Early Autumn Part 19

When the last wall was studded we leaned it against its end of the foundation and went and got two beers and sat down on the steps of the old cabin to drink them. The clearing smelled strongly of sawdust and fresh lumber, with a quieter sense of the lake and the forest lurking behind the big smells.

Paul sipped at his beer. Some starlings hopped in the clearing near the new foundation. Two squirrels spiraled up the trunk of a tree, one chasing the other. The distance between them remained the same as if one didn't want to get away and the other didn't want to catch it.

"'Ever will thou love and she be fair,'" I said.

"What?"

I shook my head. "It's a line from Keats. Those two squirrels made me think of it."

"What two squirrels?"

"Never mind. It's pointless if you didn't see the squirrels."

I finished my beer. Paul got me another one. He didn't get one for himself. He still sipped at his first can. The starlings found nothing but sawdust by the foundation. They flew away. Some mourning doves came and sat on the tree limb just above the speed bag. Something plopped in the lake. There was a locust hum like background music.

"What's going to happen?" Paul said.

"I don't know," I said.

"Can they make me come back?"

"They can try."

"Could you get in trouble?"

"I have refused to give a fifteen-year-old boy back to his mother and father. There are people who would call that kidnapping."

"I'm almost sixteen."

I nodded.

"I want to stay with you," he said.

I nodded again.

"Can I?" he said.

"Yes," I said. I got up from the steps and walked down toward the lake. The wind had died as the sun settled and the lake was nearly motionless. In the middle of it the loon made his noise again.

I gestured toward him with my beer can.

"Right on, brother," I said to the loon.

CHAPTER 23.

"Well, Father Flanagan," Susan said when she opened her door. "Where's the little tyke?"

"He's with Henry Cimoli," I said. "I need to talk."

"Oh, really. I thought perhaps you'd been celibate too long and stopped by to get your ashes hauled."

I shook my head. "Knock off the bulls.h.i.+t, Suze. I got to talk."

"Well, that's what's important, isn't it," she said, and stepped away from the door. "Coffee?" she said. "A drink? A quick feel? I know how busy you are. I don't want to keep you."

"Coffee," I said, and sat at her kitchen table by the bay window and looked out at her yard. Susan put the water on. It was Sat.u.r.day. She was wearing faded jeans and a plaid s.h.i.+rt and no socks and Top-Siders.

"I have some cinnamon doughnuts," she said. "Do you want some?"

"Yes."

She put a blue-figured plate out and took four cinnamon doughnuts out of the box and put them on the plate. Then she put instant coffee into two blue-figured mugs and added boiling water. She put one cup in front of me and sat down across the table from me and sipped from the other cup.

"You always drink it too soon," I said. "Instant coffee's better if it sits a minute."

She broke a doughnut in half and took a bite of one half. "Go ahead," she said, "talk."

I told her about Paul and his mother. "The kid's making real progress," I said. "I couldn't let her take him."

Susan shook her head slowly. Her mouth was clamped into thin disapproval.

"What a mess," she said.

"Agreed."

"Are you ready to be a father?"

"No."

"And where does this leave us?" she said.

"Same place we've always been."

"Oh? Last time we went out to dinner it was a fun threesome."

"It wouldn't be that way all the time."

"Really? Who would guard him when we were being a twosome? Do you plan to employ Hawk as a baby-sitter?"

I ate a doughnut. I drank some coffee. "I don't know," I said.

"Wonderful," Susan said. "That's really wonderful. So what do I do while you're playing Captains Courageous? Should I maybe join a bridge club? Take dancing lessons? Thumb through The Total Woman?"

"I don't know. I don't know what you should do, or I should do. I know only what I won't do. I won't turn the kid back to them and let them play marital Ping-Pong with him some more. That's what I know. The rest has to be figured out. That's what I wanted to talk with you about."

"Oh, lucky me," Susan said.

"I did not want to talk about how you're in a funk because I'm paying more attention to him than to you," I said.

"Perhaps what you want to talk about isn't terribly important," she said.

"Yes, it is. What we have to say to each other is always important, because we love each other and we belong to each other. And will forever."

"Including what you refer to as my funk?"

"Yes."

She was silent.

"Don't be ordinary, Suze," I said. "We're not ordinary. No one else is like us."

She sat with her hands folded on the edge of the tabletop, looking at them. A small wisp of steam drifted up past her face from her coffee cup, a fleck of cinnamon sugar marred her lower lip near the corner of her mouth.

The kitchen clock ticked. I could hear a dog bark somewhere outside.

Susan put one hand out toward me and turned it slowly palm up. I took it and held it.

"There's no such thing as a bad boy," she said. "Though you do test the hypothesis."

I held her hand still and said, "First the kid wants to be a ballet dancer."

"And?"

"And I have no idea how he should go about that"

"And you think I do?"

"No, but I think you can find out."

"Aren't you supposed to be the detective?"

"Yeah, but I've got other things to find out. Can you get a handle on ballet instruction for me?"

She said, "If you'll let go of my hand I'll make some more coffee."

I did. She did. I said, "Can you?"

She said, "Yes."

I raised my coffee cup at her and said, "Good hunting." I sipped some coffee.

She said, "a.s.suming you can keep him despite the best efforts of both parents and the law, which rarely awards children to strangers over the wishes of the parents. But a.s.suming that you can keep him, are you prepared to support him through college? Are you prepared to share your apartment with him? Go to P.T.A. meetings? Maybe be a Boy Scout leader?"

"No."

"No to which?"

"No to all of the above," I said.

"So?"

"So, we need a plan."

"I would say so," Susan said.

"First, I'm not sure how much the parents will want to get tangled up in legal action at the moment. Neither one wants the kid. They only wanted him to annoy each other. If they had to get into a court action to get him away from me, I'd try to prove them unfit and I might dig up things that would embarra.s.s them. I don't know. They may each, or both, get so mad that I wouldn't give the kid up that they'll go to court, or the old man may call out his leg breakers again. Although I would think after the first two debacles they might be getting discouraged."

"Even parents who dislike their children resent giving them up," Susan said. "The children are possessions. In some cases the parents' only possession. I don't think they'll give him up."

"They don't want him," I said.

"That's not the point," Susan said. "It's a shock to the most fundamental human condition. The sense that no one can tell me what to do with my child. I see it over and over in parents at school. Kids who are physically abused by parents who were abused when they were children. Yet the parents will fight like animals to keep the kid from being taken away. It's got to do with ident.i.ty."

I nodded. "So you think they'll try to get him back."

"Absolutely."

"That'll complicate things."

"And the courts will give him back. They may not be good parents, but they aren't physically abusive. You haven't got a case."

"I know," I said.

"If they go to the courts. As you say, the father seems to have access to leg breakers."

"Yeah. I think about that. I wonder why."

"Why what?"

"Why he has access to leg breakers. Your average suburban real estate broker doesn't hang out with a guy like Buddy Hartman. He wouldn't know what rock to look under."

"So?"

"So what kind of work has Mel Giacomin been involved in that he would know Buddy Hartman?"

"Maybe he sold him real estate, or insurance."

I shook my head. "No. Nothing Buddy's involved in is legitimate. Buddy'd find a way to steal his insurance."

"What are you thinking?"

"I'm thinking if I can get something on Mel, and maybe something on Patty too, I'd have some leverage to bargain with on the kid."