“You can’t do that!” Pat was mad and was showing me what being really and seriously mad looked like when coming from her. One of the reasons I was so taken by her was that she seemed to appreciate my dry humor and saw that I didn’t take very much of anything seriously. Now, she was letting me have it with both barrels, letting me know this was important, not a joke, and she was very impressive.
I’d told both her and Dustin that I’d be returning him to his father on Wednesday. He’d jumped up from the table and run into the bathroom. Pat was yelling at me.
“His father already turned him out onto the streets! What’s the matter with you, anyway? He can’t go back there!”
“What else can I do?” I asked, trying to sound calm when, for some reason, I didn’t feel that way inside at all. “The man has a legal responsibility for the boy. I could take Dustin to CPS, but he told me he doesn’t want that. What’s left? Tell me.”
“You could keep him.”
“Huh? Me? I don’t even like kids, and I’m out all hours, day and night, on jobs, risky ones I might not return from. He needs someone home when he gets back from school. Someone to take care of him, be there for him, support him. Mend his socks.”
“Stop joking! Yeah, he does need all that! Exactly! And his father has already proven he won’t do any of it! You’re throwing that boy to the wolves!”
“Look, calm down. I’m not especially happy about it either, if you want the truth, but what else can I do? Just tell me that.”
She looked at me and some of the anger drained away. “I’m not sure. But he can’t go back to that father.”
“Well, I’ll give it some thought. It won’t happen until Wednesday anyway. We’ve got some time.”
» » »
Because Dustin would be with me for a couple more days, and nights, and because I don’t much like kids, I talked Pat into staying, too. Of course, there were ancillary benefits with that, not that that fact had anything to do with asking her to stay, but in the interest of factual reporting, it should be mentioned.
I returned the ring to Mrs. Book man and collected my fee. Another happy customer. Except she didn’t look very happy. Maybe she never was. Angry women were one reason I’d never married, never really considered it. I like women, and the idea of settling down with one for the long haul certainly had its attractions now that I wasn’t getting any younger, but finding one who would continue to appeal to me and keep life interesting and exciting hadn’t happened yet and it was difficult to imagine it ever would. I’d met lots of women in my life without finding one like that. Pat certainly was in my mind a lot these days, but I hadn’t known her very long. Women had a nasty way of changing as the days passed. Not for the better, either.
I had to figure out what to do with all that money that had been in Jim’s safe. I finally took the time to count it, and it came to almost $600,000. A lot of bread. Much more than I’d ever had or ever expected to have. I wasn’t planning to give it back or report it to the government, and I couldn’t deposit it in the bank; they had bothersome reporting rules. I temporarily put it in my safe-deposit box while continuing to think about the right thing to do with it.
I also had to give some thought to Mr. Cramer, and that thinking involved Dustin. It was a lot to think about.
Pat took the beginning of the week off from The Gobbler to stay with Dustin and me. I liked that, because I do my best thinking when talking. Somehow having to put my thoughts into words seemed to clarify them. Maybe it was just that, spoken aloud, I could hear how silly most of them were.
After I’d done some thinking on my own, some pretty serious and scary thinking, I needed to bounce my thoughts off her, and I couldn’t do that with Dustin there overhearing me because some of it was about him. I couldn’t leave him alone, either. Well, I could have, but it seemed he’d had negligent adult supervision all his life, even more so since his mother had died, and I didn’t want to do the same thing.
So I tried to remember what I’d liked when I was his age, and I came up with an idea.
I collected Dustin and Pat and told them we were going out. They asked where, and I said it was a surprise. Dustin got in the back and Pat rode shotgun, and we headed out. Seeing the car made me remember: I needed to get the dents and scratched paint on the right side fixed when there was time. Of course, now I could afford a new one. Somehow, though, that seemed a waste of money. When you’ve lived your life never having a lot, you don’t just change your spots when suddenly a nest egg drops into your lap. Well, at least I didn’t.
It was a fifteen-minute drive, and then we pulled up at a place where a bunch of teenagers, mostly boys, were standing around. Dustin looked at where we were, then at me and said, “Huh?”
I laughed. “Yep. Hope you enjoy it.”
We got out, and I walked to the window and bought Dustin an hour. We got him fitted with a helmet, and he picked a go-kart he liked the color of, and with a few minutes instruction by an older teen, he was off on the track. After he completed a circuit for the first time he had the widest smile on his face I’d ever seen.
I could have been sarcastic about him liking it so much, but I remembered myself at that age when driving a motorized vehicle was at the very top of my wish list. To disparage him for loving it would be doing the same to a younger me. Actually, I enjoyed seeing him really happy for the first time since I’d had him.
There were bleachers for parents and friends to sit and watch, but I took Pat into the café that was part of the complex instead. I got us both a cup of coffee, and then we sat and talked. We talked for the entire hour Dustin was driving.
“Have you had any great ideas about Dustin?” I asked after bringing her the coffee.
“No. I’ve been thinking, and . . . ” She hesitated, then said, “I guess not.”
“Does that ‘and’ you stumbled over mean that you did think of something?”
“Well, uh . . . ” She paused, then dropped her eyes from mine and said, “I guess not.”
I looked at her for a moment. My hands felt clammy, and I’m not a clammy-hands sort of guy. “I’ve been thinking, too.”
“Yes?”
“Well, you know I don’t like kids. Nothing’s changed about that. But, see, Dustin, well . . . ”
“Yeah,” she said, sounding a bit sarcastic and not smiling. “He’s gotten under your skin, hasn’t he? He’s a great kid, polite, quiet, naive and defenseless, and the thought of turning him away to a very uncertain and unhappy future, it doesn’t set right, does it?”
“I don’t like it any better than you do. I just can’t see him back in that huge house with his dad, an intimidating guy who doesn’t like him. I can’t see him surviving in a group home, and you never know what you get with foster parents. He needs support. He needs stability. He needs direction.”
Pat put her hand on my arm. “He needs love.”
“Not only mine: he’s gotten under your skin too, hasn’t he?” I said, grinning at her.
She nodded and for a moment, looked wistful. “Maybe it’s just my biological clock ticking. But I look at him and just. . . ”
I didn’t say anything for a moment, then decided, what the hell. “You like him a lot. And even though I don’t like kids—”
Pat interrupted me, and now there was anger in her voice, and in her eyes. “You need to stop saying that! If you keep that up, you might even start believing it. I've watched you with Dustin. There's no way you don't like kids! You're just saying that to protect your image, and your independence. It's selfish and demeaning, and it’s a lie!”
Wow! I hadn’t expected that. It had come out of nowhere. But, damn, this lady was smart. She saw into me better than anyone I'd ever met. The best I could do for a comeback was, “Well, most people buy it,” which bought me a scoff and a, "hmmph.”
I hesitated, feeling like the little boy who drops his head when caught in a lie and is embarrassed. I didn’t drop my head or my eyes, however. I looked at her, into her eyes, until hers softened.
“Okay,” I finally said. “Dustin does sort of make me feel something as I watch him when he doesn’t know it, something kind of hard to put into words, at least not the kind of words I use. But see, you like him, and I, well . . . ” Okay, don’t be a coward now, I told myself. “I think maybe, you and I, between us, could give him something he needs.”
“What are you saying?” she asked, no longer angry, her voice sounding funny.
“I’m saying you should move in with me, and we should get Dustin to live with us, too.”
“Can you do that?”
“I can do most anything I set my mind to. What I’m mostly thinking of here is Dustin. Well, that’s not entirely true. In fact, it isn’t true at all. I’m thinking of you and me, too. I like you. In my bed, sure, but I like you at the kitchen table, too, and telling me I’m wrong about things and why, and I like the way you think, and your sense of humor, and your strength and intelligence. And you’re so beautiful. Dammit, I think I’ve been falling in love with you since I first saw you slicing lemons. You were concentrating on them with a focus that somehow made me wonder what it would be like if you were focusing on me that way. What a crazy thought! I’ve never had one like that before. I don’t do love! But since then, the same thoughts haven’t let up. I want to do what’s right for Dustin, that’s part of it, but it isn’t the whole part; I’ve never felt this way about a woman before.”
She was looking at me with the focus I’d seen with the lemons. Maybe it was possible.
I continued. “I’m sure you don’t love me. But that’s okay; I’m not very lovable; what’s important is that you seem to understand me and don’t mind how I am—joking about most everything, trying not to take anything too seriously. You don’t dislike me, and that has to be a plus. You want Dustin, and this way, if you can put up with me, you can have him. You can give him all that love you say he needs, and maybe I can love him a little too when he isn’t bothering the shit out of me just by being a kid and all. But I do know what he needs. What he needs is self-confidence. He doesn’t have any. And I can help with that.”
I was going to go on and explain, but she stood up from the table where we were sitting and leaned over and kissed me. Then I was standing, too, and holding her, and we were seriously into lip-lock with each other.
When she sat back down, looking a little glassy-eyed, she said, “Briar, you certainly know how to woo a woman. Some guys go out to fancy restaurants, wear a good suit, bring flowers, order drinks and filet mignon and have a violinist stop by the table to play romantic melodies while he whispers sweet nothings in her ear. What you do is bring a girl to the go-kart track and buy her some scorched joe in a paper cup.”
I laughed. She was wonderful. She always said just the right thing, just the way it should be said. She made me smile. She’d just done it again.
We just looked at each other for a while, our eyes communicating, saying words I wasn’t able to say without feeling all squishy, a feeling I didn’t much like. But she made me wonder about what I’d said about her not loving me.
When she spoke again, what she said was, “Dustin is going to be so happy. I know he will. And we’ll be good for him. We’ll give him the love he’s so desperate for. Both of us will. You want to build his self-confidence? Loving him so he knows he’s worthy of that, that’ll get you more than halfway there.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” I said, needing to stop all this mushy talk. “That’s all women’s stuff. But the other stuff, yeah. Even more than love, what he needs is manly self-confidence. Pat, he just doesn’t have any, and if you look at it objectively, he has no reason to. He hasn’t tried to do much other than read and play computer games. Anything he tried with his father around, he got criticized for. Anything else he’s tried, he hasn’t been much good at. So patting him on the back and saying nice things to him might make him feel good, and hugging him and messing up his hair and telling him you love him might give him goose bumps, might make him like himself better, but none of it will instill confidence in him that he can be a man. He needs that kind of confidence.
“There’s only one way to get that: he needs to earn it, and the way to earn it is to be successful with things he tries.”
Pat broke in. “A lot of kids aren’t real good at sports. They tend to become loners if all the other boys they know are into sports and they’re not. I’m not sure you can teach him to be good at swimming or tennis or baseball if he doesn’t like them and isn’t interested in them. And if you force him to, and he simply fails again, what have you accomplished?”
I was on a roll and not to be deterred. “He told me he’s tried things, and at every one of them, he failed. Trying them again and failing again isn’t going to help at all. You’re so right about that. But part of it is finding things he likes, not working hard at things he doesn’t. He needs to be supported and helped with finding those things.”
“Just to play the devil’s advocate,” she said, “what if he finds something he likes and tries it but still isn’t good at it? What if he fails again? It would hurt him even more.”
“Yeah, but this time he won’t fail.”
“Why not?”
“Because this time I’m going to be with him and teach him how to do things right.”
She smiled. “I love the sound of that, but I hope we’re not putting the horse before the cart. We don’t even have him yet. And I’m not sure how we’d go about that.”
“Hah!” I said. “I’ve got a plan.”
» » »
Dustin was all smiles when he got out of his racer. He was bubbly, the first time I’d ever seen that in him. He ran over to us where we were waiting by the exit gate.
“That was really great! I got to drive all around, do whatever I wanted on the track. Then this kid asked if I wanted to race him, and I said sure even though I was sort of scared, and we raced. I knew he’d beat me, but it was good being asked and I didn’t want to say no. We ended up racing four times, and I won two and he won two. But, I won twice! It was great! This was so neat! Thanks so much for bringing me here!”
And to my surprise, he hugged me. Then he hugged Pat. I noticed, when he was enthusiastic, which I was now seeing for the first time, his vocabulary became age-appropriate. Odd.
We took him into the café, and I told him to get whatever he wanted. He ordered two cheeseburgers and a large fries and a gigantic Coke. We watched him eat, which he did between stories of his recent exploits on the track. The boy could talk! Amazing! I wondered what had become of the quiet kid we’d brought here.
When he finally calmed down and was taking a long drink from his cup, Pat said, “Dustin, Briar and I have been talking. I want to know, what would you think about coming to live with us?”
He put the cup down, and his eyes grew wide. And then, to my dismay, I saw tears form in them. He looked back and forth between us, and then dropped his head, and started really crying. Pat jumped out of her chair and went to him and put her arms around him. He reached up and clung to her like a stuffed Garfield cat attached to a car rear window, and he was shaking, too. It took a minute or two, but when he’d stopped, without letting go, he raised his head and looked at me.
“Really?” he asked, his voice husky with tears. “I can?”
“If we can get your dad to agree,” I said.
His happiness disappeared in an instant. Just the memory of his dad did that. He became sullen and withdrawn again. “He hates me,” he murmured so softly I could barely hear him. “He won’t care what happens to me.” He turned so he wasn’t looking at either of us any longer, and spoke in a defeated voice. “But he’ll say no just so I can’t have anything I want. He’ll say no, then kick me out again.”
“What if I can persuade him?” I asked. “Would you want to?”
“You mean I could. Really? You, you mean you want me to live with you?”
“I’d like you to,” I said. “Both Pat and I would.” And then, suddenly and without warning, he was in my arms. I’d had no idea the kid could move that fast. He was hugging me tightly, and Pat had an ear-to-ear grin.
» » »
Wednesday came with no call from Mr. Cramer, to my great surprise. I’d thought he’d call with a reason to delay the inevitable. That he didn’t worried me. When I put that together with the way he’d calmed down during our first meeting, I couldn’t help but wonder what he was thinking. That he’d meekly cave in and do what I wanted was low on my list of possibilities. He didn’t look like the kind of man who rolled belly up at the first sign of a problem. He looked like a man who liked getting his own way and wouldn’t be the least bit reluctant to do anything it took to achieve that. Anything.
But if he was going to do what I considered likely, all I could do was smile. It played into my hands. He’d probably want to play rough. Playing rough was where I lived. Let him bring it on. I’d be ready.
If I survived, of course. There was always survival to consider.
No time like the present. I got ready, dressed in my black working outfit, checked the load in my 9mm, made sure I had everything I needed and left the house. It was 5 PM. Three hours ahead of our appointment. I liked to be early to meetings like this. Early had never failed me.