Tutor

Linda Marx Gardner awoke from a dream and felt her husband's erection against her hip. Not nudging it, not demanding; just there. Earlier in her marriage, or maybe more accurately very early, on predawn mornings like this, the bedroom dim and shadowy, Linda would have taken hold of Scott and started something. Those predawn somethings, their bodies still loose and heavy with sleep, would usually turn out pretty good, sometimes better than that. Linda got out of bed. In her dream she'd been frantically erasing words from sheets of pink paper, but the words themselves were all forgotten. As she went into the bathroom, Scott made a little sound in his sleep, one of those soft grunts that indicate agreement. She had a funny thought, not like her at all: was he erasing something too? Then she was in the shower, her appointment book opening up in her mind, time blocks dense with her neat writing. There was going to be an overrun on the Skyway account, most of it from the photography screwup, but not all. Linda tried to figure out where the rest of it came from, letting go of everything but work so completely that she jumped as she caught sight of Scott through the steamy glass, his naked back to her as he stood before the toilet. She called to him: "Can you wake Brandon?" Scott said something she didn't catch because of the shower's noise, almost a roarwhen they'd renovated instead of moving up from West Mill to Old Mill, they'd used nothing but the best, in this case the 10-Jet Tower from Kohler's Body Spa collectionand when she looked again he wasn't there. The water, hot and pounding, felt so good she could have stayed there all day. Linda turned off the shower at once. She got out, reaching for a towel with one hand, flushing the toilet with the other. Scott always forgot, or didn't bother, or something. Her watch, on the granite sink topblack granite streaked with midnight blue, the nicest feature in the whole housetold her she was running two or three minutes late, nothing to be all tense about. She took a deep breath. "Bran? Bran? Bran? Bran?" Over and over. The word penetrated Brandon's dreams, twisted them out of shape, finally woke him. "Brandon? You awake, buddy? It's late." Brandon came awake enough to know he had the covers pulled way up, know that he was totally warm, totally fuzzy, totally unable to get up or maybe even move at all. He got one eye open, not much, just enough to peer at his father through gummy lashes. His father: towel wrapped around his waist, shaving cream on his face, razor dripping in his hand. "I'm really not" "Forget it, Brandon. You're going to school." "I feel like shit." "You're going. And watch your language." Brandon didn't say anything. "Show a little life. Sit up or something. Don't make me come back here." "All right, all right," Brandon said, but the only thing moving was that one eyelid, closing back down. "And this room is really getting out of hand." Brandon, almost asleep, barely caught that last bit. The inner fuzziness repaired itself quickly, knitting up the little hole poked through by his father and then some. * * * A cut-glass prism dangled in the window of the bedroom across the hall from Brandon, a window that always caught the first light. As Brandon sank back into deep sleep, the sun blinked up through the bare tree limbs out back, sending a ray through the prism. A tiny rainbow instantly printed iAbrahams, Peter is the author of 'Tutor', published 2003 under ISBN 9780345439413 and ISBN 0345439414.