It wasn’t so much that I gave my dad a wide berth after we returned; it was more that there now seemed to be a space between us, a distance that hadn’t been there before. Without my anger at him filling the void, I could feel an absence—whatever it was. I knew things now, about my dad, about myself, that couldn’t be unlearned. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing; it was just different. But he was still my dad, he would always be my dad, no matter what he did or I did.
My sister had her big end-of-summer musical. This particular one was pretty good. It was about a girl in an English school who was hated by all the teachers and took her revenge on them. Usually when my sister was in one of her musicals, she paraded around the house singing all the time she wasn’t at rehearsal, making a lot of noise, but that’s about all you really got from her. But once we were back from Maine, she was different. I hardly remember her performing around the house at all, and she didn’t race up to her room after dinner to listen to her show tunes. Instead, she hung out more. She came to my room and didn’t irritate me as much. She talked about other things besides her show. She was actually a pretty cool kid to be around.
She wasn’t the main girl in the musical, just one of the classmates in the chorus, but honestly, Julie would have been much better than the girl they had chosen. Even from the back of the stage, you could see her sparkle. Simon agreed with me. Say whatever else you want about my little sister, but when it comes to the theater, she’s got it. She truly does.
I missed my grandfather. I suppose that’s a strange thing to say, since I met him twice, and only for a few days. I prefer to think that I knew him briefly, but well. Whatever it was that led me to seek him out, perhaps I’ll never fully understand. I can only say that I’m glad I did. Meeting him when I did meant a lot to me.
Truth be told, I missed the adventure of the road too. If so much can happen in such a short time, then what are we doing with most of our lives, just going on from day to day with so little variation and excitement?
One afternoon when Simon and Maxine were away on a family vacation—in Utah of all places—I made a detour over to the park outside Thomas’s house. I wasn’t sure why, but I suppose I had known since we got back that I was going to go over there sooner or later.
I had planned to just sit on the bench across from his apartment building, like I had done the first time I saw him. But when I turned the corner Thomas was already in the park, playing with a small remote-control electronic helicopter. He was having some trouble getting it to fly correctly, and when he did get the thing up in the air, it was nearly impossible for him to control. From a distance I watched as it crashed into trees, then slam to the ground. I would have been much more aggravated by this than he was. Instead of being frustrated, Thomas laughed every time the contraption went zipping off into a nearby tree trunk.
Eventually he spotted me. He appeared happy enough, but really he just seemed to take my presence for granted, the way kids do.
“Do you know how to do these things?” he asked.
“No,” I told him.
“Where you been?” he asked me.
“On the road to discovery,” I said.
“Huh?”
“Nowhere much.”
He let me have a turn at the helicopter, but I was no better at making it behave than he was. When I slammed it into the ground trying to circle a tree, he laughed. When the propeller came off, he just shrugged.
His mother came out from their apartment building. She was prettier than I remembered. Her hair was down and she had on a nice skirt. I suppose she was still in her work clothes—whatever her work was.
“Come on, Thomas, we have to go,” she called.
“I just gotta fix this propeller.”
“Now, Thomas.”
“Mom, just hold on; if I don’t fix it, it’ll be broken.”
“Go on, Thomas,” I said to him softly.
“This is Lucy.” Thomas pointed at me.
Katharine took a step closer to us, but stayed on the other side of the street. She just said, “Hi, Lucy.”
“Hi,” I answered. I didn’t realize I had been holding my breath.
A car turned down the street and drove between us with its radio blasting. It went all the way to the circle at the end of the road and swung around. We watched it head back out toward Prospect Avenue.
“A wrong turn,” Thomas said.
“We should get going, Thomas,” his mom said. “We need to go and get back for dinner.”
“Aw, Mom, I’ll just wait here. Lucy can stay with me.”
“Come on, Thomas,” she said, moving to get into her car.
“Mom.” He didn’t budge.
“Now, Thomas.”
“You know,” I heard myself say, “if you ever do need babysitting, I’m pretty free these days.”
His mom stopped. “Oh, well, thank you, Lucy,” she said. She opened the door to her car.
“Yeah, Mom,” Thomas said. “Like now.”
“Not now, darling, but sometime maybe Lucy can babysit. Maybe on a Tuesday afternoon, when I have to work late.”
I decided to help her out and demonstrate some child-care skills at the same time. “We’ll do it some Tuesday, Thomas. But you go on with your mom.”
“All right,” he said, and then he stopped at the curb, looked both ways, and raced across the street. He was a pretty well-behaved kid. When his mother was halfway into the car, she stopped, stood back up, and turned back toward me. I was standing on the far curb with my toes dangling off the edge, like I had been that time with Simon.
“Actually,” she said to me, “why don’t you give me your number? You never know.” She reached into her purse and started digging around.
“Okay.” I stepped out into the street and crossed over toward her.
“Hold on a sec,” she said as she pulled out her phone and started fiddling with it. “I’m not near as fast as you kids are with these things. All right, there.” She started typing. “Okay, Lucy. Go ahead.” Then she looked up at me.
Thomas’s mother had startlingly blue eyes. I guess I just hadn’t been close enough to notice them before. Between those gorgeous azure things and my father’s pale blue ones, there was no way Thomas was not going to have inherited his enviable peepers.
“Your number?”
I told her, and she punched it in, stabbing at the phone with the index finger of one hand the exact same way my own mother did it, the same way I was always telling her not to—she needed to use her thumbs, I always said; that’s the way it was designed.
When she was done she dropped the phone back in her bag. Thomas was still standing by the car but he got in when his mom did.
“See ya.” He waved as he pulled the back door closed.
I watched the car back out onto the street, swing away from the curb, and disappear as it turned onto Prospect Avenue. I figured it was the last I’d see of them.
I was wrong.
A week later, right at the end of summer, my phone rang. I did something I hardly ever do when I don’t recognize a number—I answered it.
“Lucy?” the voice said.
“That’s me.” I was a little leery.
“This is Katharine Eaves. Thomas’s mother.”
It took longer to respond than I intended. But finally I managed to get something out.
“Oh,” I said—eloquent, right?
“How are you?”
“I’m good. I’m just hanging around in my room.”
“Oh, that’s nice. I’m sure it’s a lovely room.”
“It’s not, actually,” I blurted out. “I mean, it’s totally fine. It’s just not anything all that special.” I didn’t know why I was saying all this.
“So, Lucy,” she went on, “you still up for a little babysitting?”
“Oh,” I said again. I realized I had still been expecting her to yell at me. “Sure, no problem.”
“Great, Thomas would enjoy that. How’s next Tuesday afternoon?”
I told her that next Tuesday afternoon was fine.
“Do you know where Lincoln School is?”
“I went to school there when I was his age.”
“Oh,” she said. “Of course.”
There was a short pause that I had no idea how to fill.
“Well, Thomas is just finishing up his basketball day camp, so . . .”
“Got it,” I told her.
“So if you’d just pick him up and take him back to the apartment for a few hours until I get home, that would be great.”
“I can do that,” I told her.
“Do you need to ask your parents if it’s all right?”
“No, that’s fine,” I assured her. “They’re good.”
“Okay,” she said. “Then I guess we’re all set.”
She asked if I had her phone number and I told her that I did; it showed up when she called.
“Oh, of course,” she said, and sort of laughed a little.
I told her I’d text her after I had retrieved Thomas and we were on the way back to their place.
“That would be perfect,” she said.
The following Tuesday I waited outside Lincoln School. I hadn’t been back there since I graduated. I suppose it should have felt strange that Thomas was going to my old school, sitting in those same beat-up desks that I had, drinking from that same grungy low water fountain on the second floor that I used to drink from, but somehow it didn’t. He gave me a big wave as he came through those big metal doors. I texted his mother and we headed back toward his home.
Thomas and Katharine lived up on the second floor. You entered into a big room, a combination living room, dining room, and kitchen. Four windows overlooked the street and the park beyond. Thomas wanted to practice his dribbling skills in the parking lot outside, and had to go to his room to get his basketball. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and ran through one of the two closed doors at the far end of the apartment.
“Okay,” I called after him. “Take your time.”
The place had a nice feel. It was neat and clean, but not fussy. It was a place where people lived. There was a huge couch that looked like it would be comfortable to fall into and watch a movie, with a large, squishy ottoman in front of it. The art on the walls was nice, but nothing fancy—a painting of fields and flowers, and an old poster for a movie with Charlie Chaplin, whoever he was. A black-and-white photograph showed a man kissing a woman; her head was thrown back, and he had a cigarette between his fingers. They were in a European city, maybe Paris—it had that kind of feel. Between two windows there was a full bookshelf. It wasn’t in perfect order, but the books looked like they’d been read, or at least looked at, recently.
I walked back to the kitchen area, past a small table with one wooden chair on each side, and took a glass from the open shelves. I filled it at the sink—I didn’t want to open the refrigerator. I took a huge swallow of water and wandered toward the view. I glanced out the window, exactly the way Thomas’s mom no doubt had done to keep an eye on him, the same window from which she must have first spotted me. My gaze drifted to the bookshelf beside me and I caught sight of a tall, thin hardcover book. I couldn’t believe my eyes.
That’s a ridiculous expression, I know, but in this case it was true—I actually couldn’t believe it and had to pick up the book to make sure. It was the same one I had as a kid, about the Japanese farmer. Their copy looked as well read as mine. I flipped through it to take a look at the paintings, but then I started to read.
The story was about an old farmer whose horse ran away one day. His neighbor came over to offer condolences. Such a thing was very unfortunate, the neighbor said. The old farmer nodded his head slowly and replied to him, “Maybe.” The next day the horse returned, bringing with him two wild stallions. The neighbor saw this and came over to congratulate the farmer on such good luck. “Maybe,” the old man replied. The next day the farmer’s son climbed up on one of the wild horses and was thrown off and broke his leg. The neighbor came by to offer his sympathy. “Such bad luck,” he said. “Maybe,” the farmer answered. The day after that, the army came to draft all the healthy young men to fight in the war. When they saw the farmer’s son with his leg in a cast, they didn’t take him and went on to the next village. “What good luck,” cried the neighbor. “Maybe,” said the old farmer.
I never really understood the story all that much when I was little. Maybe it wasn’t actually a kid’s book.
Outside, Thomas wanted to work on dribbling between his legs and behind his back. He started to walk from one end of the paved area to the other, bouncing the ball between his legs with each step. My job was to count each successful pass through his legs until he messed up—a typically dumb boy’s game. At first he made it three steps before he kicked the ball. Then he got up to six, then ten, and then eleven. He got to nineteen three times but couldn’t break the twenty mark. He was really concentrating, I had to hand him that. Then in one turn he got a good rhythm going, I could tell right from the start. I counted along.
“. . . eight, nine, ten . . .”
You could see he felt it too. He started to grin.
“Concentrate,” I called to him. “. . . thirteen, fourteen . . .”
He was slapping the ball back and forth with authority now. The smile was gone. He was the picture of focus.
“. . . sixteen, seventeen . . .” I must confess, I started to get really excited. It was just a stupid game, but damn, he was going for it.
“. . . eighteen, nineteen, TWENTY . . .” I shouted out.
He kept dribbling. He got to twenty-five, then thirty. He got to thirty-seven before he kicked it.
“AW!” he yelled. But he was thrilled.
“Thirty-seven!” I shouted.
We both jumped toward each other and slapped a direct hit high five. It made a sharp, satisfying snap. I’m not sure who moved first, but we leapt into a quick hug. He squeezed me pretty hard with a little grunt; my arms wrapped around his sweaty little back for a second before we let go.
I hadn’t felt this childishly happy and satisfied since I don’t know when. My face hurt from my grin.
The late-summer sun shone down on us. There was a slight breeze moving through the leaves on the trees. Thomas was now trying to twirl the ball up on his fingertips. It kept falling off after less than a second. He was going to need a lot more practice to get any good at that. When the ball spun off his finger, it bounced away from him. He had to chase after it almost to the curb. When he looked up he saw someone—someone I had seen just a second earlier—come striding up the road.
He was back from Utah.
“Hi-ho!” Simon called, waving both of those skinny arms over his head like he was signaling for a ship from a desert island.
“Hi-ho!” Thomas called back. He ran to Simon and gave him a high five. Then he turned to me. “It’s the Sime-ster.”
Both Simon and I laughed.
Maybe having a little brother wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
Maybe.