LUCA

On a sun-splashed Sunday like every other sun-splashed Sunday in Rialto, Luca turned eleven. His mother threw a party with noisemakers and paper hats decorated with glitter. One little girl got some in her eye. The kids played pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey and his mother made sure everyone won a prize.

Luca’s Boy Scout troop met after school the next day.

“What a handsome young man you are,” his mother said, fussing over the way his bandanna was tied. His sash was covered with merit badges. He was tired of the “handsome young man” bit, but it made her happy when he smiled. No braces for him. She pulled a comb through the front of his hair. The thick blond forelock fell into line above his eyes.

The church basement where his troop met had a musty smell Luca didn’t like. The other boys roughhoused before the meeting started. Luca sat quietly. His mother didn’t like it when he got his uniform dirty. He watched as what started out as a playful shoving match between two boys turned into a brawl, which stopped abruptly when the scoutmaster heard the commotion and hurried downstairs.

“That’s enough of that,” the scoutmaster said. “You’re going have a quite a black and blue mark there,” he told the boy who got whacked in the face, chucking the kid on the shoulder like he’d just won a prize. Luca rubbed his own cheek in sympathy.

School had let out at two-thirty; Scouts ended at four. Luca started home, preoccupied, stroking his new fire-making badge between his thumb and forefinger as he walked to the corner and waited for the light to change. A big gold Buick pulled up to the curb. Luca recognized the driver—the man from the bank he’d visited with his mother after his father died.

The man rolled the window down and called out, “Want a ride?”

Luca didn’t think twice before hopping in.

Randy Asbury was Vice President at the local bank. Luca knew he had a family: a girl and a boy who looked to be Luca’s age. He’d noticed their pictures on his desk as he sat waiting for his mother to finish her business with him. There was also a picture of Randy with his wife, a pretty blonde, all dressed up. She was plump, wearing an orchid corsage pinned to the shoulder of a frothy pink blouse.

It was easy to rationalize. There was nothing wrong with it. Really there wasn’t. It wasn’t that way. Luca was grateful. That’s what he told himself. He’d watched others struggle. They didn’t know how to make themselves inconspicuous. While they were miserable, trying to fit in, he had Randy. Randy saved him a lot of time, and confusion, trying to figure himself out. So what if he wasn’t like other boys? He knew he had to be careful. He was good at covering up. Randy taught him how. He wasn’t a bad man. He never hurt him. Not really.

It felt good in the beginning. The big hand on his knee gently moving as Randy drove. Half an hour, that was all. A quick ride in the car every Monday after scouts. A wave from his mother when Randy dropped him off on the sidewalk in front of their tidy, flesh-colored bungalow.

“Thanks for driving him home,” she shouted, waving from the front porch.

When Luca became an Eagle Scout, it was easy to lie that he had to stay later. That’s when they started going to Randy’s office after the bank closed, an hour, sometimes two. Randy was careful with him, slow and easy.

“So nice of you to take such an interest in him,” Luca’s mother said. “It’s been tough since my husband died.”

She lied. What little Luca remembered of his father was enough for him to know it was much tougher before. He had flashes of memory from before his father got sick. His mother crying. Shouting. The fights. The smell of beer. His father’s insults.

“Shut up, pretty boy.”