Sons from Afar (20 page)

Sammy just nodded his head.

“My dad says it's because we used to live in the city, because we lived in Kentucky before they got married. He says my mother keeps thinking Crisfield is the same as Louisville, with city streets. But it's not at all like a city.”

“I guess not,” Sammy said.

“He's not my real father,” Robin said.

“Who isn't?”

“My dad. They only got married last Christmas. He's a French teacher but my real father is a jet pilot, in the air force. He flew in the war, in Vietnam. He's got lots of medals. He's a colonel.”

The kid was really proud of his father. Sammy guessed he could see why.

“I've got his picture, I'll show you,” Robin said.

They turned off at one of the houses, different from its neighbors only in being light brown instead of white or red. There was a car parked beside it, with Kentucky plates, a beat-up blue sedan. “Is that your car?”

“My mom's. She's a teacher too, but she teaches art, in the elementary school. But she can't get a position until next fall, so she just substitutes. She promised she'd never substitute for my class. Her name's Norton, not Kelly.”

“Okay,” Sammy said.

Each of the other houses had a car parked beside it. Each house sat on its little flat square of lawn in exactly the same position, like houses on a Monopoly board. A couple of the backyards had swing sets in them, but most just had grass that stopped abruptly at the edge of the field that lay behind, where soybeans grew low and bushy. Robin waited by the back door at one end of the long rectangular house while Sammy kicked down the stand to park his bike. The front door of the house was smack in its middle, facing the street, just like all the rest of the houses. It was all so neat and tidy, and all so much the same, it made Sammy nervous.

“Are you coming?” Robin asked.

“Okay,” Sammy said.

Sammy expected the inside of Robin's house to be boxes, like the outside. But the inside didn't match the outside at all. The inside felt bigger than it could possibly be. They entered into a kitchen, where plants in brown clay pots hung down in front of the windows, and the walls were crowded with posters in bright crayon colors. A little table in front of the windows had two glasses and a plate of cookies set out. “I'm home,” Robin called. A woman's voice answered him, but she didn't appear.

“Hungry?” he asked Sammy.

“Sure,” Sammy said. He sat down at the table, in one of the three chairs, and looked around the room. He liked those pictures, with their shapes that almost looked like something, almost like a person or almost like a flower, almost like stars. He liked the way the counters and refrigerator and stove sparkled. This
kitchen was entirely different from his grandmother's kitchen, which was old wood colors and yellowy light. This one was bright and new looking. Sammy knew he liked the old, worn-down-with-living look of his grandmother's kitchen; but he liked this one, too. Every place he looked he saw something to like: the potholders, their colors as bright as the pictures, hanging over the stove; a wooden bowl filled with apples and oranges and bananas on the counter by a shiny metal toaster; the leaves of the plants hanging down ferny green in the sunlight that came through the window. Robin poured two glasses of milk and sat opposite Sammy. “We just moved in, practically,” he said. He picked up a cookie and ate it. Sammy did the same. These were peanut-butter cookies, made from scratch, with marks where the fork had flattened them and a perfect, almost crumbly, texture. He took a couple more.

“Your mom's a good cook.”

Robin, his mouth full, agreed. “It's because she isn't working. She has lots of time for cooking and things when she doesn't go to work. Want to see my room? We have to wait for Dad to get home, anyway, before we can discuss things.”

Sammy finished his milk and put the glass in the sink. He grabbed some more cookies and followed Robin out of the room. They went through a long combination living and dining room, a wooden table at one end with a bowl of flowers on it, Indian rugs on the floor, and bright nubbly cushions on the sofa and chairs, then down a narrow hallway. Robin opened the second door.

Robin's room should have been just a little box with two windows, but it had been turned into something wonderful. “Hey, wow,” Sammy said, looking around.

He saw a ladder, leading up to a kind of loft, and underneath that, in what looked almost like a cave, was a desk, with bookcases
beside it. A bureau and some open shelves filled with games were on the opposite wall. The floor had a bright red and blue rug on it. “Neat,” Sammy said.

“Dad built the bed, go ahead up,” Robin said. Sammy scrambled up the ladder and saw that the whole loft was a bed, with a wall light above the pillows, and a shelf to put books on. The ceiling above the bed wasn't painted white, but covered with an intricately designed fabric that hung over the bed like the underside of a fancy cloud. There wasn't room to stand up, but there was plenty of headroom if you were sitting up. Sammy sat there for a minute, trying to forget the boy below. In this bed, you'd almost be in a tree house; it felt a lot like a tree house, the bed. It would be like sleeping in a tree.

He leaned over. “Your father built it?”

“No, Dad did. And Mom found the fabric for the ceiling. She made the rug, too. She weaves.”

“I thought you said she was a teacher.”

“She does crafts and all kinds of things. Weaving, sewing, too.”

“Did she do those paintings in the kitchen?”

Robin started to laugh. “You mean the Matisse cutouts? Wait'll I tell her you thought she'd done the Matisse cutouts.”

Sammy didn't know why Robin was laughing at him. “So what,” he said. “So what's so funny?”

“Because Matisse is—I'm sorry, Sammy, I know you wouldn't know anything about Matisse. I'm not laughing at you.”

“Yes, you are.” Sammy climbed back down the ladder.

Robin started to object, then stopped. “Yes, I guess. But I am sorry, I know it's not your fault if you don't know something. I mean, I only know because my mom's been taking me to museums from about the minute I was born. That's one of the things my father didn't like. Look, here he is.”

The photograph had been put into a silver frame. It was an officer, with his cap on exactly straight, and his expression serious. He had dark hair, like Robin, but his face was more square, the jawbone square, the mouth a thin straight line. He didn't look alive, Sammy thought; he looked like a wax figure, not a person.

“That was five years ago,” Robin said. “He gave it to me. I guess he'll look older now, probably. You can't see his medals.”

“What do you mean five years ago? Haven't you seen him?”

Robin shook his head. He looked at the picture, not meeting Sammy's eyes.

Understanding, Sammy had a little jumping feeling inside him; not a nice feeling at all, he knew, like a little black imp jumping up and down; because he guessed things weren't so exactly perfect for Robin after all. But why should that make Sammy glad? Unless he was jealous? But Sammy didn't get jealous of people, and why should he envy Robin, anyway. Why should he envy anyone? He didn't, that was the truth. Except for just that little short jumping feeling—gone now.

“Let's go outside. Do you have a soccer ball, or another lacrosse stick?”

“We've got a baseball and two gloves,” Robin said. “Let's.”

Mrs. Norton was in the kitchen as they went through, and Robin introduced her but Sammy barely paid attention other than to say hello. “The cookies were good,” he said, turning at the door to tell her.

For some reason that made her laugh. He didn't mind.

They had to play out in the narrow backyard, because Robin said he wasn't allowed to play in the street. “It's because we lived in a city,” he said. He had an okay arm, and the ball went back and forth between them with satisfying speed. “Dad says all Mom's reflex reactions are a city person's. So we have to be patient with her, until she gets used to how different things are here.”

“Dad?” Sammy was having trouble keeping these fathers straight.

“He's my stepfather but he wants to adopt me. So I call him Dad.”

“Why do you need to be adopted?”

“So we'll all have the same name and be a family. Because he likes me, mostly, that's what I think.”

“Do you like him?”

“Sure. He's not my real father, though.”

“Yeah, but it doesn't sound like your real father is anywhere around.”

He shouldn't have said that, he could tell, but it was too late. Robin held on to the ball, kind of rubbing it into his glove, twisting it there, studying it. “It's a lot of work being a colonel,” Robin said. “He flies F-110s. I've got a model of one of those. I'm going to be a jet pilot too, if I'm good enough.”

“By that time,” Sammy said, trying to ease things up a little, “jets will probably be obsolete. You'll have to fly—I dunno, some kind of spaceship, like—”

“In
Star Wars
?” Robin's face lit up. He tossed the ball to Sammy. “Do you think things will move that fast?”

“How would I know?” Sammy joked, glad Robin was so easy to distract. “I left my crystal ball at home.”

“I can never tell,” Robin said, “whether I should be scared, about the bombs and all, or excited about space exploration.”

“I know what you mean.”

“My dad says he can't tell either. I thought I wanted him to say something different, you know? But it turns out I feel better knowing that he doesn't know. Isn't that weird?”

What was weird, Sammy thought, was the way Robin had this terrific stepfather but kept insisting on his real father. If Sammy had had a stepfather, he wouldn't have minded: and now he
wondered why his mother never did have another boyfriend to marry. Maybe it was because she had all those kids. Or maybe she didn't want any boyfriend except his father, maybe she loved him and didn't know how bad he was. Maybe if you loved someone, it didn't matter how bad he was.

They tossed the ball, talking a little every now and then, until a white sedan pulled up behind the blue one. A man got out of it. He waved to Robin, then went into the house. “My dad,” Robin explained. Sammy had figured that. “He stays at school to get his work done there, so he can concentrate on us when he gets home. Mostly that works, but sometimes he has to bring work home anyway. He likes us. Well, Mom especially. They met at a teacher's convention and he wanted to marry her right away. As soon as he clapped eyes on her, he says. I dunno, Sammy, can you imagine that?”

“Getting married? No.”

“Anyway, she wouldn't, not for a couple of years. Dad came and took a summer job in Louisville, so he could see us a lot. See her, especially. He told me my father sounds like the kind of man it would be hard on a woman to be married to. Dad says they were just all wrong for each other. He says some people shouldn't ever get married, but he's the marrying kind.”

Sammy thought of his own father, who was the non-marrying kind. But he couldn't imagine that it could have been worse for Momma to be married, and almost missed the catch.

“What about you?” Robin asked.

Sammy didn't want to talk about himself. “What about me?” He fired the ball so hard it burned out of the kid's glove. Robin wasn't stupid; he ran to pick up the ball and when he turned to toss it back he didn't ask any more questions.

Robin's mother called them in to wash their hands, and then they sat down at the dining-room table. Mr. Norton sat at one
end and Mrs. Norton sat at the other. All the plates and serving dishes were in front of Mr. Norton, who was a round-faced man, with thin light brown hair that needed cutting. He smiled a lot and asked questions as he served them their plates. “How do you feel about succotash? Do you want your ham sliced thin or thick? Robin, will you pass your mother the mustard?”

Sammy got the second plate, after Mrs. Norton. He started to pick up his fork to eat, but then he noticed that Robin's mother hadn't started, so he put it down again. He guessed maybe every meal in this house was as fancy as Thanksgiving.

Once they started eating, they got down to the business at hand. The grown-ups ran the discussion, like school. “Robin tells us that you want him to go crabbing with you this summer,” Mrs. Norton said.

She was looking at Sammy as if she wanted to look right inside him to see what he was like. Her hair was soft curls, held up on top of her head by a big wooden barrette, but wisping like strings of coiled cornsilk around her face. She had big, round brown eyes, gentle.

“Yes,” Sammy said. He just looked into those eyes. “We've been doing it for about four years. Before, my brother worked with me, he's fifteen, but he's got a job in an office now, so he can't.”

“Is your brother named James?” Mr. Norton asked.

Sammy didn't want to have to look away from the brown eyes, but he did.

“I have him in class,” Mr. Norton said. “I teach French in the high school.”

“Oh,” Sammy said. He didn't know what he should say next, so he took a big forkful of his baked potato. “This is a good dinner,” he said to Mrs. Norton. She laughed, and agreed with him.

“We don't know what working with you would entail for Robin,” Mr. Norton said.

Sammy explained about how you had to get out to the boat at about dawn, and then set the line and run it, for a couple of hours or sometimes longer, depending on how the crabs were biting. He told them about taking the haul to the town docks, to be picked up by the restaurants. He ate and explained. He estimated how much money Robin might earn, after they'd paid for bait and gas. “It's hard work,” he said, looking at Robin's excited face. “And sometimes it's cold, and wet—the eel smells, and when the jellyfish come in they can sting you.”