MY SON, MY SELF

The doctors could have given me the news over a cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee or whispered it in my ear with a kiss on the cheek, a Judas Kiss, oh, by the way, Gerald Knight, you have advanced cancer of the pancreas. Instead, they mailed me a typed green half-sheet of paper addressed to Mr. Gerlad Knight, with “Your Cancer Support Group is Tuesday Night at 7:30 p.m. in the Fontana Health Center Lounge” scrawled across the bottom by some clerk with a capitalization fetish.

I had to call Lou.

“Good morning, Knight AIA, this is Lou.”

“Get Rennie home on a plane right now.” Click.

Sweet Lula Lou, better than a wife. Get my sixteen-year old Rennie on a plane from two thousand miles away. She would do it.

Was Rennie still chunky? I was “husky” until sixteen or so, then I shot up. High-water Jerry. Ma Dearest could only afford the fake Sears Levis and she got my t-shirts six to a pack. The collars fell off after three washings. High-water Jerry with his navy blue PF Flyers, the closest I could come to cool shoes; Hush Puppies or Doc Martens. One shining moment Junior year, the five-buck K-Mart black polyester loafers had been in style and I had a pair.

They told me that I had an aptitude for using a template and a CAD program. No one could see my high-water pants or the holes in my socks on a UC application form. I ate Top Ramen for eight years.

Back then, there was Kendra. I always figured that Kendra left because she was sick of rotting while I studied half the night. Maybe she was sick of paying for every dinner and every movie and buying my Hush Puppies and Pierre Cardin socks and a half-price double-breasted Armani suit for my big interviews.

Kendra straddling my thighs, wearing one of my white t-shirts with a frayed neck, the scent of some tropical fruit on her breath and the scent of musky vanilla in her hair as it brushed my lips like feathers.

Now, I am an important man, Gerlad Knight the architect, so important and desirable that cancer cells want to hang out at my place for a while. Hang out in my place. I get phone calls, Kendra, from beautiful women. Kendra is probably fat now, with four kids, a minivan, a Golden Retriever and an equally fat husband smashing down her pretty tits every night.

I am not alone. I have Rennie. Flesh of my flesh.

When I designed the Rancourt Center for the Performing Arts seventeen years ago, they gave me a check big enough to start my own practice. I opened the office, I hired Lou, and what was left over was enough to clone Rennie.

I worried for a long time that the woman who carried Rennie for nine months might want him, might sue, some of that stupid crap I saw on realvid. But it never happened. Rennie came home from the hospital and I fed him and cradled him and he grew up just fine. Him and me and sometimes Lou, who was good with babies and little kids.

I didn’t want him going to school here, not in Redlands. No high-water Rennie, not with me to look after him, but there are more subtle and painful forms of persecution than razzing a guy’s short pants or his worn-out sneakers. Stuff I don’t like to talk about. Rennie was safe in Connecticut at the Braxton School.

I hadn’t seen him for four years.

* * * *

Rennie said his room was “fine, Dad, fine.” This morning the sun was as sharp as light glinting off a stainless steel steak knife. Rennie’s hair was smooth like a beaver’s back, damp from the shower. Smooth, clear light brown. Rennie, when you are forty-five, you will have silver hairs threading the brown, at your temples and on the crown of your head. They will be wiry and thicker than the rest of your hair. You’ll pluck them one at a time when you first notice them. You’ll consider a tube of metal-based “natural” color which feels like Brylcreem. Then you will realize that the green turd-colored hair of your golf buddies comes from this crap.

At sixteen, were my cheekbones as sharp as Rennie’s? Did I have that fuzzy down on my jaw and my upper lip when my pants turned into clam-diggers in the space of two weeks?

“I’m going for a bike ride.” Rennie picked up his Italian ceramic bowl and slurped the milk which remained, licking a cornflake from the rim.

The stitch in my side had turned into a pair of needle-nosed pliers. The air was crisp, the sun bright as steel. The gardener had just ridden over the lawn and the odor of the fresh-cut grass filtered into the kitchen, mixed with the milk and the coffee and the cornflakes.

“Glad I got the bike. Can I come?”

“Gonna go now,” Rennie said, flashing his white, slightly crooked teeth.

I was still in my robe and bare feet. “Go out and make sure Jose got the clippings off the sidewalk,” I said. I could throw on jogging shorts and a sweatshirt. The Marlboro Grand Prix shirt was clean.

Rennie shrugged.

I trotted back to the bedroom, the pliers twisting every step. “No,” I said to the cancer, “you’re taking a holiday today.” At eleven, I had my second appointment with The Specialist. Chin-Yeh or Yeh-Chin. I rehearsed what I would say to him. “I’m fine, Doctor Chin-Yeh (or Yeh-Chin), I went bike riding with my boy this morning. I bet you’ll find those bad-boy cells have made a major retreat into my bladder, and I have peed them all out.”

Somewhere in the Cancer Support Group pap, there was a line about “Attitude Can Win!” I would think those cells into retreat. I was the general, marshaling my immune system into formation, attacking and killing the perverted cells infiltrating my pancreas.

I found if I held my thigh a certain way, I didn’t limp when I went into the garage to get the bikes. If leaned over the bike seat, the needle-nosed pliers released. Rennie would suspect nothing.

If you ride east from the house, it’s flat for a quarter of a mile, then all downhill, turn after twisting turn, a gleeful joyride of wind in your face. A Bronco or a Beemer might suddenly loom around one of those curves, chrome bumper and personalized license plate right in front of your front wheel. I’d taken Rennie down this hill when he still had training wheels, me jogging after him, yelling encouragement.

But there were no Beemers. It was after nine, everyone was off, to work or the Country Club. We reached the foot of the hill. I was sucking air, curled over in a racing posture. “Speed racer,” I said to Rennie, trying to grin though my mouth had dried out and it wasn’t a racing posture, it was a plier-avoidance posture.

Rennie braked beside the patch of weeds and wildflowers the City Fathers called a “nature zone,” and put one long, pale leg out to prop the bike. He turned, frowning.

“Dad, is this about Jack?”

I didn’t know who he meant. I shrugged and curled my arm inward to press down the pain in my side.

“I mean, did you bring me home like this because of me and Jack?” Beads of sweat dotted Rennie’s downy upper lip. It was hotter than I’d thought it would be. The Marlboro Grand Prix shirt flapped wetly against my back. Rennie’s monthly e-mails. He’d talked about a friend, maybe his name had been Jack.

“No,” I said. “Why would I have a problem with your friend?” What was up? Him and Jack, smuggling six-packs into the dorm? Smoking joints? Groping town girls after curfew?

I remembered something Rennie had written about this Jack being on the rugby team. Big kid, most likely. “Is this the guy who played rugby?”

Rennie nodded. “I thought you might have been upset,” he said.

One of the long muscles twitched in Rennie’s slender thigh. “No,” I said. “I thought maybe you could take some time off. I wanted…” I wanted to bring home my boy, because I’m dying.

“I’m kind of pissed,” Rennie said, looking down at the split tarmac which bordered the “nature zone” as if he might find a twenty-dollar bill. “Jack and I, well, I’m gonna miss him. He was pretty pissed, too. I mean, I’ve only got a couple of semesters left. We were talking about colleges and stuff. Maybe Dartmouth or Yale. Jack’s into law.”

Jack=friend=pissed=miss him. Your boy has grown from a gangly-kneed laser tag fan into a young man.

“You can see your friend again. Maybe over the summer.”

“You don’t understand,” Rennie said, then flipped up the kickstand and started back up the hill.

He was already a block away by the time I got my bike turned around and started after him. “It’s okay,” I called. His brown hair was flying, his sleeveless shirt flapping around his waist. I thought he probably heard, but he didn’t turn. His legs were pumping furiously.

I stood on my pedals and tried to catch up. The needle-nosed pliers twisted. My face felt freeze-dried. The sweatshirt was soaked. Then, came the other pain in my gut, the snakes, twisting around. Rennie pedaled faster. He rounded a curve. The sun was like a blind penny in the sky, heated white-hot. Somebody took the penny and threw it into my gut, where it burned and seared.

I’ve known pain. Sometimes I’ve even enjoyed pain. Like tonguing a sore tooth. You can’t help yourself. But this wasn’t an aching tooth. This was a puking, twisting bayonet.

I would not get off the bike. Rennie would not see his father sweating like a five-hundred pound woman, walking the bike up the driveway. I pedaled, each downward stroke of my legs a fresh agony. I couldn’t see anything, just chunks of asphalt torn up which I had to avoid so I wouldn’t do a header and kill myself, and I found myself making the way back up to the house, two and a half miles, by counting the chunks of pavement. Ten…twenty…thirty. If I counted, I could breathe. Hee-hee-haw. Breathing out, just breathing out, that was it.

As I crept up the driveway, I saw Rennie’s bike, leaning against the garage door.

I stopped halfway up the driveway, got off the bike as the snakes did an undulating tango in my abdomen.

Sometimes things happen you can’t do anything about. Like when a bunch of reptiles wrap themselves around your stomach and you toss everything you’ve eaten for the last twenty-four hours over the freshly-mown lawn and you curse the day you ever put in the used-brick lawn border because it hurts like hell when your nose slams into it.

“Rennie.” I vomited again. The grass was cool. It didn’t stink. I was all wet. I thought I’d dried off after my shower.

“Dad,” I heard Rennie saying from somewhere very far away. Someone grabbed my shoulders and turned me over, so I could see the white-hot penny sun. Why was I so cold? Who had shot me? Someone shot me in the side, and I couldn’t move.

“Dad, what’s the matter?”

“I’m fine,” I said, very clearly and distinctly. “There is absolutely nothing the matter.”

Rennie was crying.

* * * *

“The unfortunate thing about this type of cancer,” Dr. Yeh Chin was saying, “is that we seldom see it until it is advanced.” Asymptomatic, he called it. Until it was too late. He had prefaced this information with five minutes of lecture featuring the words “fool” and “idiot,” in relation to my bike ride with Rennie.

There were the usual doctor’s office furnishings, diplomas, certificates, medical books for show, and some things I hadn’t expected. Yeh Chin had a holographic model of the L-5 station on his bookcase. Astronaut models. A space nut. His desk was made of birdseye maple and probably cost as much as he paid his receptionist in a year. Yeh Chin’s face was broad, his eyes tiny and unreadable, set close to his broad, freckled nose. I hadn’t realized that Chinese people got freckles. Well, why not? They looked like little flecks of dirt.

He had been silent for a long while. I asked him how long I’d had the cancer.

“Probably about ten years.”

So, I hadn’t had it when they did Rennie. Imagine a kid growing up with cancer. And Rennie was exactly like—

“Interesting,” Yeh Chin said, flicking a button on his datapad and squinting at the glowing display. “You have a viable clone.”

“Will he get it? What can be done?” I scooted forward in the slippery leather chair, holding my side.

Yeh Chin scratched his chin and cocked his head. “What I meant, Mr. Knight, is that you are most fortunate in having the clone. Our best alternative is harvesting and transplantation.”

It took a few moments. The pain in my side was excruciating. When I tried to think, the pliers seemed to twist in my head at the same time they were twisting in my side. He meant Rennie. I shook my head.

Yeh Chin nodded in misunderstanding. “Yes, this would be the best method,” he said.

My God, I was tired. And yellow. I’d been avoiding the mirror, because every time I looked, I’d see the whites of my eyes the same dull color as creamed corn, shot with tiny red veins. “I’ve heard,” I said, and I had to pause to catch my breath. “I’ve heard you can grow a new pancreas for me. From Rennie.”

Yeh Chin shook his head. “There isn’t sufficient time. Your entire pancreas is cancerous and there is invasion of surrounding tissue. Soon there will be involvement of the spine and the liver. By the time the patient feels pain or discomfort, it is far past our ability to treat with less…bold…procedures.”

“Why don’t you just put my head on his body, then?”

Yeh Chin took me seriously. “Possibly,” he said. “Though a simple transplant and directed laser therapy is what is indicated.”

I knew the answer, but still I had to ask. Yeh Chin was putting the data pad away. “If you transplant Rennie’s pancreas into me, what happens to him?”

Yeh Chin raised one sparse, black eyebrow and smiled without showing his teeth. “As you are discovering, Mr. Knight, one cannot live without a functioning pancreas. I assure you, in these cases, it is quite painless for the donor. We will euthanize immediately after the surgery.”

He was clearing his desk. His hands were small and neat, the nails clipped blunt. Then, he took a chrome letter opener and began to scrape under his thumbnail. He thought I was like one of those rich people cloning for transplants: eyes, hearts, livers. They could turn their liver into a gray, twisted hunk of scar tissue and have a perfect one waiting.

My side was on fire again and my hands had begun to tremble. I wrapped my arm around my stomach and stood, bent over, feeling like “old age” in that painting of the three ages of man. Would my teeth drop out of my mouth into my hand? “I don’t want any of that,” I said. “Just send me home. Give me something for the pain.”

The letter opener clattered to his smoothly-polished birdseye maple desk. Yeh Chin stood, and there was something different in his face. His small black eyes met mine, then his hand was on my arm, the other hand went around my side.

“Please,” he said. “Sit down, Mr. Knight.”

I let him guide me to the chair. He knelt beside the chair. Big round bald spot on the top of his head. Little tufts of hair. Freckles there, too. Maybe he golfed.

I put my head in my hands.

“There are conventional treatments. The odds are not good. As it is, you have perhaps three months. Or not more than a week. There is no way to tell in these cases, without invasive tests which I would not advise.”

I turned so he would not see me cry. “Rennie is my son,” I said. “He’s only sixteen.”

“There are treatments for the pain. I will prescribe something.”

A junkie in my dying days. “Morphine,” I said.

“Oh, no,” Yeh Chin said, and his voice was gentle. “We no longer use opiates to any extent. But for the nausea, I will prescribe cannabis. That should not cause too many ill effects.”

“I don’t want Rennie to see me smoking pot,” I said.

“You can take it orally,” he replied. “And you must let me know in a week what it is you’ve decided. Beyond that, I can assure nothing, even with the transplant.”

* * * *

Rennie was not home when I got back. Note on the kitchen counter. He’d gone to the mall, be back before dinner. I fixed a double Glenlivet and water and sat on the patio, staring at the freshly-mown back yard. It was three-thirty. The shadows were cast deep across the mountains. The snow was hanging on. Skiing. Maybe Rennie would want to go skiing. He’d enjoyed that, cross-country, mostly, in Connecticut. So I remembered from his letters. I rehearsed what I would say to him. Big rehearsal. Rennie, your father is dying. I’m dying, Rennie. I’m kicking the bucket, I’ve got the Big C, and it’s having a party in my guts.

I hadn’t taken one of the pink horse pills Yeh Chin had prescribed yet. There was no way they were going to convince me that they wouldn’t make me dopey. Painless painkillers. The bottle said that one of the side-effects was nausea, as if I needed more of that. The cannabis pills looked like pellets of horse crap. The pharmacist, a bald guy with a ring through his nose like a Pamplona bull, had told me that smoking the dope was always more effective than the pills.

“In a lot of pain, huh?” he’d asked in a smartass voice.

I’d wanted to yank the ring right out of his nose. Hey, Jerry got the brass ring! Instead, I got out.

“Sheesh, some people,” I’d heard him say as I left.

It was getting hot on the patio. Sweaty again. I’d lost another five pounds. It wasn’t fat sweat. Sick sweat. Railroad tie rib sweat. Time to go inside.

The door to Rennie’s room was ajar. He’d left it a mess, hadn’t made the bed. I went in to straighten the covers and picked up his duffel bag where he’d left it. Papers spilled out, mostly yellow ruled sheets.

“I’m gonna miss you, can’t wait to kiss you,” one of them said, in loopy red letters. Big love letter. I started to stuff it back in the bag, but the red letters drew me like a magnet. One of Rennie’s conquests. Well, he was a good-looking kid.

It was really sappy love stuff. Flowers and hearts and “I’ll always love you, baby, Your my love thang.” It was signed, “you know who.”

I didn’t know. I put it back in the bag. Rennie would tell me if he wanted to. She couldn’t have been very important, or he would have already said something, or at least I wanted to think that.

There was a little zippered leather pouch in the duffel bag. Maybe it was the Glenlivet. The ice was melting down into what little booze remained, the glass sitting making a water circle on Rennie’s kid desk. Had to get him a new one, I decided. I’d order it tomorrow. One of my subs did custom desks. He could have one that took up the whole side of the room. I’d call about private schools, too. Valley Prep, that was the name of one of them. Didn’t kids from there go to Harvard and Yale? It wouldn’t be so much of an adjustment for him, not going to a school like that.

I unzipped the pouch. Drugs? No way, not Rennie. There were more letters inside, the same yellow paper. Maybe this girl did mean something. I opened the first letter.

“I just want to suck you’re big dick,” it said.

This was not a nice girl.

More of the same. That loopy handwriting, the lousy spelling.

“Luv, Jack,” it said.

I folded the paper, stuffed it back in the pouch, pulled the zipper very tight, and kicked the duffel back into the half-open closet. Then, I swallowed the last of the Glenlivet and stared at the “R” on the side of the mountain, and chewed the ice.

Boys had crushes. Sure. Like I’d ever had a crush like that, or sucked another guy’s dick. Maybe I’d thought about it a couple of times, for about five seconds. Psych 101. Every person has an attraction to the same sex, in greater or lesser degree. Yeah, sure.

More Glenlivet. If I took about ten of the pink pills and washed them down with the scotch, maybe I would just go to sleep and not wake up. Maybe I wouldn’t puke the mess up and Rennie wouldn’t find me and call the paramedics and they wouldn’t pump my stomach and “save” me. Dad’s just sleeping it off, Nancy Boy. Dad’s just going to take a long nap and never wake up.

My son was a fucking faggot. A prancing queen, a dick-sucking fairy. A butt-fuck buddy.

I cried like a woman. And then it occurred to me. Was I a fag, too? Why couldn’t I ever get it together with a woman? Good old Jerry, was that why Kendra took off? Stupid, stupid, I’d always had this fantasy that Rennie would grow up, find a decent woman, a beautiful girl, get married, have kids the right way, the normal way. God, I pictured it, Rennie and this faggot jock Jack, or some other big macho guy, Rennie wearing an apron and pushing their little boy baby down the street in a baby carriage, keeping it all in the gender. Just one big happy faggot family.

I knew what guys did together. What I hadn’t known, I learned from that letter. The nausea again. Another slug of scotch, this time straight from the bottle. It went down, hot and shuddering. I gagged over the kitchen sink.

Rennie came in. He was humming.

“Dad, you’re sick again.” He put his hand on my shoulder. Faggot hand.

Then, his nose wrinkled. He smelled the booze.

“You got something to tell me?” My God, now I was slurring like one of my “uncles.” Probably had a blue shadow on my chin. Probably smelled like sweat and puke and evil just the way all of Ma Dearest’s revolving door “uncles” did. I wanted to smash Rennie’s pretty, soft, downy face. My face. My son, my self. He was white and his chin trembled.

“Dad, what’s the matter?” He touched me again with slim pale fingers.

“Get your hand off me, you little fairy,” I said. The old bull is sick, the old bull is dying, but he can still charge.

Rennie backed into the other corner of the kitchen. He put the butcher’s block island where I chopped vegetables between us.

“You got into my stuff.”

I nodded, then drained the last of the Glenlivet. “Not deliberately,” I said.

“Well, maybe I wanted you to find it.” He crossed his arms, bunched his shoulders. His hair fell into his face. He looked like he was about five, then, and I wanted to put my arms around him.

We stood there a long time. He brushed his hair back, then took a deep breath. “I’ve known for a long time,” he said. “I just didn’t know how to tell you. You were always so—”

“How can you be a fag? How? You’re me.” I wasn’t. I knew that. I wasn’t.

Rennie shook his head. A tear slid down his cheek. “You keep telling me that. But I don’t know. I’m not you. I’m not like you. I’ve never been like you.” He pounded the counter with his fist, his voice choked, cheeks reddening. “Why did you do this to me?”

“Oh, shit, Rennie,” I said. “Come here.” I held out my arms. He came forward slowly, step by step, then I grabbed him and drew him to me. His head rested against my shoulder.

“I’m scared,” he said.

I stroked his hair, so soft, so beautifully clear brown, so fine. “I’m scared too,” I said after a while. He thought I meant about him. Maybe that was what I meant.

* * * *

Rennie was helpful around the house. I told him that I had a virus I’d picked up somewhere. That was why I was so sick. He didn’t know about the pink horse pills and the cannabis pellets. I hid those. The pink pills helped. But my head wasn’t clear. Colors looked different. The pliers went away, though. Almost completely away, except at the end of the day.

Rennie used the net all the time. I was watching him click back and forth between all this stuff, the music sites he liked, surfing, skiing stuff. It occurred to me that I might find Kendra. I’d been thinking about her every night. Reaching under the T-shirt, stroking her full breasts in my dreams, wet dreams, even in my yellow state, I still had those.

It took about thirty seconds and I found a listing for a Kendra R. Collins, Ph.D., in Alta Loma. The same last name. A phone number. I called, and it was an office of some sort. A secretary took the message.

Kendra called back two days later. “Jerry?” she said.

“Hi.” There was a long moment of silence.

“Are you okay?” The same voice, a little huskier. Her voice had always been husky.

Are you fat with four kids, Kendra? Married? Divorced? Remarried? “Can I see you?” I asked.

Another long pause. “Are you still in Redlands?”

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“I knew you’d go home, Jerry. The place had infected you.”

“You’ve got a Ph.D. What are you doing?”

“I’m a psychologist. I’ve been in practice here a long time. Kids.”

Gee, let me tell you something, doc. There’s this guy, and he was so screwed up after you left him that he didn’t touch another woman for five years. He wanted a kid, but he couldn’t bear the thought of screwing up his genes with some woman who wasn’t you and so he went and cloned himself. Just like one of those crazy rich people with no moral fiber. And now he’s forty-five and he’s got a cancerous tumor the shape of an eggplant sucking the life out of him. And the clone kid? It’s a nice joke, doc, the identical clone of this guy you fucked about eight million times is, this is a really good one, doc, gay. I’m straight and my clone is gay. Maybe I should sell it to realvid. What do you think?

“That sounds like a good thing to do,” I said.

I heard her breathing, lightly. “I’m not comfortable with talking to you,” she said. “I don’t know why I returned your call.”

“Please,” I said. “I have a son. Rennie. He’s sixteen. And I’m not—”

“I hope you’re happy, Jerry. I really do. I wish the best for you.”

“Kendra—”

“I always have.” Then, she hung up.

“I’m dying,” I said to the dial tone.

* * * *

It hadn’t occurred to me before that Dr. Yeh Chin resembled a Buddha. He did. His face was round, his belly was round. He was calm, and he never smiled with his teeth. When he talked, his front teeth gapped. It produced a slight speech impediment.

There was a kit which he ordered and presented to me. It came in a blue plastic box. Not intended for home use,” it said.

“Theoretically, this must be administered under medical supervision,” he said. “Legally, however, you have every right to do this. Since you have told me that the subject is sixteen and has been raised as your own son, I think that it would be best if you administered it yourself, preferably while he is asleep.”

I nodded. Dr. Yeh Chin explained the procedure. I was to pierce the vial with the needle and draw five cc’s of something called a “soporific” from it. Then I should inject it in a muscular area. The butt or the thigh or the upper arm. Then, I should call him, and he would call the medical transport van.

He had me practice with another needle and a vial of water.

He produced an orange. I pierced the thick skin of the orange with the needle.

“That should give you a good idea,” he said. “How is the medication working?”

“Fine. No more pliers.”

His brow raised. “Ah,” he said. “How unpleasant.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I must be honest with you,” he said. “I cannot understand your choice regarding—”

“I don’t understand,” I said, interrupting him.

He crossed his arms and regarded me, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together in an unusual gesture. I’d seen him do it before. Maybe it relaxed him. “We have thoughts on this,” he said. “Chinese thoughts. That perhaps this person you feel is your son is really a ghost. A ghost of yourself.”

I hadn’t spoken of Rennie’s sexuality. I shook my head.

“What I wanted to say is that you mustn’t feel badly. The fate has led a certain way. It is unfortunate, but unavoidable.”

“I don’t know if I can do it or not,” I said. And I did not know.

“You will know,” Dr. Yeh Chin said. “I am not sure I am expressing it properly, but I believe that such things are all preordained. There will be no pain.”

The blue plastic case was very cold, and heavier than I’d thought it would be. I suppose they had kept it in the refrigerator.

“Rennie likes to ski,” I told him. “He likes to ride his bike. He’s a whiz on the ’net. His grades are tops.”

“Yes,” he said. “Of course.”

* * * *

“Dad,” Rennie said. “Jack’s flying out for a long weekend. Maybe we could go skiing together, since you’re feeling so much better.”

“Beating this virus back,” I said, flexing my arm. Rennie’s face was shining.

“Next week, do you want to go visit that school you were telling me about?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Lou said maybe you’d be starting back to work next week. She’s glad you’re feeling better, too.”

I nodded. “Yeah.”

He’d just returned from a bike ride. His shoulders glistened with sweat. Then, he ran up and hugged me. I pressed my face into his hair. It smelled sweet and fruity, no, more like musky vanilla.

I wanted to say something else, but I couldn’t. I just patted his shoulder, then released him.

We had tri-tip on the grill. I had a couple of beers. Rennie had a Cherry Coke. He told me about school, the tough teachers, the easy ones. He preferred the tough ones, because at least he was learning. Jack had a harder time, he said. Jack was smart, but not about school. Smart in other ways, Rennie said.

I had another beer while the food digested. Rennie didn’t seem to notice when I forked most of my tri-tip into the trash. On the side of the mountain, there was the “R,” and I told him about it, how it was mostly chunks of concrete and white granite rocks and every year, a group from the high school would take a bus up there and sweat all day long clearing away the brush so it would look white and perfect from a distance, the way it did now.

“You didn’t like school, did you?” Rennie said.

“Sure,” I said. “I liked it fine.”

“I’m glad Jack is coming,” he said.

I took a long pull from my beer. “Rennie, I guess I can handle how you feel.”

“Dad, I’m so glad,” he said, and he smiled.

“I wonder if you’ll have a family. Do you want a family? I mean a real one—”

“I can make a family. Jack wants a family.”

Jack is your high school crush, even if he does have hair on his chest. You think this is forever, but it’s never forever. “Not like that,” I said.

“There’s no reason either of us can’t do the same as you did,” he said. “After all, when you didn’t want to get married, you figured it out.”

There was the “R” on the mountain. White and clean-edged and perfect. An acre on each side. It took all day to clean the brush away. We were proud of it, coming home sweaty, legs ripped up from the thorny sawgrass and stinking creosote, hands all ripped from heaving the concrete around. All those rich kids hadn’t looked much better than you, Jerry, by the time that was all done. Your short pants hadn’t mattered much, by the end of that day. Rennie sat beside me in his immaculate shirt and chinos, which broke nicely over his deck shoes.

“Jack’s plane gets in Friday at 3:00. Lou said she’d take me to the airport to pick him up.”

“Good for Jack,” I said. Then, I reached over and squeezed Rennie’s hand.

That night, I tucked Rennie in, and sat in the living room. The blue case had been in the refrigerator the whole time. Rennie hadn’t noticed it, or if he’d noticed, he hadn’t said.

I dialed Kendra’s number. It rang six times, then I heard a click.

“I’m in session,” Kendra said.

“I guess you work late.”

All I could hear was her breathing. “You’re taking me away from the patient,” she said.

I cleared my throat. There was a huge lump there, like I’d swallowed an egg. “I need—”

“You need? That was always it, wasn’t it?” Her hand covered the receiver, and I heard her saying something, just the sound of her voice, not the words. Then, she was back. “I had hoped you would have grown up, Jerry, but it was always you. Whatever Jerry wants. Jerry’s the only person in the world. Someday you’ll learn there’s more to life than that.”

“Kendra, I’m dying,” I said.

She took a deep breath. “I’m not a medical doctor,” she said. “I can recommend some counselors in Redlands. My secretary will call with their names tomorrow.” She hung up. The dial tone echoed. I put the receiver down, gently.

I went to the patio again and stared at the mountain, which was now like a torn sheet of black paper against the night. Then, I went inside.

Rennie was sleeping. His shoulder was uncovered. The sheet had slipped. His hair feathered over his cheek. His breathing was soft, regular, untroubled.

The bottle was cold, the needle colder. I broke the plastic covering and thrust the needle into the liquid. Five cc’s. It took five seconds.

Rennie’s shoulder did not feel like an orange.

He stirred once, moaned, then was quiet.