Five

Waiting for Lee, I traced my fingers over the black lines that represented the Paladin missiles. Most ended in black, fiery explosions of crayon. One missed and went shooting off the side of the page. Even at six I’d known that perfection was impossible.

My eye drifted down to the title block in the lower right-hand corner. There was my dad’s signature. It consisted of a gigantic J and an equally large T. The smaller bumps must have been the h and the k. I traced my fingers over the letters, remembering the time he had written that signature on a credit card statement to buy me a fishing rod. We had gone fishing that weekend, driving to a magical pond where I caught twenty bluegills using cut-up hot dogs as bait.

My dad had saved every bluegill bigger than five inches. We took them home and he showed me how to gut them and scale them and fry them whole with just a little egg and breadcrumbs. Then he showed me how to make tartar …

“Mr. Tucker.” Lee’s voice broke though my memory. I looked up at him. Acne scars marred his broad nose. “Do you recognize the drawing?”

I nodded. “I drew it.”

“Your brother wrote on it as well.”

I slid the drawing back across the table. “He’s not my brother. He was confused.”

Lee took the drawing and put it back into the envelope. “Perhaps you are confused.”

“That’s ridiculous. My mother always talked about how happy she was to have only one kid.”

“Why would she say that?”

“She said it whenever she got mad. You know, if I couldn’t find my shoes or didn’t take the garbage out on time.” I mimicked my mother’s voice with a nasal falsetto: “Tucker, you are so much work. Two of you would just kill me.”

“That is a terrible thing to say to a child.”

“She didn’t mean it. She’s a drama queen.”

“So your mother is still alive?”

“Oh yeah, and I’m telling you, Lee, there is no brother. I begged my parents to have another kid. My mother would say that it would kill her, and my father said he had enough kids.”

Lee ran his hand through his scraggly black hair, took out a handkerchief, and blew wet snot into it. Then he folded the handkerchief and put it back in his pocket.

“Mr. Tucker—”

“Please stop that,” I said. “Just call me Tucker.”

Another sigh. “Tucker, do you know your Bible?”

“I’m an apathist, Lee. I don’t care about religion.”

“In the Bible, God promises Abraham that he will be the father of nations. But Abraham’s wife, Sarah, can’t conceive. So she tells Abraham to sleep with her handmaid, Hagar, and Hagar gave birth to Ishmael.”

“Okay.”

“Then Sarah did conceive, as God promised, and she bore Isaac.”

“Well, good for her.”

“When I told this story to my children, they called Ishmael, ‘A brother from another mother.’”

It was late. Fatigue clogged my brain. “What are you saying? That my dad was a man-whore?”

“Abraham was not a man-whore.”

“That’s a Bible story, Lee. In the real world, a married guy who gets another woman pregnant is a man-whore. That’s what you’re telling me about my father?”

The conference room door opened. Somebody peeked in and Lee nodded and stood. “It’s late. Let us give you a ride home.”

I stood and extended a hand. “I’m sorry I couldn’t help you here.”

“Thank you, Tucker. We will be in touch.”

He led me out the door, and we started down the hallway. Another couple was coming the other way. It was a cop with a small woman with red-rimmed eyes. She wore a gray UMass sweatshirt, black sweatpants, and no makeup. There wasn’t room in the hallway for all of us. I muttered, “Excuse me,” and flattened myself against a wall.

The woman said thank you reflexively and looked into my face. Her unfocused gaze coalesced momentarily into recognition. She raised her hand as if to touch my face and took a small breath, about to speak. Then she changed her mind. Her face closed, and she continued down the hallway into a conference room with the other cop.

I asked Lee, “Who was that?”

“That was John Tucker’s mother.”

I breathed in her perfume, still floating in the hallway. It evoked dim memories of a bedtime story: Where the Wild Things Are. Lee blew his nose, and the spell was broken.