Apparently, Denny Rosenblatt thought he knew what I needed for my birthday. Because three weeks later, when I turned thirteen, I went to his house and he chucked a big book at me. The Illustrated History and Mystery of the Titanic.
The Titanic?
Denny whisper-talked, “It’s a metaphor for your life, Wayne on a plane.”
My life is sinking into a watery grave?
“No, your life is about holding out hope. Lost things being found and all that. For your search. It’s still out there waiting to be found. See? Do you know how long it took for searchers to find the sunken Titanic?”
Over seventy years.
“Exactly! So you’ve only been searching for the flag a few months. You need to give yourself time. I was wrong about what I said before. You should keep looking.”
It was a nice thought. That Denny. He could not only sing, he could really surprise you with the connections he made in his brain. But the thing was, I didn’t really think I had a lot of time.
Grandpa was thinner. Sleepier. Another new amber pill bottle was on the counter. Facts were adding up. And I still hadn’t come right out and asked him what was up. I drew pictures of elephants and pinned them to the fridge. The computer’s screen saver was a giant elephant. I was hoping he would ask me, Hey, what’s up with all these elephants? And it would be a good place for me to respond, It’s about time we talk about all these elephants in the room, huh?
It hadn’t worked.
And Mom? She was a locked door. She was in a good mood when she was with Tim LeMoot. But when she was at home, alone and quiet, her mood seemed sad. She wore her deep-thinking face all the time. The face you have when you are trying to work out a really hard word problem.
Sandy? Well, the Titanic metaphor fit our relationship better than any other. Our steady stream of back-and-forth texts had continued, if you could even call them texts. We were down to communicating only in emojis.
So the flag? I didn’t have seventy years. Though there was still no new news, I held out hope that a stranger would discover it. I imagined it in my head every night. Maybe if I imagined it enough, it would come true.
“Come on, let’s go walk around Sears,” Denny said.
We got to the mall, and Denny said now that we were thirteen, we should wear cologne.
“We’ll walk through Macy’s. Those fragrance women in white coats? Man, they spray everything that moves,” he whispered.
He was right about that. We walked right into the cologne gauntlet. At least three white-coated women with press-on smiles were armed with cologne bottles and ready to shoot.
I got one cologne attack. Denny got three. As I walked behind him into the mall, the wake of smells that trailed him was toxic. But he thought he smelled like a man. There was no arguing with him about that.
“Girls love cologne,” Denny whispered.
When you don’t have a properly working voice, you let a lot of things go. Like the effectiveness of too much cologne. So I shook it off, and then he said we should make up a story to go along with my look.
I don’t have a look.
“You might have been in a motorcycle accident, you know? Or you are a young movie stuntman on hiatus. You’re here to get a jacket, right?” Denny whispered. “Let’s go to Leather Town. I’ve always wanted to go in there.”
True. Mom had told me to buy a new jacket since I’d outgrown my old one.
You know how something leathery and new smells extra-leathery? That’s what the jacket I found smelled like. Soft as butter, too. I didn’t look half bad when I turned to the mirror and checked out my right-side profile. Man, I wouldn’t be half bad if I could go through life walking sideways.
I wrote to Denny: Cool.
After our trip to the mall, you will never guess what was waiting for me when I got home!
“Surprise,” Mom shouted. “Happy birthday!”
Mom had pulled every chair we owned around our kitchen table.
And Sandy Showalter was seated in one of them.
Sandy Showalter in my house! There were other people, too, but it was like they were in black and white and she was in full color. I would like to tell you that this fact made me super happy. And it would have if Sandy hadn’t been sitting in a green-and-white lawn chair. Her mother sat in a lawn chair, too. The Flee, Stephanie, and Carrot sat in our regular chairs. Grandpa was in the swiveling office chair. Mrs. Rosenblatt sat in the tiny antique chair Mom kept in her bedroom. Because we didn’t have enough regular chairs. I tried not to focus on that fact. Mismatched chairs should not make a person feel embarrassed, but they did.
“Wayne, you and Denny sit right here,” Mom said.
We sat on two stools. I don’t even know where they came from.
Stupid chairs.
Did you know that there are several recorded cases of spontaneous human combustion? The common denominator, however, is that most of these people drank alcohol to excess prior to their combustion. The best I could’ve hoped for in my fantasy combustion was that I’d been spritzed with cologne to excess.
Because cologne is also highly flammable.
“Happy birthday, Wayne,” Sandy said with a smile. A real, in-person smile, not an emoji smile! “I like your jacket.”
So I didn’t go up in flames, unless you counted the hot rash that crept up from my stomach to my neck.
Denny sang, “There will be caaaaakkkkke!”
Our stools were right on the corner of the table. No easy exit. And believe me, since the crash, I pay attention to the exits in a whole new way.
Mom put a supersized bowl of ice cream in front of me, while everyone else gobbled up delicious-looking, torturous pizza. Even Grandpa. Everyone was talking and smiling, even Sandy. I realized that Mom was happy. Her hair up in a ponytail. Her new eyebrow debuting.
“Tim is coming over later, Wayne,” she said, smiling. “He has something for you, too.”
“What? Probably a pair of boots, right?” the Flee said.
I saw Mom mouth the word behave to him. I hoped he would, but my stomach did flip-flops. Maybe the worst thing he would do was tell me to join the stupid Aqua-Duck team in front of everyone.
“I would never miss my son’s birthday,” he said. Carrot and Stephanie had ice cream.
“Daddy got you money,” Carrot blurted out.
“Carrot, son, you shouldn’t spoil it,” the Flee said.
Denny sang-talked. Mrs. Rosenblatt rambled on about Denny’s bar mitzvah and how the printer had messed up the spelling of his name on the thank-you cards and called him Danny. Even old Hank Williams, whose tank was in the room, took a slow swim around his habitat. And it wasn’t awkward silence with Sandy.
“Everyone misses you at school,” Sandy said.
I wrote her a note: Thanks!
Grandpa handed my dad a piece of cake.
“Well, age thirteen, huh,” Grandpa said. “That’s a great age. When Reed was thirteen, do you remember, Jennifer, he was already working his way up to be an Eagle Scout. He organized an event to help the local animal shelter and did it all himself. That boy already knew how to serve his community and his country.”
Grandpa entered the patriotic zone. That wasn’t so bad. He was most like himself when he did that. Not sad or distracted. I hoped the conversation about Reed wouldn’t get him all worked up.
I looked at Denny and envied him all over again. His dinner table was always loud, but there wasn’t any sadness. And bonus fact: All his dining room chairs matched. So I prayed hard that everyone would stay happy. Just one hour of solid happiness. Just one hour where it could be all about me. Maybe that sounds selfish, but that was what I wanted. Eat cake. Be happy. Receive presents.
Mom put a box in front of me. A new laptop computer. Finally! Mrs. Rosenblatt gave me an engraved silver money clip with my initials. W.H.K.
And Grandpa? He presented me with a new fishing pole. Man, the whole party was almost nice.
And it was all going well. Until Grandpa asked the Flee a question.
“So, Doug, where do your people come from again?” Grandpa asked.
“My people?” the Flee said. “You make it sound like I’m from another planet or something.” He laughed and it made Mrs. Rosenblatt laugh, too.
“Your people. Any of them serve?” Grandpa continued.
“Now, Stephanie, this is the thing I told you about,” the Flee said. “It was always about the army in this family. Who served. Who fought the longest.”
“What’s wrong with the army?” Grandpa asked.
“It’s fine. It’s just not for everyone. And you already know the answer to your question. None of my people served.” He put the word people in air quotes.
It was possible, I thought, that the Flee felt like me sometimes. Like he didn’t fit in. Like he was the odd lawn chair around a table of matching chairs. I took a bite of ice cream and looked at Denny. He gave me a nod and a smile.
“Does anyone want any more cake?” Mom offered.
“I guess some families get to sit back and stay at home while their liberties are being protected by others,” Grandpa said. “Wayne, you understand that, right? When you enlist, you’ll see how exceptional it is to serve.”
“What if Wayne doesn’t want to enlist?” the Flee said.
There it was again. A play called Tug-of-War. Wayne Kovok playing the role of the rope. Stretching. Pulling. I prayed Grandpa would drop the subject. Embrace his own rule about knowing when it’s your bull. This wasn’t his bull. But that didn’t stop him from waving a bright red cape and trying to agitate my dad for sport.
In front of everyone.
“It’s less about choosing to enlist and more of a calling,” Grandpa said. “Wayne will make the right decision.”
Wait, what? What is the right decision? And why was this conversation taking place around the table? On my birthday?
Mom said, “Dad, you want some more ice cream?” Maybe she thought if people were stuffing themselves with ice cream, they couldn’t talk. It was a good strategy.
“I don’t know, Jennifer,” the Flee said. “Do you have red, white, and blue flavor?” He tried to make a joke. Is it still a joke if no one laughs?
Grandpa ignored Mom. “You’re good at running, though.”
The Flee puffed up. “Well, I got a college scholarship for running track. Some people say I had a real talent for running.”
“Well, don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back,” Grandpa said, which I thought was a little funny.
“Funny,” the Flee said. “I was a champion runner.”
“Ha! Running away, maybe,” Grandpa said.
I stared into my bowl of ice cream. Did you know that the biggest ice-cream sundae ever created weighed twenty-four tons?
“Listen, I was teaching Wayne valuable life lessons. Endurance and such.”
The most popular flavor of ice cream is vanilla.
“Okay, since I know the old man isn’t going to drop it, what I did was take Wayne out to this road. To train him,” the Flee said to everyone.
Ice-cream cones were invented in 1904 at the World’s Fair in St. Louis.
“Doug, no one wants to hear about that,” Mom said.
In my mind, I covered everyone with the twenty-four-ton ice-cream sundae. Except Sandy and Denny and Mom. I let them sit on imaginary ice-cream cones.
Grandpa interrupted. “You know what, Doug?”
“What?” the Flee asked.
“You’re all beans and no broth!”
I stirred my ice cream until it was like soup.
“Doug! Dad! Let’s change the subject,” Mom said.
“Well, it’s true!” Grandpa said.
If you thought that would make me want to shout at the top of my lungs, you’d be correct. And inside, I was. I was shouting. Thousands of shouts, pounding against the inside of my brain. I was desperate to shout. To shout, but my beat-up throat would not cooperate. My voice had progressed to a raspy whisper in Dr. P’s office. Fact: A raspy whisper will not get anyone’s attention.
“He was fine. Ask his mother. He was fine, right, Jennifer? He coulda been a track star if you’d let me keep training him.”
“Training, huh?” Grandpa said.
I pictured my voice as a solid object trapped in a jar. If only I could smash the glass and let it go free. “You don’t understand, do you?” Grandpa said. “Maybe you never will.”
It was too much. I had to break the glass.
“New topic!” I said, jumping up from the table. I pounded the table with my palm. Bam! Mom flinched. Blinked. The sound had been louder than a raspy whisper.
Denny slapped his hand on the table, too. Bam! “Y-y-yeah. New topic!”
I stood up and then Denny did, too. Everyone looked at us like we’d just come from Mars.
Then Carrot slammed his hand on the table, too. “Yeah!” he said.
Long seconds passed before I walked out of the room. And Denny walked out with me. I went out the garage and down the alley and bolted.