The Misfits (13 page)

I GET to thinking about this on the walk home. “This” being the fact that Mr. Kellerman's mother died. It is weird thinking about the way I just tossed that into the conversation back there at the Candy Kitchen, like,
Oh, yeah, by the way, somebody's life ended yesterday please pass the salt
I mean, the man's mother died. She was a person.

I remember when it happened to me. I was seven, almost eight. Life was going along like normal, you know? My dad was working for the same nursery he works for now and my mom was an actress. She wasn't a famous actress or anything. She hardly made a living at it. Mostly, she did community theater and taught a few classes. Sometimes she would go out on the road for a couple of months, if she got a part in something, or do a show in Albany, which isn't that far away, or fly
down to New York City for a day or two to shoot a commercial. She told me once that she had agreed to marry my dad and live in Paintbrush Falls as long as he didn't make her give up her dreams. She always told me to follow my dreams, too, do whatever it was that made me happy.

My dad was never much of a dreamer. He let my mom do the dreaming for the two of them. It was on account of her that he tried to get his own landscaping business going. I remember how excited he got talking about it at dinner some nights. My mom would sit there with her eyes glued on him, as if listening to him talk about what kind of shrubs did best in what kind of soil was the most fascinating thing in the whole world.

They were happy.

I was happy back then, too. I liked school. I wasn't fat yet.

Then one day my mom picked me up after school —I was in the second grade; it was April, I think—and my shoes were muddy, but she didn't tell me to scrape them off first the way she usually did. So I
didn't, because I figured she must have her reasons, like maybe—in my seven-year-old mind, this made sense—maybe she
wanted
some mud in the car for a change. So I jumped in the car, mud and all, and she said, “How was your day, sweetie?” but there was something wrong with her voice, like she'd fallen on it and flattened the air out of it. I looked up at her and said, “Fine.” I remember I was mad at Addie because she had told the teacher I'd been picking my nose and sticking the boogers under my chair and Mrs. Esley had scolded me and hadn't said one word to Addie about being a tattletale. Talk about no justice. Well, the point is that when I looked over and saw my mom's face, I didn't say a word about it, even though it had been the first thing I'd wanted to tell her. I could see something was wrong, and whatever it was, was a whole lot bigger than having your friend rat on you to your teacher.

I didn't ask what was going on. I didn't know how. I was only seven. What I found out later was that a couple of hours before she picked me up she had learned she had cancer.

She got sick really fast, so they couldn't hide the truth from me for long. My dad would have lied to me the whole time, I think, but my mom convinced him that I should know.

It's funny, my mom was always the one putting the big smiley face on everything. Everything was always going to be better in the morning. The glass was always half full. Anything was possible. Even when she would look in the mirror and groan about putting on weight (she had a sweet tooth, same as me) or get real angry after she'd lost an acting job, she'd find a way to turn things around and look on the bright side. My dad was just the opposite. He didn't even see the point in trying most of the time, so it was kind of a miracle that he was actually going to start his own business. Of course, the miracle was my mom.

When she got sick, my dad acted like it wasn't happening at first. He kept telling me she was getting better, but it wasn't because he wanted to protect me, as much as he wanted to believe it himself. My mom, she told me the truth straight out. She told me she was going to die, but that she would always be alive in
my heart and that I would always have my dad and my dreams.

The summer between second and third grade, she was in the hospital most of the time. My dad began staying overnight there with her. I stayed with Addie and her mom and dad. One morning while we were sitting there eating breakfast, my dad showed up at the door, his face looking like it had caved in, like it was in ruins or something. Addie's mom said, “Oh, Mike,” and she jumped up and held on to him while his knees gave out.

I can't remember if I cried. I just remember Addie's dad squatting down in front of me and asking me if I understood that my mom had died, and me saying yes, and then asking when was she coming home.

So I'm thinking about all this as I'm closing in on Shadow Glen Trailer Park, pondering how Mr. Keller-man has had his mom go and die on him, too, and wondering if maybe—even though he's a grown man and his mom was an old lady and all—just maybe he feels the way I did, knowing his mom has died but waiting for her to come home.

My dad is standing by the phone when I walk in, and he greets me with, “Know what I'm making for dinner?”

“A call to Pizza Place?” I go. “I want pepperoni.”

“You got it,” he says, and starts hitting the buttons.

There's a lot I could tell him, a lot that's on my mind, but what comes out when we're sitting there with our slices and the salad he's made because he tries to make sure I get balanced meals, is this:

“Dad, when did you start going out with girls?”

He laughs. “I've been wondering when we'd have this conversation.”

I roll my eyes. “Daaad, I just asked you a simple question.”

“I had my first girlfriend when I was ten,” he tells me.

I am shocked to hear this. “Ten?” I go. “What were you? Some kind of fiend?”

“Why do you say that, Skip? I just liked this girl and I told her so. We decided to be boyfriend and girlfriend. That's all. It was simple then. I don't think we ever actually went out or anything. We played together. She liked sports. We had a good time.”

“But
ten,”
I repeat, apparently unable to process a simple piece of information. “I'm twelve. Is there something wrong with me?”

This gets my dad laughing so hard he puts his hand up to his mouth to keep the pizza in.

“Glad I amuse you,” I go.

Eventually, he calms down, but his eyes are all watery.

“I hope you realize I am humiliated,” I tell him.

“No, no,” he goes, the way parents do when they try to tell you you're wrong about something you happen to have firsthand experience of.

“I am,” I say.

“Okay, I'm sorry, it's just. . . Skip, you're twelve. Good grief, you're just a kid.”

“But you were ten.”

“So? Like I say, it was easier then, simpler. Nobody thought it was a big deal to call somebody your girlfriend. But I had friends who didn't have their first girlfriend until they were in high school. Grady Buckower, know who I mean?”

I nod. Grady was my troop leader for the eight months I managed being a Cub Scout.

“Grady didn't have a girlfriend until he was in college—and then he married her! So what's behind all the questions?”

I thought,
How do I tell my dad I like a girl?

“You like a girl, is that it?” he goes. “And you don't know if she likes you. Am I right?”

“Oh, I
know,”
I tell him. “I know she
doesn't
like me. Well, what I mean is, I'm not so sure she
doesn't
like me, but I am sure she likes somebody else. But the somebody else doesn't like her, I mean, not as a girlfriend, he only likes her as a friend, so how do I let her know that I like her as, like, girlfriend material, and then what do I do if she laughs in my face, which I don't think this particular girl will do, but you never know, she might get hysterical.”

My dad shoves a slice of pizza in his mouth, and I bet anything he is doing it to stifle a laugh. When I am a father, I swear on a stack of pancakes I will never laugh at my children.

I wait for him to chew and swallow.

“Think you can keep it under control now?” I ask.

“Cut me a little slack,” he tells me. “I'm only
human. Look, kiddo, the direct approach is best. Hard as it is, just go up to the girl and tell her you like her. You don't have to ask her to be your girlfriend or anything, not right off the bat. Just say, I like you. Do you want to get together sometime?' Why not include her with your gang when you go to the Candy Kitchen?”

I think this over and figure it is not bad advice. I say, “It's a good thing I'm a boy.”

This one really takes him by surprise. Me, too, for that matter.

“If I were a girl,” I explain, “then I'd be missing Mom even more than I do, because I'd be at an age where I'd need, you know, to talk with a woman about stuff. But I'm a boy, so I've got my dad to talk to about guy stuff.”

My dad looks like he's having trouble swallowing. He nods his head, slowly.

“Yep,” he goes, “we're lucky we've got each other, all right.”

I tell him then about Mr. Kellerman's mom dying and he tells me he heard, on account of it being a small
town and news travels fast. And this gets us to talking about my mom dying, which I guess is what I really wanted to talk about all along. We do not talk about this often, not because my dad won't discuss it, more because what is there to say?

This time I think of something.

“How come after Mom died,” I ask, pushing the uneaten lettuce and cucumbers and tomatoes around my plate, “you gave up on starting your own landscaping business?”

He answers this so fast I know he has thought about it before.

“I needed her,” he says. “I'm not real good on my own.”

“Don't say that, Dad. You
are
good.”

He looks over and shakes his head at me. “That's just what your mom would have said. You're so much like her.”

“You always tell me that,” I say.

And this is when it hits me. No matter how many times I have heard my dad tell me I am just like my mom, I have always thought I was just like him—a
get-along guy, somebody who doesn't want to make waves, who doesn't know how to dream for himself. All of a sudden, I'm thinking maybe I
am
more like my mom, not just a dreamer but somebody who can make things happen.

How do I describe what happens next? I am sitting there, looking at my dad while he chews at the skin around his right thumbnail, a bad habit he picked up around the time my mom got sick. And all of a sudden I feel sorry for him, because I see how different we are. No, not
how
different we are, just that we are different. That I am going to grow up, and what is going to happen to him?

“How come you don't date?” I ask.

He shrugs and starts in on his index finger. “I guess I just lost interest. That, and I don't have the energy for it. It's hard, you know, taking care of you and working and all. I don't have much room for fun.”

“That's a cop-out,” I say.

“Listen to who's the authority all of a sudden. Weren't you the guy who two minutes ago—”

“Right, two minutes ago I was asking advice about
how to talk to girls. But why should I listen to you, when you're too scared to ask a girl out yourself?”

“That's not fair,” he says to me. “When you're older—”

“When I'm older I don't want to stop living if something bad happens to me. I don't want to give up. And I don't want my kid feeling sorry for me either.”

If I were my dad, I probably would have yelled at me right about then. I would have slammed the table and said, “Don't you talk to me like that!” But I don't give my dad a chance to say anything. I just open up my lungs and gasp in a whole big wad of air and when I let it out, I start sobbing. Hard. So what is my dad to do? He comes around to my side of the table and gets a good grip on my shoulders and holds on to me tight and says, “It's okay, Skip, you just let it out. You and me, we haven't had a good cry in a long time.”

And before we clear the table that night and before we play a hand of casino, that is just what we do. Dad and me. Hammer and Skip. We have a good cry.

WEDNESDAY MORNING all the signs are gone.

“I am telling you,” Addie informs me as quick as she can latch onto my arm after I enter the school premises, “it's Ms. Wyman.”

“I doubt it,” I say. “It's probably Mr. Kiley. I don't mean Mr. Kiley himself, but, you know, the
school.
You have to have
permission
to put stuff up on the walls, which we did not exactly get.”

“Well, I'm going to say something,” goes Addie.

“Such as?”

“Such as didn't anybody ever hear of the First Amendment?”

It is my turn to latch onto an arm, which I do with hers. “Stop making everything a federal case,” I tell her. “All we've got to do is let the school in on what we're doing. I say we go to Mr. Kiley and—”

“Ms. Carle, Mr. Goodspeed.”

Ms. Wyman is standing there all of a sudden with her hands on her hips like a cop who's pulled us over, except there was no siren to warn us. Addie almost collides with her and I do a quick study of the two of them, both tall with big bones and their hair cut short almost the same way. If I wasn't so sure Addie is going to grow up to become the head of some big company or president of the United States or something, I swear in looking at the two of them I'm seeing Addie's future.

As Ms. Wyman commences to speak, she forms her mouth into the perfect imitation of a smile. “May I ask the two of you to hurry at your lockers this morning so that I may have a word with you before homeroom?”

I note that Addie is about to say something, probably along the lines of, “Until the homeroom bell rings, we are private citizens and you have no right to tell us what to do with our time,” so I gently coincide the tip of my foot with the bony part of her ankle and the only word that comes out of her mouth is “ouch.”