Heft - By Liz Moore Page 0,72

and I was all by my self. Had no one in the world to help me. Now I don’t’ want you blaming yourself for any of this now or ever down your life, this is me doing this and always have been . . . this is a coward thing to do I know but listen

I truely think you will be better off. Listen you can do whatever it is that you like in your life with no worry for your mom, is she sick, is she drunk, etc etc

You can do great things, you’re a baseball star aready, but Kel please go to college, I didn’t

And look at me

Now Kel I have to tell you something hard that I should tell you a long time ago. Your dad isn’t’ who you think he is. Kel Keller just a boy who married me when I was scared and pregnant and too young to know right from right. Told me he wd raise you as his own son if I never told you otherwise. Or our families. Call you by his own name. Then let us go when you were little. And I couldn’t tell dad and mom.

And I was always scared to tell you this but now I have something good to tell you: your dad is man named Arthur Opp. The one who sent me letters you remember. There you go, you always asked me were you named after him and I used to say no. But this was lie. He’s a good man, very smart and got a lot of class. He’ll tell you our story. He’s very smart and got a lot of class. If I was smarter as a kid I would have done everything I could to keep him around. He is living in Brooklyn and I spoken to him

But you call him when you’re ready. He s expecting a call from you. He’ll take care of you I know it.

Kelly I love you, I’m sorry, I’ll see you someday, we’ll all be together

Mom.

Other Arthur

• • •

• • •

The first time I ever sat down to eat without the intention of stopping, I was nine years old. It was just after Easter. I was far too old for an Easter-egg hunt, especially a solo one, but that was the spring my father left, & that, therefore, was the spring my mother was very set on pretending everything was normal, & so after church on Easter Sunday she had walked into the house with me & said “Look, Arthur, the Easter Bunny has left presents all over the house for you!” Dutifully I roamed from room to room, looking behind drapes & under cushions, & dutifully my mother took several photographs on a camera that my father had left behind. Those pictures made their way into one of the photo albums that now live upstairs. I was already pudgy, & in them I look absurd: an overgrown boy wearing short pants & knee socks, holding a beribboned basket meant for a girl.

A few days after the Easter-egg hunt I came home after having a miserable time at school. My mother was out but I did not know when she would be back. Normally I was a good boy & did my homework straightaway, but I could not concentrate—several boys had cornered me on my walk home & had called me by several nicknames they had for me—& so I wandered around the house for a while before stopping in the kitchen. There, on top of our refrigerator, was the Easter basket, full to the brim with foil-clad chocolate eggs, what seemed to me to be hundreds of them but was probably less.

The taste of them was precise: chocolaty, waxen, made from cream and cocoa. At first I was casual about eating them. After dinner I would stroll toward the basket and grab a few, eating them one at a time while I read with my mother. But that afternoon I snatched the basket from atop the refrigerator & brought it up to my room. I was in a very stormy mood & I sat on the edge of my bed and looked down at my plumpness & felt very disgusted with myself for not being the sort of athletic boy that brutalized me on the playground. I began to eat.

I became an efficient machine. Each foil wrapper came off more smoothly than the next. The chocolates lost their taste but kept their texture. The smooth fattiness