“Well ..” he said. “I guess I’ll just ask it straight out. ... Is Kent my son?”
She turned her head away. Staring across her tightly joined hands at the rolling backyard, she offset her jaw, righted it again, and answered quietly, “Yes, he is.”
He let his breath out in a ragged gust and whispered, “Oh, God.” With his elbows propped on the table, he covered his face with both hands. Adrenaline shot through him like an electric current, leaving his skull and armpits damp with sweat. He made a ball-and-socket of his hands and pressed his thumb knuckles hard against his mouth. Studying her, sealed within her armor of indifference, he wondered how to proceed. Life, it seemed, set no precedent for a situation such as this—sitting with a belligerent woman, a veritable stranger, discussing the son you never knew existed.
“I was...” He had to clear his throat and start again.
“I was afraid so. It doesn’t take a genealogist to spot the likeness between us.”
She said nothing.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
She rolled her eyes and said, “Isn’t that obvious?”
“No, I guess it isn’t. Not to me. Why?”
She flashed him an angry glance. “By the time I found out, you were already married to her. What good would it have done to tell you?”
“But I’m his father! Don’t you think I should have known?”
“And if you had, what would you have done—just what?”
He replied honestly, “I don’t know. But I’m not the kind of man who would have left his care entirely up to you. I would have helped however I could, even if it was only financially.”
She let out a disdainful huff. “Would you? If I remember right, your fiancée was already expecting a baby when you got married. I was no more a part of your future plans than you were a part of mine. I didn’t see what good would come of telling you, so I didn’t.”
“But didn’t you ... didn’t you think that was deceitful?”
“Oh, please ...” She pushed back her chair and rose with reproof in the trim of her shoulders. Moving away, she stationed herself amid the boxes in the living room behind him. He pivoted on his chair seat and followed with his eyes, crooking an armpit and wrist over the chair back. “We had already made one mistake,” she went on. “What good would two have done? You told me that night of your bachelor party that you were marrying her under duress, but you were marrying her nevertheless. If I’d found you afterwards and told you I was pregnant, I might have broken up your marriage, and what purpose would that have served?” She clapped a hand to her chest. “I certainly didn’t want to marry you.”
“No,” he replied, coloring faintly. “No, of course not.”
“We were just ... that night was just ...” She shrugged and fell silent.
Just a hot-blooded June night that never should have happened. Eighteen years later they both knew it and were suffering the repercussions.
She admitted, “It was as much my fault as yours. Maybe more, because I wasn’t on any kind of birth control, and I should have insisted on you using something. But you know how you are at that age—you think, ‘Oh, it’ll never happen to me. Not from just one time.’ And when I went there, I never dreamed anything like that would happen. Like I said, we were both equally to blame.”
“But you weren’t the one getting married the next weekend.”
“Maybe not, but I knew you were, so which of us is more guilty?”
“Me.” He got up and followed her to the living room, where he propped his hips against a stack of cardboard boxes facing her, a goodly distance away. “It was an act of rebellion, plain and simple. She was pregnant and I was being forced into this wedding I wasn’t ready for. Hell, the ink wasn’t even dry on my college diploma yet! I wanted to teach for a while, have a few years of freedom, buy a new car and rent an apartment with a swimming pool, live with the guys. Instead I was visiting gynecologists with her and trying to scrape together enough money for the rental deposit on a one-bedroom apartment. Getting outfitted for a tuxedo I didn’t even want to wear, for heaven’s sake! I just ... I just wasn’t ready for it.”
“I know,” she replied calmly. “I knew all that before you and I slept together that night, so you don’t have to plead your case with me.”
“All right, then you plead yours with me. Tell me why you went to bed with me?”
“Who knows?” She wandered away from him to stand looking out the open French doors, her arms crossed defensively beneath her breasts. “Temporary insanity. The opportunity was there. I was never what you’d call an arm-piece, so I hadn’t had a lot of attention from men. You were a good-looking guy I’d talked to at a couple of parties, enjoyed a few laughs with ... and then I delivered those pizzas to that hotel suite and there you were with all your crazy friends ... I don’t know. Why does anybody do anything?”
He sat on the stack of boxes regretting that night afresh.
“It bothered my conscience for a long time after I got married ... what I’d done with you.”
Over her shoulder, she looked back at him. “But you never told her?”
He took some time gnashing through more present guilt before giving a hoarse reply. “N ...” He cleared his throat. “No.”
Their gazes held, hers passive, his troubled.
“And the marriage—did it last?”
He nodded slowly. “Eighteen years, every one of them a little better than the last. I love her very much.”
“And the baby she was expecting?”
“Robby. He’s a senior at HHH.”
The full implications registered on her face before she breathed quietly, “Oh, boy.”
“Yeah. Oh, boy.” Tom rose from the boxes and wandered to another spot in the room. “The two of them are out on the football field together right now. And Claire ... well, Claire teaches twelfth-grade honors English, for which, it seems, your son—ah, our son—has registered.”
“Oh, boy,” Monica repeated. Her crossed arms actually loosened slightly for the first time.
“Claire and I have a daughter, too. Chelsea. She’s a junior. Our family is very happy.” He paused a beat, then said, “Your registration card doesn’t list a husband’s name, so I take it you’re single.”
“Yes.”
“Never been married?”
“No.”
“So who does Kent think his father is?”
“I told him the truth, that you were someone I met at a party one night and had a brief affair with, but that you were no one I ever considered marrying. I made a good life for him, Tom. I got my degree and provided a solid home with all the support a child could ask for.”
“I can see that.”
“I didn’t need a man. I didn’t want one.”
“I’m sorry if I did that to you, made you bitter.”
“I’m not bitter.”
“You sound bitter. You act bitter.”
“Keep your speculations to yourself,” she snapped. “You don’t know me. You don’t know anything about me. I'm an achiever, and that’s always been enough for me. That and Kent. I work hard at my job and at being a good mother, and the two of us have gotten along very well.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound critical, and believe me, in my occupation I’d be the last one to criticize any single parent who’s single by choice, not when she’s raised the kind of kid you’ve raised. I see so many dysfunctional families where the parents stay together for the kids’ sake. Those kids are in and out of my office every day, and the counselors and police and I are always trying to straighten them out ... mostly without success. If I sounded as though I thought you haven’t done a good job, I didn’t mean to. He’s ...” Tom ran a hand over the side of his neck, stirred anew by the little he knew of Kent Arens. He looked at her and gave a flourish of one hand. “He’s an educator’s dream. Good grades, goals, college plans, a wide variety of extracurricular interests—I imagine he must be a parent’s dream as well.”
/> “He is.”
He still stood by one stack of boxes. She still stood by another. Her antipathy had waned considerably during the course of their dialogue, but neither of them had grown more comfortable with the other.
“I sent him to a Catholic grade school.”
“Catholic,” he said, absently touching his chest as if straightening a tie.
“It gave him a good solid beginning.”
“Yes ... yes, of course it did.”
“And the sports helped, too ... and his high school in Austin was very highly regarded.”
He stared at her awhile, realizing she was defending herself when she had no reason to. A question came to him, pertinent to so much, though he hesitated awhile before posing it.
“What about grandparents?” he said, unable to stop himself.
“There was only my dad, but he died nine years ago and he lived here in Minnesota, so Kent never knew him well. Why do you ask?”
“I have a father who’s still alive. He lives less than ten miles from here.”
A moment of silence, then, “Oh, I see.” Her arms dropped to her sides and her eyes remained on his while she inquired, “Aunts? Uncles?”
“One of each, plus three cousins. And on your side?”
“I have one sister here. He barely knows her either. My family didn’t exactly send up flares when I announced that I was having a baby out of wedlock and intended to raise it on my own.”
The tension was taking its toll. Tom felt an ache across his back and shoulders, and returned to the dining room, dropping wearily onto a chair, one hand thrown across the polished walnut. While Monica remained standing, he sat silently; each of them was locked in solitary rumination. After a while she, too, sighed and came back to the table to sit.
“I don’t know what’s the right thing to do,” she admitted.
“Neither do I.”
From a distant construction site came the sound of carpenters hammering and saws whining while the pair at the table sat silently, trying to piece together some sensible conclusion to this meeting.
“For myself,” she said, “I’d like everything to stay as it is. He doesn’t need you ... really, he doesn’t.”
“I’d like the same thing, but I keep asking myself what’s fair to him.”
“Yes, I know.”
More silence, then she showed an unexpected burst of emotion, covering her face with both hands and propping her elbows on the tabletop. “If only I’d called your school and checked first!” She flung her hands wide. “But how in the world was I supposed to know you’d be working there? I didn’t even know you wanted to be a teacher, much less a principal! I mean, we didn’t exactly trade life histories in the few hours we were together, did we?”
For the duration of a sigh he let his eyes close and his shoulders curl backward around the chair. Then he sat erect and made a decision.
“For now, let’s let it ride. He’s got all he can handle adjusting to a new school, making new friends. If a situation arises where we have to tell him, we will. In the meantime, I’ll do what I can for him. I’ll make sure he gets on the football team, though my guess is that’s already settled. When it comes time to apply to Stanford, I’ll write a letter of recommendation for him, and as far as scholarships are concerned, he won’t need any. That much I intend to do—pay for his college education.”
“You don’t know him, Tom. I could pay for his tuition, too, but he doesn’t want me to. He wants the scholarship just to prove to himself that he can get it, so I want to let him try.”
“Well, there’s time to discuss that later in the school year. But listen ... if there’s anything that comes up, anything you need, anything he needs ... whatever ... you come and see me, okay? Just come to my office at school. Parents do that all the time, so nobody will think a thing of it.”
“Thanks, but I can’t imagine why I’d need to.”
“Well, then ...” He laid his palms flat on the table as if to push himself up, but changed his mind, experiencing a welter of emotions, and none of them settling. “I feel so ...”
“So what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Guilty?”
“Yes, that, too, but—it’s hard to describe—disjointed, I guess. As if there’s something else I should do, only I don’t know what. I walk out of here and watch him at school every day and don’t tell anybody he’s my son? Is that what I’m supposed to do? Hell, Monica, that’s a sentence! I earned it, I know, but it’s still a sentence.”
“I don’t want him to know. I really don’t.”
“The miracle is that he didn’t already guess. When he walked into my office and I studied him point-blank, the resemblance almost knocked me off my chair.”
“He has no reason to suspect, so why should he guess?”
“Let’s hope you’re right.” Tom pushed himself up and Monica rose to accompany him toward the front door. There, they paused uneasily, as if obligated to exchange a few friendly words to mitigate their sense of distance. Their total strangeness to one another felt misplaced in light of the fact that they were linked by a seventeen-year-old son.
“So you’re an engineer at 3M.”
“Yes, in research and development. I’m working on improving an electronic connector for the Bell telephone system. The prototype is being produced now, and we’ll be testing it here, then I’ll follow the project right through to the end, until the production tooling is designed and we’re turning out marketable pieces.”
“Well ... I’m impressed. It’s obvious Kent gets his math and science skills from you.”
“You’re not good at math?” she inquired.
“I couldn’t design an electronic connector, if that’s what you’re asking. I’m a people person, a communicator. It’s the kids I love, working with them, watching them during the three years they’re in high school turn from stumbling adolescents into bright, well-educated young adults ready to face the world and challenge it. That’s what I like about my job.”
“Well,” she said, “I think he got some of your communications skills as well. He does very well around people.”
“Yes, I could see that.”
They stood groping for more polite niceties, but none surfaced.
She opened the door. He turned and shook her hand. “Well, good luck,” he said.
“You too.”
They dropped hands. He felt an almost unreasonable reluctance to walk out of this house with the knowledge he had gained in it. Once he did there’d be no one with whom he could discuss this traumatic day in his life.
“I’m sorry,” he told her.
She shrugged. “I’ll make sure he’s at the new-student orientation tomorrow. Who speaks to them?”
“Among others, me.”
“Then you will need luck, won’t you?”
They stood in the doorway, unable to find an apt parting remark. “Well, I’ve got to go.”
“Yes, me too. I’ve got a lot of unpacking to do.”
“You have a nice house. It makes me feel good to know he lives here.”
“Thanks.”
He turned and descended the curl of concrete steps that took him down to his car. When he reached it and opened the driver’s door, he glanced back up to see she had already closed the door and returned inside.
*****
He was too agitated to go straight home. Instead, he drove over to school and parked close to the front door, where a small metal sign said MR. GARDNER. Football practice had ended at 5:30, and the afternoon activities bus had already left the grounds. He wondered if Robby had been forced to ride it. Since buying the car for the kids, Tom and Claire had been amused at how put-upon they acted when forced to ride a bus as they’d done for years.
The main front doors were unlocked. As he stepped through, they closed behind him with their familiar hiss and clack. Inside, the building smelled of fresh paint, reminding him of how little attention he’d paid today to the affairs of a sch
ool year that would officially begin next Tuesday. Somewhere in the distance the custodians—Tom’s greatest blessing—were still painting the halls and would work uncomplainingly till eleven or twelve P.M., as they would do every day from now through Labor Day. One of them was whistling “You Light Up My Life.” It echoed through the halls and brought a curiously calming effect to Tom.
He took out his key and unlocked the plate-glass doors to the deserted main office. Inside, it was blissfully quiet. The secretaries were gone. The phones were still. All the lights were off but the usual one, in the far corner. The walls were spotless and a lot of the boxes gone. Someone had even vacuumed the hard-surfaced blue carpeting.
In his office he snapped on the ceiling lights, laid Kent Arens’s registration card on his desk, and dialed the athletic office.
The coach picked up and said, “Yuh. Gorman here.”
“Bob, it’s Tom Gardner. What’d you think of the new kid?”
“Are you kidding?” Tom heard the twang of Gorman’s desk chair as he tilted it back. “He makes me ask myself what I’m doing wrong with my own.”
“You questioned him?”
“Of course I questioned him. The kid’s got his head on so straight I almost wanted to hear something foolish come out of his mouth just so I’d know he was for real.”
“Can he play?”
“Can he play? Boy, can he play!”
“So he’s on the team?”
“Not only on it, I have the feeling he could be the spark that makes it happen for us this year. He knows how to follow orders, how to handle a ball and avoid tacklers. He’s a real team man, plus he’s in great shape. I’m glad you had the good sense to bring him down to talk to me.”
“Well, that’s good news. A boy like that with college goals and plenty of gray matter between his ears, he’s the kind that makes our whole school system look good. I’m glad you put him on the team. Thanks.”
“I’m glad you brought him down, Tom.”
After he’d hung up, Tom sat at his desk, wondering what would happen during this school year, what changes his life would undergo because of all he’d learned today.