“Where’s my gun?” Little Malcolm put in. “Jimmy put my gun somewhere.”

“It’s right here where you left it,” Klane said. “Don’t go blaming everything on Jimmy all the time.”

“That’s probably the id part.” I was searching his skull for the divisions. “I bet that’s the id that’s always trying to start a fight. Yeah, that’s the id, over there in the middle. It’s sure not the superego. That’s us, Klane, when we boss them around.” I grabbed Little Malcolm on his way to get his gun from underneath the high chair and gave him a kiss and ran my hand across his head. Klane got up and went over to where Jimmy was standing in the doorway. She picked him up and cuddled his fat little body into her arms. She sat back down and let him hug her while she finished off her wine. I drank the rest of mine. Little Malcolm picked up his machine gun and went out into the backyard to look for targets.

“I don’t boss them,” Klane said, hugging Jimmy’s soft fragrant little body to her. “It don’t do no good to boss them, Rhoda. When you going to figure that out? All you can do is hug them and feed them and keep them out of trouble. Get trouble out of their way.”

“I haven’t finished reading it yet. I just barely got started.”

“Well, I got to get on them floors sometime today so don’t stay gone the whole time I’m here.”

“I’ll be back by noon.” I walked over to the door and looked out into the yard. Little Malcolm was pushing his playhouse toward the fence. Every week or so he managed to get it all the way to the fence and climbed out and ran away but usually we pushed it back to the middle of the yard before he made an escape. “He’s pushing his house,” I said. “How far do you think we ought to let him move it?”

“Let him go awhile. He don’t like being penned up. Nothing likes being penned up.”

I walked over to her chair and took her shoulders in my hands. “You won’t be penned up, Klane. Over my dead body will they put you in a jail.”

Jimmy raised his eyes and looked from one of us to the other, then smiled and curled his head down into Klane’s chest. The cerebral cortex was going down again. It was losing water. Its messages were stuck on sleep. Sleep, it was saying. Sleep some more. Everything’s okay. There’s nothing to worry about. Nothing to fear.

Chapter

31