One More Thing (15 page)

This story is about to take a more personal turn, and I am starting to feel less comfortable that I am telling it the way that I am. So let me come clean on a couple of things: I am the boy in the story, and this is the story of how I found out my father was not my father.

“Let me see the box,” he said quietly.

I handed it to him. He looked at it.

“Now let me see another box,” he said. “A losing box.”

“Which losing box?”

“Any of them.”

“There are seven—”

“Any fucking box,” he said quietly. “Any box. All of them, just one—any of them.”

I walked over with all the boxes. He looked at two and then put the rest back down.

“Go to your room for a few minutes. Your mother and I are going to discuss this.”

“There are values,” my father said an hour later to begin the unprecedented second family meeting of the day, “that some people have—that many people have—that most people have. That we
understand
—that we
respect
, definitely—that are the prevailing values of the day, even, and we respect that, too, on its own terms, but.
But
. Respecting a value doesn’t necessarily mean sharing that value—often, but not always—only sometimes, anyway. For your mother and I … We in this household … That’s what we believe.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. My mother looked
like she knew what he was supposed to be talking about, but not why he was saying it the way he was.

“We are not going to claim the prize,” said my mother.

Now I understood why my father had answered in such a nonsensical way: what he was trying to say made no sense.

“Why?”

“Because it’s based on actions that we don’t allow in this household,” my mother said. “It’s the result of broken rules.”

“But I already broke the rule, and you forgave me,” I said.

“It doesn’t work like that,” said my mother.

“Why don’t you punish me for that,” I said, “something fair, like grounding me, and then I’ll keep the hundred thousand dollars. You wouldn’t fine me a hundred thousand dollars just for going to the store when I wasn’t allowed to, right? You’d ground me, right? So just ground me. Okay?”

“But everything that would follow would be based on breaking that rule,” said my father. “So any change in our lives—and there would be a great many—would be following from a corrupt core, from a foundation of values we didn’t believe in. Do you understand?”

“This is a test, in a way,” said my mother. “A test of fate.”

“Yes, except there’s no such thing as fate, there are only consequences of previous actions, and coincidences, which are the consequences of factors and decisions which are too many and too minute to be aware of—”

“Okay,” said my mother. “Okay, stop. In any case, it’s a test of our values.”

“How about this,” I offered. “You put all the money in a college fund for me. I’m not even allowed to touch it until I get to college. And then, it’s only to pay for college.”

I stared at them, daring them to turn down a prospect as joyless
as this one. If I won a hundred thousand dollars and it all went into a college fund, would it still be the greatest single letdown of my life? Yes. I had no interest in college; I planned to be a professional wrestler. But at this point I just needed to find out if this free-falling disappointment even had a floor.

“No,” said my mother.

“That would still be basing everything on something that isn’t our value system,” said my father. “In terms of college, if you work hard, there are still plenty of ways to earn scholarships or find alternative paths toward a good education without a lot of money.”

“I thought you said all of higher education was corrupt and based only on money,” I said.

My mother looked at my father.

“I said that in a heated moment, in the midst of a stressful tenure … No, there … there are definitely ways …”

I no longer understood my parents.

“Can I at least keep the sugar cereals?” I asked.

They looked at each other.

“Yes,” said my mother.

“
All
of them?”

They smiled, relieved to have this conversation end on the word “yes.”

“Yes,” they said.

“Okay,” I said.

It wasn’t okay at all, and looking back, I think that question represented the birth—forced under high pressure at the age when a moment like this is bound to be born anyway—of my first pulse of truly sophisticated manipulation.

In that instant, it had suddenly come to me that if I were to
ask that adorably missing-the-point question, I would appear to them like the fifth grader who would leave it at that, who would trust that his parents were always right, instead of the fifth grader who now knew, with certainty and for the first time, that his parents were wrong and that it was his destiny to use all the powers he had, including a calculated flash of the belovedly unpredictable kid logic of their only child, to set things right.

Tom Salzberg was a fifth grader who was old for our grade and acted it. We weren’t exactly friends, but I considered us respectful acquaintances, and I had a sense he would know what to do with this information. I found him at his locker in the three minutes between homeroom and library and quickly told him everything.

“Mm-hmm,” he said. As if this happening were one of many things like this he had to balance today. As if it had happened before. “Mm-hmm. Do you know where the ticket is?”

I told him as we walked into library that I was pretty sure I knew where it was in the house and that in any event I could find it. To show him how much I meant business I rushed through a recap of how I had hidden my motives behind the “can I keep the sugar cereal” story, which I thought would at least amuse him, but even this abridged version he seemed to find uninteresting, and by now he was sitting at the one library computer terminal that had internet, which I knew meant I was about to lose his attention for good. “If you can get it by Thursday,” he said, eyes fixed on the computer monitor, “we have a half day then for teacher meetings. We’ll be out at eleven-thirty. Battle Creek, Michigan, is an hour and a half away. That’s where Kellogg’s headquarters is.” He tilted the screen toward me and revealed a picture of an immense, futuristic, fortress of a building—the last
wholesome fantasy of a middle-school boy. “Tell your parents you have a soccer game after school and my parents are giving you a ride home after dinner. Tell them that we’re having pizza.” I didn’t play soccer or eat pizza, but I accepted this story unedited, and so did my mother when I got home from school that afternoon.

There was then, in our house, an unused staircase behind the kitchen that my mother had long ago decided was too steep to be safe. Instead, it had been repurposed as a mostly empty diagonal closet where my parents kept things like tax returns and unwrapped presents. It was closed off by an unlocked door on both sides, and while I had glanced quickly inside a handful of times over the years whenever one of the doors had somehow slightly opened, I had never actually personally opened the door, for fear of accidentally ruining my own birthday or the still-ambiguous-by-mutual-agreement myth of Santa Claus.

Separately, I had, two years earlier, toward the beginning of third grade, realized in an epiphany over an inspiringly decadent breakfast-for-dinner that midnight was not actually the middle of the night: if the night was something that started at 8:00 p.m. and ended at 7:00 a.m., as I knew it to be, then the middle of the night was actually 1:30 a.m. My parents happily confirmed this for me. Although my bedtimes had shifted in the years since, I still believed with stubborn auto-loyalty that 1:30 remained the official unofficial middle of the night.

That night, I stared at my clock until it hit 1:29. Then I took a full minute to step out of bed, wearing both socks and slippers, determined to take no chances, and shuffled out of my room on the heels of my feet, rather than tiptoe, which I had noted long
ago was actually more squeaky than “tip-heel,” my own invention as far as I knew.

I stepped out and opened the door that I had walked by thousands of times, and then for the first time I took one step after another down the staircase, until I was alone amid the clutter and mystery, unarmed except for a small emergency flashlight that cast a small square light into the cold diagonal corridor, where everything was more or less the color of manila.

On top of a video game I had asked for a long time ago was a dust-free white envelope. I picked it up. It wasn’t even licked shut. Inside was the winning strip of cardboard from the Corn Flakes box. I put it in my pajama-pants pocket and returned the envelope to where it was. I slipped back up the stairs, tip-heel the whole way, closed the staircase door, put the cardboard code under my pillow, and waited for 7:30, never closing my eyes except to blink, constantly checking for the code with my hands to make sure it hadn’t somehow evaporated.

The dictionary that had been used for the now-even-more-irrelevant contest rematch was still on my dresser. Out of an instinct I didn’t have the word to describe yet—irony? panache?—I put the winning code in the middle of that dictionary, put the dictionary in my backpack, and took it to school.

At lunch, I found Tom Salzberg in the cafeteria and showed him the scrap of cardboard.

Tom stared at the numerical code and the
YOU ARE A WINNER
message right below it for a long time. He had been convinced the whole thing was real when he had only my word to go on; now, staring at the actual evidence, he seemed somehow less sure.

“50-50,” he finally said.

“No,” I said. I hadn’t expected to pay him anything. “80-20,” I said.

He squinted in consideration for a second, then made a face identical to the Robert De Niro face that had failed to win him placement in the class talent show, and shook my hand.

“I’ll buy the bus tickets with my mom’s credit card, and then I’m going to call us a taxi to take us to the Greyhound station.”

I had never been in a taxi before but didn’t feel like letting him know that.

“Shotgun,” I said.

The Battle Creek, Michigan, headquarters of Kellogg’s looks like a spaceship built to look like a pyramid that was then hastily converted into a public library during a period of intergalactic peace. It looks exactly as you would hope it would look. As fun as it is to try to describe, I still recommend you look it up. It’s really something, and it will help you imagine how it felt to be a pair of eleven-year-old boys walking up to it, secretly carrying a secret code worth one hundred thousand dollars in a backpack.

We walked through the glass doors as if we had a business meeting ourselves, as men and women streamed in and out of the building around us, none of them questioning our right to be there. When we finally reached the all-glass reception desk inside, I realized I didn’t know what to say.

Tom did.

“Prize Department, please,” said Tom.

“I’m sorry, how can I help you two?” said the reassuringly plain-looking woman at the desk, a woman with brown hair and plastic glasses who looked like she could have been one of our friendlier teachers.

“Prize Department—Sweepstakes Prize Subdivision,” said Tom with even more authority. “Also check under Giveaways—Secret Code Redemption.”

“Do you have a name, or a person you’re looking for?” she asked. I took the winning code out of my backpack and—holding it tight with two hands, not trusting even this palpably kind woman, our one friend here so far—held it for her to see, but not touch.

“Oh my. Congratulations! How exciting. Are you two brothers?”

“No way,” said Tom. “Prize Department, please.”

“It’s my ticket,” I said.

“What’s your name?” the woman asked. I gave her a copy of my school ID.

She paused as she read the name and looked at me again.

“Let me just copy this, and you wait here.”

We sat on the stiff leather couch for five minutes until an extremely tall, extremely confident, very handsome and athletic-looking man in a notably soft-looking suit walked up to us and smiled. “Congratulations. Which of you is the winner?” he asked, but he was staring at me the whole time.

“I am,” I said.

“Congratulations,” he said again, extending a hand. I stood up so I could shake his hand appropriately, and he shook it so hard it hurt. “Come to my office and let’s discuss this.”

Tom stood up, too.

“Just the contest winner,” said the man.

Tom kept standing. “It’s a trap,” he blurted, his voice breaking, exactly as our books on puberty had warned us might happen but had never happened so far. “It’s a trap!”

“It’s not a trap,” said the man.

“What department are you in?” asked Tom. “Can we see some ID?”

“I’m Executive Vice-Chairman of the Kellogg’s corporation,” said the man in the suit, “and I don’t need to show ID here.”

Tom sat down.

The man gestured toward the long hallway ahead of us—
after you
, the gesture said—and even though I didn’t know where we were going, he let me lead the way, until we got to the elevator and he pressed the top button, and he took it from there.

The office was huge, and quiet. Windows looked out over all of Michigan, to Grand Rapids and beyond; there were so many windows, or more accurately so much window, that the room was very bright even with none of the lights on. Little toys were neatly lined up across his long windowsill—a tiny basketball, a tiny pistol, a tiny lemon—each of them sitting on top of a bronze label on a plaque. On the walls were about a half dozen framed, colorful drawings, each signed by many children, thanking him for their “super” and “great” and “super great” experiences on field trips.

“You have an unusual last name,” the man said, and then said all five syllables of it correctly.

I said yes, I had never met anyone else with it, and it seemed that no one could ever spell or pronounce it. I was impressed he had gotten it right.

He asked more easy and straightforward questions: who my parents were and what they did, what town I was from, whether I had brothers or sisters. It was a great relief, in the midst of such an intimidating situation and environment, to be asked questions I could answer without even trying to think. I kept talking,
letting each answer of mine go longer than the last, which led him to even more questions. How’s school? Public, private? Easy, hard? Sports? Baseball, soccer? Tigers, Red Wings? Video games? Friends, best friends, bullies, girls? What do you want to be when you grow up? How do you get along with your parents? Do they often buy Kellogg’s products?