Boo Boo, looking down at him, shrugged. “I don’t care.”
Lionel slowly sat back in his seat, watching his mother, and reached behind him for the tiller. His eyes reflected pure perception, as his mother had known they would.
“Here.” Boo Boo tossed the package down to him. It landed squarely on his lap.
He looked at it in his lap, picked it off, looked at it in his hand, and flicked it—sidearm—into the lake. He then immediately looked up at Boo Boo, his eyes filled not with defiance but tears. In another instant, his mouth was distorted into a horizontal figure-8, and he was crying mightily.
Boo Boo got to her feet, gingerly, like someone whose foot has gone to sleep in theatre, and lowered herself into the dinghy. In a moment, she was in the stern seat, with the pilot on her lap, and she was rocking him and kissing the back of his neck and giving out certain information: “Sailors don’t cry, baby. Sailors never cry. Only when their ships go down. Or when they’re shipwrecked, on rafts and all, with nothing to drink except—”
“Sandra—told Mrs. Smell—that Daddy’s a big—sloppy—kike.”
Just perceptibly, Boo Boo flinched, but she lifted the boy off her lap and stood him in front of her and pushed back his hair from his forehead. “She did, huh?” she said.
Lionel worked his head up and down, emphatically. He came in closer, still crying, to stand between his mother’s legs.
“Well, that isn’t too terrible,” Boo Boo said, holding him between the two vises of her arms and legs. “That isn’t the worst that could happen.” She gently bit the rim of the boy’s ear. “Do you know what a kike is, baby?”
Lionel was either unwilling or unable to speak up at once. At any rate, he waited till the hiccupping aftermath of his tears had subsided a little. Then his answer was delivered, muffled but intelligible, into the warmth of Boo Boo’s neck. “It’s one of those things that go up in the air,” he said. “With string you hold.”