Fortunate Son

16

On the trip to Phoenix, Thomas said to his brother, “You didn’t have to come with me, Eric. If you just gave me a ticket and a couple a bucks I coulda gone on my own.”

“But what would you do when you got there?”

“I don’t know. There’s always somethin’ to do. It’s not that hard.”

“I know, Tommy,” Eric said. “But we just found each other. The only reason you would even go to jail is because you were looking for me and because you saved Mona.”

“But what about her?” Thomas asked. “She needs you to be with her.”

“It’s not gonna take long,” Eric explained. “We just need to set you up somewhere where the police won’t find you. Then I’ll go back home. I promise.”

Thomas stopped arguing. He was happy to be able to spend time with Eric. He knew that Eric could use his help, that he was somehow lost and needed Thomas to lead him out of a dark corridor. He could tell by the way Eric looked away so often. There was even sadness in his smile.

So they took a room in a Phoenix residence hotel and began to plan for Thomas’s future.

The first thing they did was go shopping for clothes. They cruised through Banana Republic buying sweaters, shirts, pants, jackets, underwear, socks, and even a hat for Thomas. The young man was amazed by the variety and cost of these things. He hadn’t been to a clothes store since his days with Monique and Lily when he’d buy a new pair of pants and a T-shirt at JC Penney once every six months or so.

At the same mall they bought walking shoes and a big suitcase for the trip that Eric had planned.

“I’ve never been to New York,” Eric told Thomas. “That means the police won’t think to look for us there.”

“What about Dad?” Thomas asked.

“I told him we were going and that I’d get in touch with him.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. He just looked kinda sad and nodded, and I left.”

“Why’s he so sad?” Thomas asked.

They were sitting across from each other on single beds in the Laramie Extended-Stay Hotel and Residence on the outskirts of the city. Their window looked out onto a vast desert of yellows and oranges.

“He’s been like that ever since Mama Branwyn died and they took you away,” Eric said. “All he does is work and sleep.”

“You can see it in his eyes,” Thomas added. “He’s got old man’s eyes.”

“I think it’s because of me,” Eric added. “When I was a kid I always made him do things for me, and I didn’t even see it. And then when I got older it was already too late.”

Thomas rubbed the palms of his hands over his black-cotton trousers. He thought about not being in jail or on trial.

“Maybe he could come visit after we get to New York,” Thomas suggested.

The next day they were on an eastbound train. They sat across from each other at the front of the car and talked for eighteen hours a day.

“I took riding lessons...”

“I found a glass-cutter and made drinking glasses from beer bottles for a while. After I’d make’em, I sold’em on the boardwalk in Venice until the police chased me away...”

“After the SATs I went to UCLA to study economics. I like numbers that do things in people’s pockets. It’s funny...”

“I never had sex with a girl yet...”

“I’ve never been in love...”

“And are you sad like Dad?” Thomas asked after three hundred miles were gone.

“Not like him. I’m not really sad at all. I have everything I want. Especially now.”

“But you look sad,” Thomas said. “You don’t hardly smile, and your eyes are always movin’ around like you’re looking for something all the time.”

“Up until now I guess I’ve always been looking for you. Dad tried to find you after a few years, but nobody even knew where your real father was. Finally they found him down in Texas, but by then he’d lost track of you.”

That first night on the train from Phoenix, Eric slept while Thomas sat and looked at the moon out of his window. Thomas felt safe sitting next to his brother. He didn’t care about being on the train or going to New York. He wasn’t afraid of the police finding him. The day Eric came to take him away, Thomas was already planning to leave. He thought he might go down to San Diego, where he’d heard a man could sleep under fruit trees and eat off their limbs for breakfast. But Thomas had a feeling of safety with Eric — between them they made something whole.

Thomas exhaled, and for a long moment he just sat there without taking air back in. The train lurched at a turn in the tracks, and he found himself breathing again, feeling deeply satisfied. For the first time that he could remember, he didn’t have to worry about who was coming or when his next meal would be or where he was going to sleep.

But looking out at the lunar-lit plains, Thomas began to think that he might die soon. Death made sense to him. So many people he had known were dead: his mother and Pedro and Alicia and Tremont, Bruno and Chilly and even RayRay. He had been so close to Death for so long that he wasn’t afraid of Him. But he didn’t want to die, because he wanted to be with Eric. Having a brother meant he had something to live for.

“Eric,” Thomas whispered in the darkness.

“Yeah?”

“You know what I worry about all the time?”

“Not having any place to live?”

“Uh-uh. There’s always a place to stay or hide,” Thomas said. “The thing that always scared me was if one day I went crazy and forgot about back home with you and Mama.”

“Which one?” Eric asked.

“Which one what?”

“Are you afraid of going crazy or forgetting?”

“They’re both the same thing.”

The next morning, in Denver, a young black woman got on the train. The two seats next to Thomas and Eric were free, but she went to a single seat four rows down.

“She’s pretty,” Thomas said to Eric.

“I guess,” Eric said, not really looking.

“Did you ever think that we would be together again on a train going to New York?”

“No,” Eric said. “I thought that I would probably die before seeing you again.”

“You?” Thomas grinned.

“What’s so funny?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t think about you dying.”

“I think about it all the time.”

“Why?” Thomas asked.

A young white man moved to the seat next to the young black woman. Thomas felt that maybe he should have done that, but then he thought, no.

“I think about killing myself,” Eric said seriously.

“What for? You got everything. And you said you’re not that sad.”

“Sometimes I think that it’s because of me that other people get hurt.”

“That’s crazy,” Thomas said. “Nobody gets hurt over you.”

“I met Raela, and three days later Drew killed Christie, shot you, and the police killed him.”

“And you think that it’s because you wanted her?”

Sheepishly Eric nodded.

Thomas looked away a moment. He noticed the white man talking to the young woman.

“I was lookin’ at the moon last night,” Thomas said, “while you were asleep.”

“So?”

“I remembered that I met this guy once who used to be a merchant marine, but he got a blood disease and they let him go. He said that he had enough money that he could have had a house and a car, but he found movin’ around a better life. He said that livin’ in a house was like spendin’ your life in a tomb.”

“You think he was lying?” Eric asked.

“I never thought so,” Thomas said. “But I never thought about it. But he said somethin’ else.”

“What’s that?”

Thomas thought that he heard the young black woman say something to the man next to her.

“He said,” Thomas continued, “that the moon has gravity and that the ocean rises up and falls down because of that.”

“Yeah,” Eric said, “the moon governs the tides.”

“So if that’s true,” Thomas said, “and if one day somebody said to you that you couldn’t have what you wanted unless the tide didn’t come in, what do you think would happen?”

“Of course the tide’s gonna come in.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “The tide’ll come in, the sun’ll rise, people will live an’ die, an’ you can’t do a thing about it.”

“I could kill myself.”

“But it wouldn’t make no difference except to the people who love you.”

“Excuse me,” someone said.

The young men looked up to see the girl who had gotten on earlier.

“Can I sit with you guys? That jerk down there started talkin’ shit.”

“Sure,” Eric said and Thomas wanted to say but didn’t.

“I’m Eric and this is my brother, Tommy, I mean, Thomas.”

“They call me Lucky,” Thomas said.

“They do?” Eric asked.

“I thought you said you were brothers?” the young woman said, settling next to Thomas. She had a wheeled, silvery suitcase that was meant to look like metal but was made from lightweight plastic. Eric got up and put the bag in the rack above their heads.

“We were separated when we were young,” the young white man explained.

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “We just found each other again.”

“You don’t look like brothers.”

Thomas and Eric told their story together, sometimes finishing each other’s sentences. As they spoke, the young black woman pictured the two men as little boys and found herself smiling at their graceless affection for each other.

Her name was Clea Frank. She was a native of Denver and now was on her way to a scholarship at New York University. She was a language major and wanted to work at the UN.

The young white man had tried to “put the moves on her,” and she wanted to sit with them so that he’d leave her alone. She was happy that Eric and Thomas were going all the way to New York.

“Don’t you feel funny calling him brother?” Clea asked Thomas some time after midnight as the train approached Chicago.

“That’s what he is. He’s the only brother I’ve ever had.”

Eric was asleep, and Clea had just come awake after napping through the late afternoon and evening.

“But he’s not your real brother — he’s white,” Clea said. “I mean, I don’t have anything against white people, but I don’t go around calling them my brother either.”

Thomas liked talking to her in the darkness of the train. In a way it was like his late-night talks with his mother or Alicia, when he couldn’t see them but only felt their presence.

“But we were raised together and we understand each other. He used to protect me when the big kids would pick on me, and I explain things to him.”

“But he has three years of college and you don’t have hardly any school. What do you explain to him? The street?”

Over the previous day and a half the three had changed trains twice and told their stories. Clea’s father was a baker in Denver, and her mother was a part-time nurse in the pediatric ward of the university’s teaching hospital. Clea was their fourth child. Her two brothers were high school dropouts, and her sister was a schizophrenic who lived on the street half the time and spent the rest of her life in various mental hospitals. Clea was the hope of her family, and she intended to make something of herself.

Thomas had told her about everything he’d done and about the police being after him. He didn’t think that she would tell anyone, and Eric was asleep by then.

“I can see things in other things,” Thomas said. “Eric’s real smart, but he doesn’t pay attention to everyday things like I do.”

“Like what?”

“Rocks and eyes and making things up.”

He chose that moment to take her hand.

“Your skin is so rough,” she said.

He pulled away, but she reached out and drew the hand back.

“I thought that you were making it up about living in the street,” she said. “But your hands are like a workingman’s hands.”

“I knew a woman that was schizo,” Thomas said. “She saw things too. There was a guy named Benny who would say that she was his ho, an’ he would get money from other homeless guys to have sex with her.”

“And did you have sex with her?”

“No. But I’d go sit with her sometimes, and if I was really quiet she’d get still and tell me about the things she saw.”

“Like what?”

“There was a big man who sometimes chased her and sometimes killed her, but then he could be nice and take her on his shoulders and show her the sea. It was a light-blue-and-pink ocean with fish that swam on top of the water and talked to the men in boats who sailed out there with them. And the moon was very close to the earth, and there wasn’t any cigarettes or alcohol.”

“She was crazy.”

“Maybe. But I can tell you what she said and you don’t call me crazy.”

“What was the woman’s name?” Clea asked.

“Lana.”

“Did you get Lana away from Benny?”

“No. She liked him and called him her husband.”

“But he was pimpin’ her.”

“Yeah, but she said that he never let those men hurt her.”

“That’s crazy. He took those men there in the first place,” Clea said.

“Life’s crazy,” Thomas replied. “When Benny would get money for Lana, he’d go out and buy us all pizza and a quart of root beer.”

“So you lived off her too?”

“I only stayed near them for about a week. And I don’t eat cheese or drink sodas. They make me sick.”

Thomas couldn’t have explained why he kissed Clea then. She didn’t know why she let him.

Clea had her whole life planned out. She would go to college and get her degree and then work at the UN translating French, Portuguese, Italian, and other languages for the sub-Saharan African nations. She would find a young black man who was either a doctor or a lawyer and marry him and move to Montclair, New Jersey, where she would relocate her parents and her sister. Her lazy brothers could fend for themselves.

But there they were kissing passionately in the early hours, in that hurtling train. Eric awoke once and saw them. Clea had her hand on Thomas’s while he kissed her neck again and again.

It was then that Eric thought about what his brother had said about the moon and tides. The Golden Boy, Eric, closed his eyes and muffled a sigh — his brother had somehow delivered him from his fear.

Eighteen hours later the train pulled into Penn Station. The boys put Clea into a yellow taxi, and she gave them her cell number.

“Call me if you want to come down and see NYU,” she’d said.

The boys met a nun collecting money for homeless children and asked her if there was an inexpensive place they could stay. She told them about a place uptown, and Eric put a twenty dollar bill in her jar.

That night Eric Tanner Nolan and Thomas “Lucky” Beerman were ensconced in the men’s residence at the 92nd Street YM&YWHA.

After the first few days of exploring together, the brothers started going out separately. Thomas discovered Central Park while Eric plumbed Lower Manhattan.

For the next three weeks they explored the city. Eric liked the big buildings and the Wall Street crowd. Down among the businessmen and — women he took tours, listened and learned firsthand about how the market was run. He made impromptu appointments with personnel officers, introducing himself as a UCLA senior who was looking for student programs in the stock market. He met a female stockbroker on a tour of Morgan Stanley. Her name was Constance Baker. After a fifteen-minute conversation, she took Eric under her wing.

He had told her pretty much the truth about his coming to New York. After a long separation he and his brother had come east on a holiday to have fun and get to know each other again. They were staying at the Y.

Constance was thirty-six, handsome, and in charge. She had a boyfriend named Jim Harris, who worked commodities and lived in a big house in Brooklyn. Constance had an apartment that overlooked the Hudson River in the West Village, where she slept during the week. On the weekends she stayed with Jim at his house in Brooklyn Heights.

Meanwhile, each day Thomas would walk south on Lexington until he got to 59th Street, and then he’d head west until he got to the southernmost side of the park. It was early April, and the cherry trees were filled with the white and pink blossoms of spring. There were vast lawns and horses and thousands of people wandering in the light of morning. He’d walk up the asphalt pathways each day until he got to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Once there he’d give what money he had and then spend hours among the paintings, sculptures, and jewelry of the ages.

He walked from ancient Rome and Greece into Africa and South America. He sat for hours one day among the wooden boats of the cannibals of the South Sea Islands. He imagined himself in the cramped canoes carved from whole trees, traveling under canopies of green along rivers and then out on the cobalt sea.

He spent five days in a row surrounded by the arts of China, India, and Japan. This section of the museum didn’t have many visitors, and often Thomas found himself alone, sitting on a courtesy bench in front of a great stone Buddha or in a re-created shogun’s home.

Thomas loved the stillness of the paintings. He imagined that this was what his grandmother Madeline saw when she was looking at the television, but the sound and action of the TV was too much for him; just the frozen moment of men and women in motion was enough to imagine a whole world of action and life.

His favorite tableau was a doorway to the left of the entrance of the museum. It looked upon a re-created room from Pompeii. There were rose-painted walls drawn upon with pedestrian scenes and still lifes, intricately tiled floors, and a slender stone bed behind which there was the image of a window. Thomas imagined looking down from that window on the people in the street below: men in togas and women in blues and reds with no electricity or cars, no airplanes, televisions, or telephones. People like him, lopsided and broken from just living, happy among one another, next to a sea that, Eric said, was as blue as a blue crayon.

Sometimes he would have silent dialogues with his mother or Alicia while meandering through the halls of art. But not so much as before, when he was on the streets of Los Angeles. Often he found himself thinking about the afternoons when he would take the subway downtown to Washington Square Park, where every other day or so he would meet Clea Frank for coffee.

Before Thomas first called her, Clea had decided not to see him or his beautiful “brother,” Eric. After all, she didn’t know them, and they had said that they were running from the law. But when Thomas called, he didn’t ask to get together.

“I just remembered that I had your number in my pocket,” the perpetual runaway said. “And I thought I’d see how you were doin’ in school.”

“It’s really good,” she said. “I like the classes, but they’re big, impersonal, you know.”

“How about the classrooms?” Thomas asked, remembering that awful light that drove him away.

“They’re big. Sometimes there’s as many as two hundred kids in the same class. But I can do the work, and the library’s nice.”

“Eric says that the library at UCLA is so big that you could sleep in it at night and nobody would find you... if you wanted to, I mean.”

“How is Eric?”

“He’s fine. He met a woman down on Wall Street who’s showin’ him about how investing works. I think he’s happy. I hope so.”

“Why would you worry about him?” Clea asked, forgetting that she didn’t want to know the boys. “He’s got everything.”

“He’s my brother,” Thomas explained.

“Deposit another ten cents for five additional minutes,” the mechanical operator said.

“I better be goin’,” Thomas said. “That was my last quarter.”

“What’s your number?” Clea asked. “I’ll call you back.”

“I don’t see one.”

“Why don’t you come down to Washington Square Park?” she said. “I could meet you under the archway at five.”

The phone disconnected, and Clea wasn’t sure that Thomas heard what she said. But at five she found him at the foot of Fifth Avenue and the park, sitting on the ground at the wire barrier that fenced off the crumbling arch from foot traffic.

“You made it,” she said, wondering to herself why she had asked him to come. It had been a week since she’d seen him, and she’d already been out on her first date with a good-looking senior who was about to start law school at Columbia.

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “I didn’t have any money, so I had to walk.”

“From where?”

“I was up at Ninety-second and Lexington, but that wasn’t so bad. I used to walk all day long when I lived in L.A.”

Clea didn’t know why she looked forward to seeing Thomas. She still talked to Brad (the future lawyer) and went out with him on weekends. But Thomas made her feel comfortable, and when he kissed her he seemed to be telling her something, something dear and intimate. When Bradley kissed her it was strong, and he seemed to know what he wanted. He made her want it too, though she hadn’t given in yet.

But she had agreed to go away with Bradley to Martha’s Vineyard with a bunch of seniors who had rented a house for the long weekend. They would stay in the same bedroom. She told herself that she wanted to go, and her new girlfriends in the dorm agreed that she should.

Thomas was walking across a broad green field in Central Park. The day was so beautiful that he didn’t want to go into the museum just yet. He had not been so happy since he was a child. All day he walked and studied and dreamed about kissing Clea, and in the evening he got together with his brother and they talked about their day.

Eric was liking New York too. Constance had gotten him an afternoon job as an intern, and he spent four hours a day with other college students learning about high finance. But in the evenings he was happy to be quiet and listen to his brother regale him with facts about Mesopotamian cylinder seals and pre-Columbian clay whistles.

Thomas was walking across that field, thinking about asking Eric to come with him to the museum tomorrow, Saturday, when he walked into someone’s chest.

“Excuse me,” he said as he looked up and saw the blue uniform of the NYPD.

“Put your hands up, son,” the policeman said, “up and behind your head.”

Clea’s cell phone rang just when she was beginning to wonder if Thomas had somehow figured out that she was going away for the weekend with Bradley. He hadn’t called about getting together, and they hadn’t seen each other since Tuesday. She still wanted to be friends with the lame man-child, but there was no future with him.

“Hello?”

“Clea, it’s Eric.”

“Hi. I was expecting Lucky.”

“They got him in jail.”

“What for?”

“Some kid mugged a woman in Central Park, and they grabbed Tommy for it.”

“He wouldn’t do anything like that.”

“No. They found the kid who did it, but Tommy didn’t have any ID and so they took him to jail as a vagrant.”

“A vagrant?” Clea was amazed. Maybe he really was jinxed.

“He told’em his name was Bruno Frank, so...”

“Where are you?”

When Clea called Bradley his machine answered. She was relieved not to have to talk to him, and also not to be going with him to the Vineyard.

The police station was on 86th Street. The sergeant in charge asked her a dozen questions about Bruno.

“What is his birthday?”

“January 12, 1986.”

“What is his middle name?”

“No one in our family has middle names.”

“Why doesn’t he have ID?”

“He doesn’t have a license and, anyway, he lost his wallet.”

Eric and Thomas had worked out all of the lies on the train ride before they got to Denver. Later on, after they had reached New York, Clea had told Thomas it was all right to use her last name. She hadn’t really believed that Thomas was in such deep trouble, or that the police would just grab him off the street for no reason.

Eric posed as Clea’s boyfriend from NYU.

“Your brother should really have identification,” the policeman said.

“I’ll get him to do it, officer,” she said, relieved.

The three caught a cab a few blocks away. Eric gave the driver an address on the West Side Highway near 12th Street. There they entered a twelve-story glass apartment building. The doorman seemed leery at first, but when Eric gave him his name he handed over the key and allowed them entrance.

As he worked a key on the door of the penthouse, Clea asked, “Why are they letting us in here?”

“Connie said that I could stay here on the weekends if I wanted. She said that she’d leave my name at the desk.”

“But shouldn’t you knock?” Clea asked.

“She spends every weekend with her boyfriend in Brooklyn,” Eric answered. “I thought we could go out in the Village this weekend. Connie said that it’s a pretty big place.”

The transparent walls allowed a nearly unobstructed view up and down the Hudson River. They could see the Statue of Liberty and across to Hoboken.

“I was supposed to go away with some kids to Martha’s Vineyard this weekend,” Clea was saying that evening after they had eaten take-out Chinese. “But I’d rather be here with you guys.”

Thomas had been quiet since getting out of jail. He sat close to the future linguist and ate hardly at all.

“What’s wrong, Lucky?” she asked.

“I don’t like bein’ in jail. But I think that’s where I’m gonna end up.”

“No,” Eric said. “I won’t let that happen.”

“I didn’t do nuthin’ today, man. I was just walkin’ in the park thinkin’ about you guys an’ the pictures. But those cops just grabbed me, and even though they knew I didn’t do nuthin’, they took me to jail. One suckah in there started beatin’ on me the minute he saw me. I didn’t even look at him.”

There was a pronounced lump over Thomas’s left eye.

“I’m sorry,” Eric said.

“They just see a black man,” Clea said, “and they think he did something wrong. It happens all the time.”

“I never had such a good life as I do right now,” Thomas said, unaffected by apologies or explanations. “I got friends and places t’sleep an’ that museum. You know, I could spend every day for a year lookin’ in there. I could live there. I asked them about bein’ a guard, but you know you need a real Social Security numbah and a phone and a high school degree at least to work there. And even if you walk in the park, you could get grabbed up an’ put in the Tombs.”

They were sitting on a leather couch in front of a low glass coffee table. The sunset lit a fire behind New Jersey.

Without warning, the door to the hall came open and a woman walked in.

Eric jumped to his feet.

“Connie,” he said.

“Hello, Eric.” She had short red hair and an aggressive, angular face.

When Thomas met her eye, he thought he saw disappointment, but then she put on a bright smile.

Sharp as a hatchet. The words came into Thomas’s mind. After a moment he remembered that it was something Ahn used to say.

“I’m sorry,” Eric was saying, “but I thought you said you were away on weekends.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “I just came back for a few things. Who are your friends?”

Eric introduced Thomas as his brother and Clea as his brother’s friend. Connie smiled and asked, “Does anybody want a drink?”

Clea joined their hostess for a glass of white wine. Eric had a Coke, and Thomas took tap water without ice.

Then Constance Baker regaled them with stories about her day. It mostly concerned trading and investments. A terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia caused a flurry because of a bus manufacturer. Only Eric seemed to understand what she was talking about.

But Constance was a good host. She asked Clea about NYU and then if Thomas was in school too.

“I wanted to go to school,” Thomas said, “but it wouldn’t make no difference.”

“Why not?”

“It just wouldn’t.”

“Hm,” Constance mused. “Eric, will you come into the other room for a moment please?”

They went into her bedroom, and she closed the door.

“I think she likes your brother,” Clea said.

“Everybody likes Eric. When we were kids he used to go to parties all the time.”

“Didn’t you go?”

“Not too much. No. I coulda gone, I guess, but I liked stayin’ home with my mother. We used to talk a lot.”

“Is that Eric’s mother too?”

“Not by blood. But she loved Eric and me.”

Clea took Thomas’s big hand in both of hers, and for a while they sat there looking out the window.

Then there came a low feminine moan from the bedroom.

“I was going to go away with a boy named Brad this weekend,” Clea confessed.

“How come you ain’t goin’?”

“Because I had to come get you outta jail.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“I’m glad I didn’t go anyway.”

“How come?”

“He’s nice and everything, but I like you. I don’t want to like you, but I do anyway.”

“Oh, yeah!” Connie declared loudly. “Oh my God!”

A heavy thumping began to sound through the wall.

“Why you like me?” Thomas asked.

“I think it’s your big hands. At first you look so small and weak, but then when I hold your hands it’s like you’re the strongest person I ever knew.”

Clea kissed Thomas, and Connie squealed.

“Do you have protection?” Clea asked.

“What’s that?”

“You don’t use a condom when you have sex with your girlfriends?”

“I never had no sex with a woman,” the young man said.

The thumping got louder, and Connie cried out clearly, “Do it, do it, do it!”

“You’re not serious.”

“Yes, I am. I never had no girlfriend to have sex with.”

“But you used to take drugs to prostitutes; you lived with a woman and her child for three years.”

“But I ain’t never had no sex. One time, on my twelfth birthday, Monique played with my thing. I mean, sometimes there was women who said that they would if I wanted, but I was too shy. And that was when I was livin’ in the street an’ I was dirty all the time. You know, it didn’t sound right. And anyway...”

“Anyway what?”

“Nuthin’.” Thomas didn’t want to say that he felt that his mother was watching him and that she would have been upset to see him with some prostitute or drug addict.

“Oh, baby, yeah,” Connie said through the wall.

“Do you want to sleep with me?” Clea asked. Her tone was both serious and soft.

“I’d like to try,” Thomas said.

“I bet we could find some condoms in Connie’s bathroom.”