The Perfect Son (12 page)

ELEVEN

Felix stared at his Thursday to-do list until a low-grade headache set up shop in his temple and started telegraphing little messages of pain across his forehead. Tugging off his glasses, he squeezed the bridge of his nose.

Midnight, and he had two things left to accomplish before bed: hang the happy birthday banner and blow up balloons. Were fifty too many? Ella had told him not to bother with balloons, but if he was doing this, he was doing it right. Besides, a quick Google search would, no doubt, debunk the mystery of how to hang balloons.

Due to the astronomical expense of party supplies, Felix had taken full advantage of all the deals. Thanks to the discovery of BOGOF—buy one get one free—they had enough paper goods for Harry’s eighteenth. In fact, they would never need to buy paper plates or napkins again, which was why he’d chosen a timeless color. Black.

He should probably create tomorrow’s to-do list before the headache crippled him. Suppose you had to do this task multiple times a year because you had more than one child? Unimaginable.

He pulled out a blank index card and started writing. Had Harry told everyone to bring sleeping bags and pillows? Could sixteen-year-old boys be relied upon to remember pillows? What if they forgot to bring bedding? He ripped up the list and started over.

Remind Harry:

1) All boys sleep in his room. (No louts sleeping on the sofa.)

2) Midnight curfew on noise.

3) Guests must be gone by noon on Saturday. No exceptions.

Felix glanced over at the three boxes of pancake mix sitting in the middle of the kitchen island. Could he pull off pancakes and bacon for six when he’d never cooked them for one? The mix came in a box labeled “just add water!” How hard could it be? He pulled out another index card, Saturday’s to-do list, and wrote:
make test batch of pancakes while boys sleep.

Back to tomorrow’s list:

Get up at 5:30

Shower

Make Harry’s breakfast

Pack Harry’s lunch

Although really, Harry should be able to do those last two himself.

Drive Harry to school

Come home

Do a load of laundry

Go to Harris Teeter and pick up birthday cake

Clean the powder room

Hoover

Tidy up

Should he have hired Merry Maids? Ella had told him to not clean beforehand but merely “clear the decks.” Which made him intensely nervous that (a) people would be coming into an unclean house and (b) that he somehow needed to protect his possessions. Would they break furniture? Not use coasters? Sneak illegal substances into his house as easily as Katherine had?

He should probably stop by Pizza-To-Go on the way back from Harris Teeter. Meet with the manager and confirm that yes, they could indeed deliver four large pizzas at 7:30 p.m. (Should he have taken care of this yesterday?) Felix kept writing:

Stop at Pizza-To-Go

Put soda in fridge

Put candy in bowls

Had he bought enough soda? Should he have provided more choices for the kids? And when Harry said put out a few bowls of candy, how many did he mean? This was so unlike work, real work. This was the great unknown of vagueness, and it came without explicit instructions.

Felix got up, freed the stopper of his cut-glass decanter, and poured a healthy shot of Macallan. He went back to the sofa and added
hide the alcohol
to his list.

So many possibilities for disaster. And suppose Harry didn’t have a good time? Suppose his guests didn’t have a good time? Shouldn’t there be more organized activities? Suppose the loo got clogged from overuse and he had to call Dickie the plumber on a Friday night? Suppose the kids stole the Mini for a joyride around the neighborhood? Did teens en masse devolve into mob mentality?

This whole event was ludicrously unstructured. The only definite was pizza at seven thirty: two cheese, one pepperoni, one Hawaiian. Although why anyone with half a brain, even a teenager, would choose to eat anything as disgusting as Hawaiian pizza was incomprehensible.

Felix pulled out the Pepto-Bismol bottle, unscrewed the top, and swallowed two pills with a chaser of single malt. A hive of stinging bees had surely taken up residence in his stomach. If only it could be this time tomorrow. No, not tomorrow, since there would be six large, smelly teenage boys camped out in the bedroom down the hall. This time on Sunday, then, with the house quiet and Harry asleep. When Harry was awake, the house was littered with the perennially half-finished: a glass of orange juice left on the island for two hours; soda cans moved to the sink but not rinsed out and dumped in the recycling; dirty crockery left on the counter and not scraped, rinsed, washed, and slotted in the dish rack to dry. (Felix refused to use the dishwasher. If he had his way, they wouldn’t have one.)

The ghost of birthdays past hovered—the good old days when Ella organized extravaganzas for twenty children at a local museum and never once lost her cool.

Two more days until Ella came home and life could revert to the way it was supposed to be. The way it had always been. Well, not quite. He would still have to chauffeur Harry around and drive Ella to medical checkups and then rehab. Do the supermarket run and be the errand boy. So not exactly the same as before. In fact, nothing like before.

Harry nearly melted when Sammie rubbed her thumb along his palm. Holding her hand was the softest, warmest, safest, sexiest feeling ever. He would never tire of it. Seemed the Beatles actually got something right. Who knew?

Hand in hand, they walked across the school parking lot.

“Oh, your dad has a Mini. How cute,” Sammie said.

Dad and cute? Really?

One good thing about Dad doing pickup—unlike Mom, he never got out of the car. Mom was always the only parent on the porch at pickup, and the only parent who drove for every field trip, and the only parent who volunteered for every school event. At the science fair, one of the little kids had actually mistaken her for staff. When she was back in charge of, well, everything, maybe he should grow a pair and finally set some boundaries. Ask her to wait in the car at pickup, like Dad.

Dad appeared to be asleep. Not surprising, given how hard he’d worked on the party. At this point, Harry just wanted it to be whatever Dad wanted it to be. Maybe they should have canceled. He and Sammie could have gone to the movies instead and held hands in the back row.

Harry knocked on the window. Dad shot up like Max had when Mr. George caught him napping in calculus earlier that day. “Are we boring you?” Mr. George had asked, and Harry had willed Max not to say yes. Thankfully, the psychic vibes must have worked, because Max had apologized. Seriously un-Max-like behavior.

“Dad, Dad.” Harry knocked again, louder.

Dad opened the driver’s side door. “Once would have been enough, Harry. I have a headache. No need to rap as though attempting to wake the dead.”

Dad’s eyes bored into Sammie. “The car is unlocked, you know. And since I’m not officially a chauffeur, I don’t need to open the door for you.”

Sammie squeezed his hand tight.

Be nice, Dad. Please, be nice.

“Sammie can’t get a ride this evening
sooo
can she come home with us?” Harry knew he was talking fast, but Dad had to say yes, and he had to like Sammie. That last bit was super important. Dad didn’t like surprises, and this was so totally off script, but he
had
to like Sammie.

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Fitzwilliam,” Sammie said. So sweetly.

That had to thaw even Dad’s heart.
Don’t screw this up for me, Dad. Please.

“I can help set up,” Sammie said.

“I’ve done everything.” Couldn’t Dad fake it, just for once pretend to be the laid-back, “whatever, dude” parent?

“Oh.” Sammie blushed.

“I’m assuming that’s a yes?” Harry said with a mega dose of bravado.

“Do I have a choice?”

Harry sighed. “I need you to do this. For me.”

Dad sighed, too. Two sighing guys in the school parking lot while the most beautiful girl in the world watched.

“Fine, yes.” Dad turned on the engine. “Nice to meet you, too, Sammie.”

“You’ll get used to my dad. He can be blunt.”

“You don’t have to talk about me as if I’m not here, Harry.” Dad gave him that look, the one that made Harry feel as if he were the size of a flea and even further down the list of life-forms. “What time did you say people were coming?”

They’d had this conversation. Several times. Why was Dad checking?

Harry opened the rear passenger door and let Sammie scramble inside, then joined her. No way was he sitting in the front while she was stuck in the back with Dad glaring at her in the rearview mirror.

“Six. Six sharp.” Harry smiled. At least, he tried. Best get all the news out at once and be done with it. “And Josh’s dad has a problem picking him up tomorrow. He asked if we could give him a lift home.”

Dad angled his head and turned away. “No.”

“Dad—”

“I said no, Harry.”

“Not even if you dropped him off on the way to the hospital?”

“Are you arguing with me?”

Really?
Really!
Dad had to pull this shit in front of Sammie?

“No. It’s fine. I’ll tell him to ask one of the other guys.” Harry looked at his lap. And Sammie reached over and wove her fingers through his. He knew Dad was watching. He knew, but he didn’t care. Sammie Owen, the most beautiful girl in the school, was holding his hand.

The kids turned toward Harry’s bedroom the second Felix unlocked the front door and canceled the burglar alarm.

“Harry, wait. A word, please.”

Harry looked over his shoulder. “Yeah?”

“Your door stays open.”

“Excuse me?”

“A new house rule when you have a girl over.”

“Great,” Harry mumbled as he slumped off. “Another house rule.”

“I heard that,” Felix called after him. Would it be inappropriate to have a whisky before the kids turned up? Highly inappropriate. Suppose another parent came to the house because it was polite to say hello to the parent in charge, and that person smelled alcohol on his breath and assumed Harry’s dad was an alkie . . .

No. No alcohol
.

Felix focused on working down his to-do list. Everything was checked off by 5:45 p.m., and then he paced.

Guests arrived in dribs and drabs—the two girls came together—and Felix ordered the pizza. The kids had taken off their shoes in the hall, as Felix had requested, but they’d left them scattered. When the pizza delivery guy rang the doorbell, ten minutes behind schedule, Felix tripped over a particularly large white sneaker. The quintessential American sneaker, the ugliest shoe in the world, and it was defiling his hall.

He nearly yelled at the kids right then to leave. It took all his powers of concentration to swallow his irritation so that he could serve supper. An Oxford education reduced to slicing pizza.

The kids descended on the pizza like starving street urchins from
Oliver!
Trying to get them to line up led to failure, but he did force them to wait as he cut the pizza and handed it out one piece at a time, on double paper plates. Then they homed in on the dining room table, squishing into the six chairs. Two of the boys stood to eat. Why hadn’t he covered the floor with drop cloths?

When Max helped himself to a piece of Hawaiian pizza directly from the box, and a small chunk of pineapple fell to the wood floor, Felix rushed at him with a paper plate. And two napkins.

“Uh, thanks, Mr. FW,” Max said.

Felix couldn’t take his eyes off the kids for a second, especially not Max, who was barely house-trained. There was even a can of Coke sitting in the middle of the coffee table without a coaster underneath. Felix rectified the situation and wiped down the entire table with a wad of paper towels.

Then he retreated to stand behind the kitchen island, where he waited with the pizza cutter for the next half hour—to make sure nobody pulled a Max. Occasionally, he snuck glances at Harry and Sammie snuggled together on the same chair. In part he did this for Ella, who loved Harry’s birthday parties and would expect a detailed report. But he was also curious to see how Harry handled himself with a girl. At one point their foreheads touched, and Harry sat perfectly still—until he giggled at something Max said. Strange that Harry still had his little-boy giggle.