In sixth grade everyone in Mrs. Gradinger’s homeroom had to build a balsa wood miniature of the family manse, which our mothers were supposed to be exhilarated by when they came for parent-teacher-student conferences. My replica was painted black and yellow, and featured bushes everywhere like broccoli. Although our actual house had an open-sided carport, I constructed a square, detached garage, without doors or windows or a very well applied roof. Mother greeted Mrs. Gradinger, looked at my model for the longest time, then looked at me for the longest time.
“Jeremy,” she said, “Jeremy, sweetheart, are you ever just going to come inside with everyone else and get warm?”
She touched his nose and cheeks, tousled his hair, kissed his forehead with dry lips. Ethan’s mother smelled like laundry mixed with buttermilk. She leaned forward and he held her in his arms but was afraid of hurting her with too hard a hug, so he set her back down against the pillow and let go, moving away.
A B O U T T H E A U T H O R
DAVID SHIELDS’S other books are Remote, A Handbook for Drowning, and Heroes. His stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, Vogue, Details, the Village Voice, and Utne Reader. He has received two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, two PEN Syndicated Fiction awards, an Ingram-Merrill Foundation award, a PEN/Revson Foundation fellowship, and a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. A graduate of Brown University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he now lives in Seattle, where he is a professor of English at the University of Washington.
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