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Show -171 out," I said. Jacob's meatball skittered out from under his fork and rolled across the table. "I'm sorry, Alice," he said. Carlo giggled. "Clumsy Jacob. This is just like old times." His eyes met Alice's and his face unexpectedly clouded over. "I don't have to put up with it," he said. He pushed his chair back, stood up and ran out of the room. "What's wrong?" Morgan said. "Shouldn't somebody go see if he's all right? Was he crying? Poor Carlo-" Alice looked at her severely. "Leave the boy alone. All of you. He's all right; everybody needs to be by himself sometimes." She focused her eyes first on me, then on Jacob, and I realized for the first time that she feared us in something of the same way she had feared Adam: we might want to get too close. "Do you remember how you and Adam used to dance to the radio after dinner?" I said. Half-asleep up in our room Jacob and I could hear the two of them through the vent-pipe, shuffling clumsily, clasped to each other, frightened, ill-assorted and, I see it now, each in his own way desperate for love. As I am. For richness and then love. First there was Jenny, then Mary-Ellen, then Fancy, now Morgan. Childishly, I was still looking for a perfect union. A soul-to-soul connection. Father Ragni would have a theological explanation for that |