“You don’t care at all, do you?”

“Of course I do, I’m your mother.” She pauses, gives his leg a final squeeze. “Do you want pie? There’s pumpkin pie.”

“You’re so frustrating sometimes,” he says. “I could get in my car and go home right now if I really wanted to.” As soon as he says it, he wonders how he didn’t think of it earlier. What had he been thinking, coming all this way, leaving the apartment unattended? What if Alice decided to return? What if, knowing he wouldn’t be there, she came and collected her things?

“Don’t be dramatic,” his mother says. With this she gets up and goes to the kitchen, leaving Elliot alone on the couch. A moment later she calls from the kitchen, “Do you want a big slice or a little slice?”

“Big,” Elliot says. “And whipped cream.”

He then goes to his room—his childhood room, with the twin bed and the ugly alien spaceship Roy painted above his window long ago, without Elliot’s permission—and gets his bag in order. Soon, he will be back in the apartment with Alice’s things—her necklaces, her toaster oven, her collection of miniature animal figurines. Where he will put the mallard, he still hasn’t decided. For now, he hurries to the bathroom to gather his toiletries. He flushes the toilet so that his mother will think he has simply gone to the bathroom, that this is why he is not still sitting on the couch, waiting patiently for her to return with his pie. Neither she nor Roy will think about the mallard until they run into Mr. McBride, perhaps while getting the mail or pumping gas at the QuikTrip. “Elliot came by to get some kind of duck thing,” Mr. McBride will tell them. “Still don’t understand how it got in my pool, but stranger things have happened.”

First Love

Jett Kaplan decided it was time he had sexual relations. Everyone else was doing it. Bill Clinton had done it, which implied that Monica Lewinsky had also done it. Even Chance LaBouda, who was an entire year younger than Jett and who once admitted to tongue kissing his grandmother’s miniature schnauzer, even he had just made it with that gap-toothed sophomore Vicky Romano. So why not Jett? Certainly it was his turn. He was as good-looking as any fourteen-year-old boy had a right to be. Sure, his hair turned greasy in a matter of hours and the stubble above his lip had conspired into an upsetting suggestion of puberty, but he was on his way to handsomeness—he was sure of it. All he had to do was look at his father to see that good looks awaited him somewhere down the road. He imagined it this way, his taking a stroll and suddenly coming upon a parcel with the words HANDSOMENESS FOR JETT! written on the side. He would open it to the delight of his father, who had a full head of feathery hair and green eyes that made women at Kmart turn to look. That would be him one day, Jett was sure of it. Until then, wasn’t he entitled to some practice runs? Certainly the universe owed him something. Wasn’t this, at least, the arithmetic of fairy tales? Girl loses parents, gains magical shape-shifting pumpkin, couture glass slippers, and prince. Why not: boy loses mother to cancer, acquires globally recognized sexual mastery? The anniversary of his mother’s death had come and passed, but still he woke each morning listening for sounds of her—coffee brewing in the kitchen, her gold bangles clinking against a porcelain cereal bowl. What he needed was a bridge of adult bodily experiences to lead him away from the past, where his mother reigned with her brown sack lunches and grass-stained gardening gloves, and into his adulthood, where it would be all glass tumblers of whiskey and seedy midnight encounters with women in tight white T-shirts.