On second thought, now was not the best time to tell Claire. He’d do so this weekend. What better time than when the two of them were off on a romantic getaway by themselves? Might she accept it better in a situation that reinforced the strength of their marriage, and how much he’d grown to love her?
Tom’s gaze shifted from the grass to the framed photos on the windowsill. From this distance the images were indistinguishable, but he knew them so well, the details of the smiling faces were clear in his mind. He lingered over those of Claire, wondering—if she found out, was there even the slightest chance she’d be so hurt that he’d lose her?
Don’t be silly, Gardner. Is that all the faith you have in your marriage? You tell her, and do it quick.
But what about the wishes of Monica Arens?
He stared at Kent’s picture again. The boy deserved to know who his father was. There were dozens of reasons, ranging from practical to emotional, from future health questions to future children. Kent, after all, had two half siblings, and their relationship could extend for years. His children would be cousins to Robby’s and Chelsea’s. They’d have aunts and uncles. Kent himself had a grandfather, alive and well and with a lot to give all his grandchildren by way of friendship, the passing on of family lore, paternal support such as that he was giving this weekend by staying with the kids. And what about when Kent was an adult faced with losing his only acknowledged parent? At times like that the support of siblings mattered so much. Was it fair to rob him of the knowledge of the existence of a brother and sister when it appeared he had little chance of ever getting one through his mother?
While Tom was still doing inner battle, his telephone rang. It was Dora Mae.
“Someone from the Rotary Club is on the phone and wants to know if they can use the school gym next spring for a fundraiser.”
“Doing what?” Tom asked.
“A celebrity donkey basketball game.”
Tom withheld a sigh. Politics again. Saying no to the Rotary Club was courting criticism, yet the last time he’d allowed animals in the gym it had been the American Kennel Club, and the dogs had made a mess, leaving not only a bad smell but permanent raised spots on the wood floor that had brought complaints from the athletic director and custodians alike.
Tom closed Kent Arens’s file and picked up his phone to handle one of the hundreds of administrative duties that sometimes tried his patience and had nothing whatsoever to do with education.
*****
The new Arens home was slowly coming to surface beneath the boxes that had been piled shoulder high the day the moving van pulled away. On Thursday afternoon, after she and Kent arrived home, Monica set a sack of Chinese carryout food on the kitchen counter and went to her bedroom to change clothes. When she returned to the kitchen dressed in a loose cotton peasant jumper, Kent was standing at the open French doors with his hands in the rear pockets of his jeans, staring out at the grassless backyard and the house under construction in the distance.
“Why didn’t you get out some plates?” she asked, glancing through the doorway that connected the kitchen with the dining room.
He acted as if he hadn’t heard. She opened cupboards and got out dishes, silverware, and two raffia place mats and set them on the dining room table, which held a new bouquet of cream silk flowers. In the living room, furniture was set in place and the labels had been removed from the new windows.
“The house is starting to get into shape, isn’t it?” she remarked, returning to the kitchen for the white cardboard containers and taking them to the table. She flipped open the boxes, releasing the aroma of cooked meat and vegetables into the air. Still Kent stood with his back to her, staring outside.
“Kent?” she said, puzzled by his reticence.
He took some time before turning around, doing so slowly enough that she knew something was bothering him.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said, and sat down in the loose-jointed, dissociated, teenage way that often said, Read my mind.
“Something go wrong today?”
“No.” He scooped out a mountain of lo mein, then handed her the container without meeting her eyes.
She helped herself and spoke again only when their plates were loaded and Kent was eating.
“You missing your friends?” she asked.
He shrugged in reply,
“You are, aren’t you?”
“Just drop it, Mom.”
“Drop what? I’m your mother. If you can't talk to me, who can you talk to?” When he went on eating without giving her so much as a glance, she reached out and covered his left hand on the tabletop. Quietly she said, “You know what the hardest thing is for a parent to hear? That answer—nothing—when I know perfectly well it’s something. Now why don’t you tell me?”
He got up abruptly, brushing around the back of his chair and heading for the kitchen to pour himself a glass of milk. “You want some?” he called.
“Yes, thanks.”
Her eyes followed him while he brought back two glasses and sat down. He drank half his milk, then set the glass on the mat.
“I met this really nice girl today ... actually it was Mr. Gardner’s daughter. She acted as my guide for the school tour, and you know how it is when you meet somebody—you sort of ask each other questions to be polite. She asked if I was going to college and I said I wanted to be an engineer like my mother, and one thing led to another and pretty soon she asked about my dad.”
Monica’s fork paused in the air above her plate. She stopped chewing and fixed her eyes on Kent with a peculiar look of alarm. When she finally swallowed, the food seemed to have trouble going down.
He went on speaking while studying the lo mein on his plate. “It’s been a long time since I went to a new school and had to make new friends. I sort of forgot how hard it is to answer kids when they ask me about my dad.” Monica began moving again, becoming immersed in her food. For a moment Kent wondered if she was trying to avoid the issue, then she spoke quite calmly. “What did she ask?”
“I don’t even remember, just what my father did, I guess. But this time I found it really hard to say that I didn’t have a father. And I could tell she felt like a jerk for asking.”
Monica set down her fork, wiped her mouth, picked up her milk, but stared out the window instead of taking a drink.
Kent said, “I guess you don’t want me to ask anything about him, do you?”
“No, I guess I don’t.”
“Why?”
Her gaze flashed back to him. “Why now?”
“I don’t know. Lots of reasons. Because I’m seventeen, and all of a sudden it’s starting to bother me. Because we’re living back in Minnesota, where you were living when I was born. He’s from here, isn’t he?”
She sighed and turned her gaze out the French doors again but gave no answer.
“Isn’t he?”
“Yes, but he’s married and has a family.”
“Does he know about me?”
Monica rose to her feet and carried her dishes away. Kent followed, continuing to pressure her. “Come on, Mom, I’ve got a right to know! Does he know about me?”
She was rinsing her plate under the running water as she answered. “I never told him when you were born.”
“So if he found out now, I’d be an embarrassment to him, is that it?”
She swung around to face him. “Kent, I love you. I wanted you, I always wanted you from the time I found out I was pregnant. Getting pregnant never even slowed me down. I went on working toward my goals and I was happy that I had you to work for. Hasn’t that been enough for you? Haven’t I been a good mother?”
“That’s not the point. The point is that if I have a father somewhere around this city, maybe it’s time I got to know him.”
“No!” she shouted.
In the silence following her outburst, he stared at her while his cheeks grew pink.
Realizing her mistake, she covered her mouth
tightly with one hand. Tears sprang to her eyes. “Please, Kent,” she pleaded, much softer, “not now.”
“Why not now?”
“Because.”
“Mom, listen to yourself,” he said reasonably, more quietly.
“It isn’t a good time for either one of us. You’re ... well, look, this move to a new city, a new school, making new friends ... it’s all you can handle right now. Why load more onto yourself by bringing up this issue now?”
“Did you think I never would, Mother?”
“I don’t know what I thought. I just ... I guess I thought ... well, when you were old enough to have children of your own, maybe then.”
He looked at her with questioning brown eyes, then said, “Would you tell me something about him?”
“I don’t know much.”
“You never kept in touch after I was born?”
“No.”
“But he lives here now?”
“I ... I think so.”
“Have you seen him since we moved back?”
She told her first lie ever to her son. “No.”
He stared at her with a solemn expression on his face, his mind working and wondering.
Quietly, he told her, “Mom, I want to know him.” Above all, she realized he had that right. Beyond that, it seemed almost as if fate had placed him and his father in the same arena for the sole purpose of forcing their introduction. Was it possible that some ineluctable energy was at work when the two of them were together, mysteriously shifting protons and neutrons in the atmosphere and giving Kent some sixth sense about his father? Could the bond of blood be so powerful as to key some recondite thought transference between the two of them? If not, why had he asked now?
“Kent, I can’t tell you now. Please accept that for the time being.”
“But, Mom ...”
“No! Not now! I’m not saying I won’t ever tell you. I will, but you’ve got to trust me. This isn’t the right time.”
She watched his face turn hard, then he spun from the kitchen and headed for his room.
He slammed the door the way he’d been taught years ago he was not to slam doors, then flung himself onto his bed and clamped his hands beneath his head. Through a haze of angry tears he stared at the ceiling.
She didn’t have any right to keep it from him! None! He was a person, wasn’t he? And a person came from two people, and a lot of what that person was and felt and hoped and yearned for stemmed from who he came from. And everybody knew who they came from but him! Well, it wasn’t fair! And she knew it, otherwise she would have stormed in here and chewed him out for slamming the door.
All his life she’d been doing extra things to make up to him for not having a dad, and all his life he’d pretended it didn’t matter. But it did, and he wanted to know. She’d had a dad, so she didn’t know what it felt like in elementary school when everybody drew pictures of their families and his just had two figures in it. She didn’t know what it felt like to stand in a circle of boys and listen to one of them tell about how his dad had put a cool set of handlebars on his bike for him, or taken him out fishing or shown him how to use a soldering gun. When they’d lived in Iowa, he remembered a boy named Bobby Jankowski, whose dad did everything with him, taught Bobby how to pitch and hit a baseball, took him camping, helped him make a soapbox car and enter it in a race. And one sublimely wonderful day when the schools closed for a blizzard, Bobby’s dad built a two-story snow fort with a stairway, windows made of hard plastic, and furniture made of packed snow. He took a lantern out and let the kids play in the fort after dark, and when they asked if they could sleep out in it in their sleeping bags, Mr. Jankowski said, “Sure.” All the kids except Kent got to try sleeping in that fort. Sure, they were all back in their own houses after an hour, but Kent’s mother gave an adamant “No!” right off the bat. Forever after, he’d been convinced that if he’d had a dad, he’d have gotten to try sleeping in that fort. He had never quite forgiven his mother for refusing to let him try it. Now that he was grown he realized that all those moms and dads knew perfectly well the boys wouldn’t last out in that cold ... but the chance to share the adventure for even one hour—that’s what Kent had missed.
Bobby Jankowski: the luckiest kid Kent had ever known.
And now today, that girl, Chelsea ...
When her dad had put his arm around her and introduced her, and later when she’d said how proud she was of him because all her friends thought he was a fair man—heck, Kent’s mother couldn’t begin to imagine the mix of emotions that caused in him. Uppermost was a sort of sick longing tinged with regret, followed today by anger and a strong resolve to find out who his father was and meet the man.
And no matter what, he was going to do that.
*****
Wesley Gardner drove a nine-year-old Ford pickup with more than eighty thousand miles on it, wore styleless trousers with flappy legs and a dirty blue fishing cap. He lived largely on venison and walleyed pike, loved a beer before supper, and brought smiles to the faces of his grandchildren when he walked into their house late Friday afternoon.
“Hi, Grandpa!” Chelsea said enthusiastically as he gave her a hug.
“Hi, snookums.”
She reached up to cock his silver-rimmed eyeglasses lower on the left side. “Your glasses are crooked again, Grandpa; what am I going to do with you?”
He took off his glasses and threw them onto the kitchen counter, where they ricocheted off the canisters and landed with the earpieces sticking up in the air. “Well, straighten the dang things then. They always bother you more than they do me. Robby, look what I brought for you and me.” Into his grandson’s hand Wesley thrust a plastic bag sealed with a Twist-Tie, holding a curl of white meat. “Walleye. We’ll cook it in some beer batter the way you like it.”
“Walleye. All right. They been bitin’ out there?”
“Caught this one yesterday off the sandbar. A four-pounder. Thought you were gonna come out this week and go fishing with me.”
“I wanted to, but I had football practice every afternoon except today.”
“So are you gonna whup Blaine this year or not?” Blaine High School was the archrival of the HHH Senators.
“We’re gonna give it a try.”
“Well, you better, by gol, ’cause I got a bet on with Clyde.” Clyde was Wesley’s brother and next-door neighbor. They lived out on Eagle Lake, side by side, in a pair of cabins they’d built when they were young married men. Both were now widowers, content to sit on their front porches and look at the water when they weren’t on it in their fishing boats.
“Chelsea, go out in my truck and get those tomatoes I brought, and there’s some new potatoes too. I dug up the first hill this morning and, say, do they look good. We’ll have us a supper fit for a king.”
Tom came through the kitchen carrying a garment bag and an overnight case. “Hi, Dad.”
“Well, if it isn’t Romeo”—he smiled as Claire followed Tom into the room—“and here comes Juliet.”
She kissed his cheek in passing. “Hi, Dad.”
“Where are you two lovebirds going?”
“To Duluth.”
“Well, you don’t have to worry about a thing back here. I’ll keep these two in line.” To the kids he said, “I remember once when your grandma was alive, I took her up there just north of Duluth during smelting season, and, say, those smelt were running so thick we were scooping ’em out of the river by the washtubful. Never saw a year when the smelt ran like that. Well, your grandma, she never really liked smelt, hated cleaning ’em, but she was a good sport and went along—just the same. We camped out in a tent that night, and next morning when I got up and stuck my foot into my boot, something wiggled in there. She’d stuck a couple smelt in each of my boots, and, say, when those fish started wiggling, I threw that boot so far the fish flew, and your grandma, she laaaaughed.” He drew the word out in fond memory. “Yup, your grandma, she was a good sport. Knew how to make fun out of har
d work, and let me tell you, that smelting was hard work.”
Tom came back into the kitchen after taking the clothes to the car. “You telling that old smelt-in-the-boot story again, Dad?”
“Not to you, I’m not. You get on out of here and leave us three alone so we can fry fish. Robby, I got a six-pack of Schlitz in the truck. You go get it and put it in the refrigerator for me, but leave one can out so I can mix up that batter.”
“Sure, Grandpa.”
“Well, I guess Mom and I are packed,” Tom said, leading the procession out to the driveway, where goodbye hugs were exchanged by all. Tom hugged his father last. It was a real hug, involving four strong arms and thumps on the back. “Thanks for staying with the kids.”
“Are you kidding? I wish I could do it more often. Keeps me young. You just have a good time with your bride.”
“I will.”
“And, Claire,” Wesley said, “if he doesn’t do right, just put a fish in his boot. Man needs a fish in his boot every now and then to make him stop and appreciate what a good woman he’s got.”
Tom didn’t need a fish in his boot. He realized what a good woman he had and performed the forgotten courtesy of holding the car door open for her.
“Woo,” she said, slipping into her seat. “I like this already.”
He slammed her door, got in, and they backed down the driveway waving goodbye. She waved for half a block down the street, then arched back against her seat and said to the roof, “I can’t believe we’re actually going!” Impulsively she caught Tom around the neck and planted a kiss on his cheek. “I’ve wanted to do this for so long. You’re going to be sooo happy you got this idea.”
She ran a finger down his Adam’s apple into the open neck of his shirt, then smiled to herself and settled back for the ride.