（外文电子版资料）SKHeartsInAtlantis.doc

PAGE PAGE 30 Low Men in Yellow Coats 1 A Boy and His Mother. Bobbys Birthday. The New Roomer. Of Time and Strangers. Bobby Garfields father had been one of those fellows who start losing their hair in their twenties and are completely bald by the age of forty-five or so. Randall Garfield was spared this extremity by dying of a heart attack at thirty-six. He was a real-estate agent, and breathed his last on the kitchen floor of someone elses house. The potential buyer was in the living room, trying to call an ambulance on a disconnected phone, when Bobbys dad passed away. At this time Bobby was three. He had vague memories of a man tickling him and then kissing his cheeks and his forehead. He was pretty sure that man had been his dad. sadly missed, it said on Randall Garfields gravestone, but his mom never seemed all that sad, and as for Bobby himself?.?.?.?well, how could you miss a guy you could hardly remember? Eight years after his fathers death, Bobby fell violently in love with the twenty-six-inch Schwinn in the window of the Harwich Western Auto. He hinted to his mother about the Schwinn in every way he knew, and finally pointed it out to her one night when they were walking home from the movies (the show had been The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, which Bobby didnt understand but liked anyway, especially the part where Dorothy McGuire flopped back in a chair and showed off her long legs). As they passed the hardware store, Bobby mentioned casually that the bike in the window would sure make a great eleventh-birthday present for some lucky kid. Dont even think about it, she said. I cant afford a bike for your birthday. Your father didnt exactly leave us well off, you know. Although Randall had been dead ever since Truman was President and now Eisenhower was almost done with his eight-year cruise, Your father didnt exactly leave us well off was still his mothers most common response to anything Bobby suggested which might entail an expenditure of more than