Blum Row of Narcissus

Blum Row of NarcissusBlum Roses in a Painted Vase IIBlum Roses in a Painted Vase IBlum Rose on Cracked Linen
hesitated and straightened up. Whatever he’d been about to reveal, he let slide. He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m tense ’cause my dad’s .”“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”“Sure. But it’s pretty tense, too.”“Why tense?”“Well, he’ll have some of his buddies with him, you know. He always does.”“You don’t care for his with the fragrance of popcorn and with the greasiness of canola oil tricked up to smell half like butter, where you had to check the theater seat for gum and candy before sitting down, where during the funny parts of the movie, you could hear not just your own laugh but that of a crowd.“And there’ll be a girl with him,” Fric continued. “There always is. He broke up with the last one before Florida. I don’t know who the new one is. Maybe she’ll be nice. Sometimes they are. But she’s new, and I’ll have to get to know her, which isn’t easy.”friends?”“They’re okay. They’re all unwinds. His buddies and him, they’re like a club.”A club in which you’re not and never will be a member, Ethan thought, surprised by a sympathy that tightened his throat.He wanted to give the boy a hug, take him to a movie, out to a [455] movie, not downstairs to the mini-Pantages here in Palazzo Rospo, but to some ordinary multiplex crawling with kids and their families, where the air was saturated