It was a week later and I was at Denny’s house, using his computer for some stealth searching. He sang, “Maybe you should let it go. Small flag. Large space. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack. Stop worrying about it. Order a new flag, maybe? Liz Delaney isn’t going to write you back.”
You would think that Denny’s cool singing voice would soften the blow, somehow. But it stuck in my mind like a bad commercial jingle. Reality doesn’t sound any better in song form.
True story.
He still kept singing.
“Liz Delaney isn’t going to write you back. It’s like a needle in a haystack.”
I was beginning to believe only Mr. Darcy truly understood me.
Did you know a family received an army soldier’s medals thirty years after they went missing?
Denny motioned for me to keep writing.
He was a Green Beret in Vietnam and had earned a ton of medals. And they were to be returned to his family after his funeral, but there was some confusion and they went missing for a long time. Then his family got the call and they were delivered. Thirty years later.
“So you’re saying it’s possible that lost things can be found?” Denny whispered.
Exactly!
I told him about my research on the Columbia space shuttle and how debris was still being found.
“So you will find the flag, then, or someone like Liz Delaney will find it? Or some other mystery person?” Denny asked.
Yes.
“It’s a good theory,” Denny said.
It’s a great theory.
“I wish I had your problems, Wayne on a plane,” Denny whispered. He suddenly looked depressed.
What?
“I wish I could be on a search for something lost, but I can’t,” Denny sang, pacing around his room as he did. “I, Dennis Rosenblatt, have to read out loud in front of an entire synagogue. Out loud!”
Sorry.
“Yeah. Be sure to get a front-row seat. It’s going to be hilarious,” he whispered.
“Okay, boys, ready for dinner?” It was Mrs. Rosenblatt at the door to Denny’s room, smiling, wearing an apron that read KISS THE COOK. Mrs. Rosenblatt was nice. So nice that last week she had to do that mom thing and try to touch my beat-up face and I had to recoil and write Hurts on my notepad. The truth? My face didn’t hurt as much.
“Mashed potatoes for you, Wayne,” Mrs. Rosenblatt said. “As soon as you are all healed, I’m going to make you an ambitious sandwich that you will never forget. Roast chicken. Swiss cheese. Tomatoes. Lettuce. The works. Don’t I make the best sandwiches, Denny?”
“Yes,” Denny said. “The best sandwich ever.”
If there were a contest for torturing someone’s taste buds, the Rosenblatts would win.
Still, she gave me a nice bowl of delicious mashed potatoes. That eased the agony of not being able to eat the best sandwich ever.
So I sat at the Rosenblatt family dinner table while everyone passed around dishes of delicious food. Denny had a loud house. There were at least five conversations going on at once among Denny, his father, his smiling mother, his aunt Sheila, and his little brother and sister. Especially Mrs. Rosenblatt. The way she talked made up for any nontalkers at the table.
“Denny, set the table, kids, don’t climb on that, did you see that article about food preservatives, Sheila, I can’t shop there anymore, put the dishes in the dishwasher, no, I never said it was broken, I said it just doesn’t work, there’s a difference.”
I watched them pass their plates while Denny’s mother told everyone what to do and asked him about fifteen times if he’d practiced his reading.
“Let the boy eat,” Denny’s dad said.
“We are so proud of Denny,” Mrs. Rosenblatt said. “Wayne, he is going to wear his great-grandfather’s prayer shawl that all the Rosenblatt men have worn for their bar mitzvahs. Did you know that?”
Nope, didn’t know that.
And did I know that Denny needed to practice reading his Torah portion?
And did I know that after Denny got up in front of everyone, and the service was completed, he would be considered a man?
“We can’t wait to hear him read,” Mrs. Rosenblatt said.
Denny got real interested in his meat loaf, and why wouldn’t he? Everyone was focused on how nice it would be to hear him read out loud.
Out loud!
Man, what was his family thinking? It seemed obvious to me that a kid like Denny would be too terrified to read a grocery list to a crowd, much less ancient Hebrew. Didn’t the Rosenblatts see the elephant in their dining room?
Denny turned to me, took my pad of paper, and sent me an SOS signal using Morse code.
…- - -…
And I wrote back, Did you know that people are wrong when they say the distress signal SOS stands for Save Our Ship? It doesn’t stand for anything. S-O-S was created in 1906 because it had nine keystrokes—three dots, three dashes, three dots—and was the easiest Morse code combination to transmit.
Sandy Showalter’s middle name was Olivia.
It’s ironic that the girl who plagued me would have the initials SOS.
Ironic with a capital I.
I should have known better than to crush on a girl with those initials.
Denny wrote: You’re a nerd!
I know!
Just when you think you’ve got a messed-up situation and more questions than answers, you sit at a big wooden table with a bunch of hungry, talking Rosenblatts and realize that Denny Rosenblatt would, in fact, love to trade places with someone searching for a red, white, and blue cloth rather than face the fear of reading in front of a hundred people. So over a meat loaf dinner, I realized something.
I was plagued.
But Denny was plagued, too.
Maybe we all were.