as if by magnetism, and he continued rolling as before when the wheels reconnected with the ground. If not, the board slipped away from the rider’s feet and plunged to the pavement, usually landing upside down or on its side, and making either a soft clattering noise or a decisive smack, depending upon whether the rider came down on top of it, in which case a fairly interesting fall could result.

A smooth landing was preferable to a painful tumble, of course, but was that it? Even when done properly, the maneuver seemed unassuming to a fault, barely worth the trouble. And yet, rider after rider kept gliding past him like figures in a dream, crouching and hopping, standing or falling, performing their pointless task with the stoic patience of early adolescence. I don’t know why I’m doing this, each boy seemed to say, but I’ll keep doing it until I’m old enough to do something else.

As he had so often in recent days, Todd closed his eyes and let out a low moan, mentally reenacting the kiss by the swing set. He still couldn’t believe that it had really happened, right out in public like that, after only a brief conversation, with all those women and children looking on (Aaron had been particularly curious about what he’d seen, and had received Todd’s explanation that it was just pretend, a game grown-ups sometimes played, with justifiable skepticism). But Sarah hadn’t just kissed him. She had pressed her body against his with astonishing frankness, murmuring these sweet little noises of approval and encouragement right into his mouth. Todd had been this close to grabbing her ass when he remembered where they were. She looked dazed and disappointed when he pulled away, and he’d had to stop himself from inviting her back to his house for more right then and there, though what “more” might have meant with a pair of three-year-olds in tow, he couldn’t have begun to say.

A week had passed, and Todd hadn’t seen or heard from her since. He and Aaron had returned to the Rayburn School playground the following morning, but no one was there, not even the three bitchy women who supposedly called him “Prom King.” They were back a few days after that, but played dumb when Todd asked about Sarah, as if they didn’t know the first thing about her, not even her last name or where she lived.

“I’m surprised you have to ask,” said the bossy one with the toothpick legs. “It looked like you knew each other pretty well.”

Sarah hadn’t shown up at the Town Pool, either, though Todd remembered telling her that he and Aaron could be found there most afternoons. So she was obviously in no big hurry to reconnect with him and explore phase two of the playground fantasy, whatever that might be. It was probably a good thing, Todd decided. It wasn’t like he wanted to have an affair or anything. He just wanted to see her again, maybe talk a little about what had happened, find out if she felt as unsettled by their encounter as he did.

Because he couldn’t get that damn kiss out of his mind. The whole thing was just so uncanny. Todd had been fantasizing about something like that for months, every time he found himself engaged in conversation with an attractive young mother—Dear Penthouse Forum, I’m a 31-year-old stay-at-home dad, and you’ll never believe what just happened to me at the playground—and now it had really happened. It was like suddenly being a teenager again, returning to a time when sex wasn’t a routine or predictable part of your life, but something mysterious and transforming that could pop up out of nowhere, sometimes when you weren’t even looking, though usually you were. Walk into a party and Bang! There it was. The mall, McDonald’s, even church! Some girl smiles at you, and it’s a whole different day.

Losing that sense of omnipresent possibility was one of the trade-offs of married life that Todd struggled with on a daily basis. Sure, he got to sleep with a great woman every night. He could kiss her whenever he wanted (well, almost). But sometimes it was nice to kiss someone else for a change, for the hell of it, just to prove it could still be done. It didn’t seem to matter that Sarah wasn’t his type, wasn’t even that pretty, at least not compared to Kathy, who had long legs and lustrous hair, and knew how to make herself as glamorous as a model when you gave her a reason to. Sarah was short and boyish, slightly pop-eyed, and a little angry-looking when you got right down to it. She had coarse unruly hair and eyebrows that were thicker than Todd thought necessary. But so what? She’d read his mind and walked into his arms, as if she’d memorized a script he hadn’t even remembered writing until he found himself standing in the middle of it, breathing hard and barely able to let go.

 

“Hey, pervert!”

Todd cringed at the word, flinging up his arms as if to deflect a blow. The minivan had crept up so slowly—or he had retreated so deeply into himself—that he didn’t even notice it until it was idling right in front of him, blocking his view of the skateboarders.

“Like the little boys, do you?”

The teasing note was clearer now. Todd dropped his guard and squinted into the van in an effort to identify the driver, who was craning across the front seat to assist him in this task. It took a few seconds to pin a name on the broad, fleshy face grinning at him through the open passenger window.

“Jesus, Larry. Don’t even joke about that.”

Larry Moon was a father Todd had hung out with a couple of times at the Stuart Street sprinkler park during last summer’s heat wave, and hadn’t seen since. He was a stocky, thick-necked guy in his midthirties, an ex-cop who had recently retired on full disability, though there didn’t appear to be anything physically wrong with him.

“You busy?” he asked.

“Actually, I’m, uh, supposed to be studying.” Todd lifted his bookbag off the ground to bolster what sounded—even to himself—like an unlikely claim. “I’m taking the bar exam next month.”

“Didn’t you do that last year?”

“Yeah,” said Todd. “See how good I did?”

Larry laughed, as if Todd had meant it as a joke. He popped the lock and the passenger door swung open.

“Get in,” he said. “I got a better idea.”

Larry cleared off the passenger seat, tossing a football and a pair of binoculars into the back of the van, and snatching up a fat stack of blue paper, which he dropped into Todd’s lap a moment later.

“You mind?” he said. “I’m trying to keep ’em nice.”

Todd recognized the pervert warning right away. He had received three of them in the past week alone—one in his mailbox, one folded into the Sunday paper, another slipped through his car window when he’d left it open a crack at the supermarket. A small footnote at the bottom of the flyer said, Paid for by the Committee of Concerned Parents.

“You part of the committee?” Todd asked.

“I am the committee. It just sounds better than Paid for by Larry from Hazel Avenue. A little more official.”

“How’d you find out about this creep?”

“There’s a web site. The state’s required to disclose the whereabouts of convicted sex offenders.” Larry shot him an inquiring glance. “Don’t you check it?”

“Not on a regular basis,” Todd confessed.

“I think decent people have a right to know if Chester the Molester’s moving in next door, don’t you?”

“McGorvey’s not living next door to you, is he?”

“Not next door. But close enough.” Larry’s expression darkened. “They should just castrate the bastard and be done with it.”

Todd nodded as noncommitally as he could, trying to acknowledge Larry’s strong opinion on the subject without having to express his own more measured one. In the interval of silence that followed, Todd’s attention latched on to the familiar music playing softly on the car stereo.

“You a Raffi fan?”

“What?” Larry seemed startled by the question.

“That’s Raffi, right? ‘Big, Beautiful Planet’?”

“Ah, shit.” Larry punched EJECT. “After a while I don’t even know what I’m listening to anymore.”

“I actually like some of his stuff,” Todd volunteered. “You know, just a song here and there. I’m not president of his fan club or anything.”

Larry didn’t respond, and Todd wondered if he’d been more forthcoming on the subject than he needed to be. His discomfort grew more acute at a red light just beyond the center of town, when Larry shifted in the driver’s seat and examined Todd’s body with disconcerting thoroughness, his gaze lingering on the legs and moving slowly upward.

“You look good,” he said. “Been going to the gym?”

Oh shit, thought Todd.

He felt like an idiot, more embarrassed on Larry’s behalf than his own. Because what was the guy supposed to think? He pulls up, calls you a pervert, and invites you into his van, and you climb in without even asking where you’re going. The average five-year-old would have known better.

“I run a lot,” Todd explained. “Lotsa push-ups and crunches and stuff.”

“This is unbelievable.” Larry grinned and gave Todd a hard but not unfriendly sock in the arm. “I’ve been searching for you for months, and when I finally give up, there you are, standing on the corner like some crack whore in the ghetto.”

“Why were you looking?” Todd decided not to make an issue of the crack whore analogy, which did not strike him as auspicious. “Did you want to ask me something?”

“The guys are gonna love this,” Larry said, more to himself than Todd.

The guys? Todd thought unhappily. What guys? But before he could pose the question, the minivan veered unexpectedly across two lanes of traffic, into the parking lot of the high school athletic complex, which was brightly lit and the scene of a reassuring amount of activity—senior citizens shuffling around the track, some teenage boys tossing a lacrosse ball, two Chinese women practicing Tai Chi near an equipment shed. Todd let go of his misgivings, despite the fact that Larry was staring at his legs again.

“Good thing you’re wearing sneakers,” he said.

 

As successful and satisfying as it had been, Todd’s high school football career had unfolded on a field so incurably dingy that not even the most nostalgic glow of memory could improve it. The grass of Arthur “Biff” Ryan Stadium was coarse and mottled with permanent bald spots between the thirty yard lines that the long-suffering groundskeeper tried to mask with some kind of vegetable-based spray paint for big games and graduation ceremonies. This organic ground cover held up to the rough-and-tumble of twenty-two pairs of stampeding feet about as well as the white powder they used to mark the field, a highly volatile substance that rarely survived the first quarter, rendering the out-of-bounds and goal lines more or less hypothetical for the players, referees, and spectators. On top of everything else, the soil didn’t drain well; an hour of hard rain could transform the field into an evil swamp capable of sucking a shoe right off your foot as you tried to duck out of the grasp of a blitzing linebacker.

How much better it would have been to scramble around on this, Todd thought, the moment he and Larry stepped onto the Bellington Bombers’ state-of-the-art field, the taut blue-green skin of the artificial turf glowing with Caribbean purity beneath the dazzling night game lights, the crisp white lines and numbers marching with precision from one yellow end zone to the other. Even with the bleachers empty and only a half dozen men tossing balls and doing warm-ups at midfield, the stadium communicated a powerful sense of occasion and romance that Todd felt immediately in the pit of his stomach.

“Wow,” he said. “This is something.”

“It’s pretty,” Larry agreed. “But it doesn’t have a lot of give. It’s like playing on cement.”

The men at midfield stopped what they were doing and assembled themselves into an impromptu welcoming committee. Like Larry, all of them were wearing gray athletic shorts and T-shirts with GUARDIANS written across the front. They stared openly at Todd as he approached, but their collective scrutiny felt less intimate than Larry’s had in the close quarters of the van.

“Who’s he?” grunted a barrel-chested man with a drill-sergeant crew cut and a nose that looked like it had been broken more than once.

Larry draped his arm around Todd’s shoulder. “He’s that quarterback I was telling you about.”

Todd was startled to hear himself referred to in this manner. He had a vague memory of swapping football stories with Larry at the sprinkler park, but he must have made it clear that he hadn’t played the game in a serious way for almost a decade. At this point in his life, he was no more a quarterback than he was a seventh grader.

“You told us he moved,” said a bald-headed black guy who was maybe five-six, but had a build like Mike Tyson’s. He had cut off his shirt so it hung well above his navel, exposing an abdominal six-pack that belonged on the cover of a fitness magazine.

“I just ran into him,” Larry explained. “Outside the library.”

“I hope he’s as good as you said,” said a lanky guy with an orthopedic brace on one knee.

“He played in college,” said Larry. “How bad could he be?”

Todd didn’t think this was the right time to explain that he hadn’t been a starter and that it was a very small college. He already felt like enough of a civilian in his cargo shorts and polo shirt.

“I’m a little behind the curve here,” he said. “Who are you guys?”

“We’re the Guardians,” said the drill sergeant.

“We’re cops,” said the black guy.

“We play in the Tri-County Midnight Touch Football League,” Larry added. “A lot of towns have teams.”

“Our quarterback’s wife made him quit,” said the guy with the knee brace. “He got too many concussions.”

The other Guardians glared at the speaker, as if he’d divulged top secret information.

“Concussions?” said Todd. “I thought you said it was touch.”

“Rough touch,” said Larry. His teammates seemed to find this amusing.

“It’s basically tackle.” The drill sergeant spoke in a comically nasal voice. If Todd hadn’t been looking straight at him, he would have sworn the guy had clamped a clothespin on his nostrils. “We just call it touch for insurance purposes.”

“We really need a quarterback,” said a cherubic-looking behemoth who’d been silent up to that point.

“Why don’t we work on some simple pass patterns?” Larry suggested.

Todd waited for his good sense to kick in. There were lots of excuses available to him. My wife works nights. I have to study for the big exam. I can’t keep my eyes open at midnight, let alone play football. I don’t like concussions. But it felt so good to be standing there beneath the bright lights on that vast turquoise carpet, surrounded by men who called themselves the Guardians. Way better than standing in front of the library watching twelve-year-olds ride their skateboards. He had a feeling similar to the one he’d had right before kissing Sarah, like his world had cracked open to reveal a thrilling new possibility.

“Just let me warm up a little,” he told them.

 

After practice, Larry invited Todd out for a beer to celebrate their new alliance. Todd started to say no—it was already ten o’clock—but then figured, what the hell. It wasn’t like he went out drinking every night of the week.

“Cheers.” Larry lifted his mug. “You looked good out there.”

“You think?” Todd checked his face for signs of insincerity. “Some of the other guys weren’t so sure.”

“Who, Tony Correnti?” Larry waved away Todd’s concern. “He’s a pussycat. Give you the shirt off his back.”

Todd’s altercation with Correnti—he was the drill sergeant with the off-kilter nose—had taken place during a scrimmage at the end of practice. He’d just let go of a pass, a sweet spiral that floated right into the hands of DeWayne Rogers, the short black guy he already thought of as his go-to receiver, when Correnti nailed him with a cheap shot, knocking him flat onto the artificial turf, which, true to Larry’s description, was about as forgiving as freshly paved blacktop.

Except for having the wind knocked out of him, Todd was unhurt. He struggled to his feet and glared at his assailant, arms spread, mouth open, his whole body a tacit what the fuck? Correnti stepped up, getting right in Todd’s face like he was spoiling for a fight.

“You got a problem?” he honked.

“That was a late hit.”

“Poor baby.”

“Roughing the passer. Any ref woulda called it.”

“No refs in this league, pretty boy.”

Todd didn’t know what to say to that.

“Well, take it easy, okay? It’s just a friggin’ scrimmage.”

Correnti laughed in his face. “You think the Auditors are gonna take it easy? You think the Supervisors are gonna ask permission before cleaning your clock?”

“You’re supposed to be my teammate.”

“This isn’t Pop Warner, Ace. You either suck it up and play ball, or you get the fuck off the field, okay?”

Larry told Todd not to worry about it. He said Correnti was just testing him, making sure he was a good fit with the team.

“He’s an ex-Marine,” Larry explained. “A jarhead of the old school.”

Todd shook his head, reminding himself to take shallow breaths. Every time he inhaled past a certain point, he felt a sharp stitch in his rib cage.

“No wonder your last quarterback quit.”

“Little Scotty Morris.” Larry spoke the name with contempt. “What a pussy. He wouldn’t have even gotten up after a hit like you took.”

Todd nodded, acknowledging the compliment. Aside from Correnti’s cheap shot, practice had gone pretty well. He threw the ball better than he expected—all those push-ups had paid off—and had been surprised to find his football instincts intact after the long hiatus.

“There aren’t too many guys who can throw on the run,” Larry continued. “You looked like John Elway out there.”

“Thanks.” Todd was flattered. “I always kind of modeled my game on Elway’s.”

“Well, it shows.” Larry signaled the bartender. “Hey, Willie, how about another round for me and my new QB?”

 

Larry’s mood darkened suddenly, somewhere between the second and third beer, when Todd asked how his boys were doing. He remembered the twins from the sprinkler park, beefy kids with enormous heads, dead ringers for their dad.

“The boys are fine,” Larry said. “But my marriage is in trouble.”

Todd didn’t press for details. He didn’t know Larry that well—had never even laid eyes on his wife—and didn’t think it was any of his business. But Larry felt like talking.

“Joanie thinks I should get a job. She thinks I’m too young and healthy to be hanging around the house all day.”

He looked expectantly at Todd, as if asking for his opinion on the matter. Todd didn’t think he understood the matter well enough to have one.

“Why did you retire? If you don’t mind my asking.”

Larry seemed genuinely surprised by the question.

“You don’t know?”

“You never told me.”

“Huh,” said Larry. “I thought everybody knew.”

Todd shook his head and waited. Larry took a thoughtful slug of beer and inclined his head in Todd’s direction. He kept his voice low, even though there was no one within eavesdropping distance.

“I was the one who shot that kid,” he said. “At the mall.”

Todd understood immediately. It had happened a few years ago, around the time Aaron was born. A local cop had been dispatched to the Bellington Mall to investigate a report of a black teenager carrying a gun. The cop had entered the mall with his own gun drawn, just in time to see the suspect heading up the escalator to the food court. The cop gave chase, cornering the suspect in front of the Taco Bell kiosk. The kid reached for his gun, and that was that. It was only after firing the fatal shots that the officer discovered that the kid was packing a toy, a cheap plastic six-shooter purchased at the Dollar Store.

There were some protests from civil rights groups, who insisted that the kid—he turned out to be only thirteen, though already over six feet tall—never would have been shot if he’d been white, but a departmental investigation determined that the cop had acted in accordance with legal guidelines for the use of deadly force. After that the story pretty much faded from the local news.

“Jesus,” said Todd. “That’s terrible.”

“I still have nightmares about it,” Larry confessed. “Antoine Harris was his name. Turns out he was a good kid. Real skinny, class clown. Thought it was a big joke, waving around his cowboy gun.”

“You didn’t know. It could have been real.”

“I was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress syndrome,” said Larry. “By three different psychiatrists. That’s why I retired. I couldn’t do the job anymore.”

“Not after that.”

“For a year or two, Joanie was okay with me hanging around the house. But now she thinks I’m getting lazy.”

“Maybe you could do something else,” Todd suggested.

“Like what?” Larry snapped. “Drive a forklift at Costco?”

“Maybe go back to school.”

“You sound like Joanie.” Larry looked like he was trying to control himself. “I loved my job. I don’t want to do anything else.”

 

Todd had given clear directions to his house, but Larry must have misheard them. He turned off Pleasant a mile too soon, onto a network of curving streets near the Rayburn School.

“This isn’t it,” Todd told him. “I’m farther down toward the park.”

Larry ignored him. They were moving at a crawl through a sleepy enclave of Cape Cods and garrison colonials, a modest family neighborhood a lot like Todd’s own—tricycles abandoned on lawns, hockey nets tipped over in driveways, soccer ball flags flying proudly over front doors.

“Can you believe they let the bastard live in a place like this?”

“Oh shit,” said Todd. “This is Blueberry Court.”

Larry released a bitter chuckle.

“Why not give the pervert his own day-care center, too?”

Larry pulled to a stop in front of a small white house, Number 44. An old-fashioned lamppost cast its light over a well-kept square of lawn outlined by a border of scalloped bricks. The flower boxes beneath the picture window and the horse-and-buggy cutouts on the shutters gave the place the quaint, frozen-in-time look of an old photograph. Larry pressed three times on his horn, shattering the late-night silence. It was almost like he was summoning the pervert, like he expected McGorvey to come out and join them in the car.

“Why’d you do that?” Todd asked.

“Just to let him know I’m out here.”

Larry reached into the backseat for his binoculars and trained them on the picture window. This seemed like overkill to Todd; the backs of two heads were clearly visible through the glass, silhouetted against the throbbing blue light of the TV.

“I want this scumbag to know I’m keeping an eye on him.”

Time clicked by on the dashboard clock—five, ten, fifteen minutes. Todd just wanted to go home. Kathy would be worried; he had to take a wicked piss. But Larry seemed in no hurry to end his vigil.

“Unbelievable,” he muttered. “Just sitting there watching Leno like a normal human being.”

Todd could have spoken up, of course. But something held him back, the passenger’s code of conduct. He felt like he’d surrendered his control of the night the moment he’d stepped into the van. For better or worse, the driver called the shots.

“You know that Girl Scout he exposed himself to?” Larry asked. “She was my buddy’s daughter. Still hasn’t gotten over it.”

“He exposed himself to a Girl Scout?”

“Sweet little kid. She was just selling cookies.” Larry lowered the binoculars. “Joanie thinks I’m obsessed with this creep. She thinks if I had a job, I wouldn’t be driving by his house five or six times a day.”

Larry tossed his binoculars into the backseat and grabbed a handful of flyers off the stack that was resting on Todd’s lap.

“But I kinda feel like this is my job,” he said. “There’s a roll of tape in the glove compartment. Could you grab it for me?”

Kathy was still awake, hiding behind a fat biography of Eisenhower when Todd entered the bedroom. Aaron was asleep beside his mother.

“Where were you?” she asked, striking a tone of profound indifference.

For an instant, Todd actually considered telling her the truth—i.e., that instead of studying he’d spent the night playing tackle football with a bunch of cops—but then he saw a better way.

“I joined the Committee of Concerned Parents,” he told her. “We’re distributing the flyers about that creep on Blueberry Court.”

It was not technically a lie, at least not the second part. They had distributed flyers—Larry had taped about a dozen on the pervert’s front door, and then he and Todd had tossed handfuls out of the car windows as they drove away, littering the neighborhood with warnings. It was actually kind of fun, letting the wind pull the papers out of his hand, watching the individual sheets flutter and dive to the ground.

Kathy put down her book and studied him with a quality of attention he rarely received from her these days. He was delighted to see that she was wearing her black camisole, the semisheer one that offered a shadowy glimpse of her nipples, but his pleasure was diluted somewhat by the thought—not the first time it had passed through his head—that she was a lot more likely to wear something sexy to bed on nights when she was home alone with Aaron. When Todd was around she favored extra-large sweatpants in weird colors and T-shirts that hung to her knees.

“You remember Larry Moon?” he continued. “That retired cop from the sprinkler park?”

“The guy with the twins?”

“Yeah, it’s his organization.”

“I thought you didn’t like him.”

“I can take him or leave him. But this committee makes a lot of sense. It’s pretty scary having a guy like that living right in town.”

Kathy glanced at Aaron, who was sprawled out on his back, one arm bent at a right angle, the other sticking out straight. There were bunnies and carrots on his pajamas.

“I know,” she said, touching him tenderly on the forehead. “I hate to even think about it.”

 

Todd showered with the efficiency of a man who believes he has a fairly decent chance of getting laid if he hurries. All the stars were in alignment—Kathy was awake and wearing black underwear; Aaron was far away in dreamland. What was there to stop them, aside from a little soreness in his ribs?

This is what we need, he thought, brushing his teeth at twice the normal speed. Something to take my mind off that kiss.

Todd was painfully aware of the fact that he and Kathy had not made love for over three weeks. First, she’d had her period, then she’d been stressed out at work. One or the other of them was usually too tired at night, and Aaron was always hanging around in the morning, ready to intervene at the slightest sign of physical contact that didn’t involve him. About six months earlier, they’d somehow managed to plop him in front of the TV by himself while they shared a precious—if somewhat distracted—half hour upstairs. Todd still remembered how good it felt afterward, lounging around like royalty in his bathrobe, sipping coffee and exchanging significant glances with his wife, but it was a one-shot deal. Now, whenever Todd—it was always Todd—suggested that Aaron go downstairs and watch PBS while he and Mommy “rested” for a little while longer, their little chaperone immediately smelled a rat and insisted that one of them join him on the living room couch.

Deciding that this was no time for subtlety, Todd emerged from the bathroom wearing only a towel, his manly intentions on full display. All he had to do was successfully transfer Aaron to his own bed without waking him, and they’d be home free. But when he pulled back the covers and slipped his hands under his son’s knees and shoulders, Kathy released a barely audible whimper of protest.

“Please don’t.”

Todd straightened up, his high hopes already wilting.

“Come on, Kathy. How many times do we have to argue about this? He’s three years old. He needs to start sleeping by himself.”

“I know,” she said, in the melancholy tone of someone fighting a battle she knew she’d someday have to lose. “But he just looks so comfy.”

“He’ll be just as comfy in his own bed.”

“I just like to have him next to me.” She gazed down at her son with a look of profound adoration and shook her head, as if to say that she knew Todd was right but was helpless in the face of her own feelings. “Don’t you love his warm little body?”

What about me? Todd wanted to ask. What about my big warm body?

“Look, Kathy, I’m just getting a little tired of waking up with his foot in my face.”

“But isn’t he just so perfect? Was there ever a more perfect face in the entire history of the world?”

There was only one right answer to a question like that. And besides, for the most part Todd did like having Aaron in bed with them, especially when he was all warm and soapy-smelling from his bath. He’d wake up happy at the first light of morning and beg his parents to tickle him until he couldn’t take it anymore, at which point he’d beg them to stop.

“He is a handsome devil,” Todd had to admit.

“I know,” said Kathy. “He’s my perfect little man.”

So Todd cast off his towel, put on a pair of boxers, and climbed into bed with his wife and sleeping child. Just before she turned off the light, Kathy leaned over Aaron to give Todd a kiss. He pushed himself up on his elbows, just high enough to get a quick peek at her breasts. Even after five years of marriage, it still gave him a little thrill.

“Night, night,” she told him.

“Night, night,” he said.