A Father for Philip (4 page)

“I don’t think it’s just that first love
is hard to compete with, Grant, think there should be more to what I feel for
you. Maybe when the seven years are up if there’s been no word I’ll think about
it again. But if you don’t want to hang around waiting, that’s okay, too. I
understand. Maybe you’re the one who needs to move on. I realize it’s not fair
to you, having to wait, now I know you want more than friendship.”

He had quit pushing her for an answer
then, and the last year had been peaceful and companionable. They got along
well on all but the subject of her son. They dined at his restaurant—he liked
showing her off, he said. They drove occasionally into the city for the theater,
which both enjoyed, or opera, which he loved and she tolerated. On those trips,
she insisted on separate hotel rooms and Grant gave in grudgingly. They danced,
skied, and rode horseback on the riding trails winding through his resort and
continued the friendship she enjoyed.

But for all that, Grant’s treatment of
Philip remained a real bone of contention..

When, in December, just four months ago,
the seven years without word of David had been completed, Grant had started
again. And not only did he push Eleanor for a decision, he leaned heavily on
Philip, too, trying to break him in, he said, for the upcoming marriage... A
marriage to which Eleanor had not agreed.

Poor Philip, Eleanor thought, swatting a
mosquito. He can’t help being afraid of horses, and Grant is so darned
impatient with him. The other day, when he picked him up and flung him into the
saddle, Phil was terrified! I hated Grant in that moment, even though I knew he
thought he was helping Philip get over his fear as well as teaching them a
lesson.

Eleanor rose and walked into the house.
She tried to close the screen door quietly but, as always, it squeaked. She
tiptoed into her child’s room and stood looking down at him in the dim light
from the hallway.

His brown hair, damp with perspiration,
slicked to his forehead. His left foot and leg were outside the covers and she
automatically tucked them in again, knowing that they would be out once more,
in two minutes. Philip frowned and muttered something which sounded like, “Hate
him.” He was talking in his sleep. Eleanor thought he must be dreaming about
fighting with one of his schoolmates. She smiled gently at the frowning little
face crushed against the pillow.

Philip had finally stopped having
nightmares, but still talked in his sleep occasionally. Dr. Grimes said bad
dreams weren’t unusual, nor was talking in his sleep. He had done it last
night, and the night before, too. The scare he’d had on the horse could be
blamed for that. Eleanor closed the door gently behind herself and left her son
to his dreams.

She showered and then stood in front of
her king size bed. She and David had bought it together to accommodate his tall
frame, and she could not bring herself to give it up though she sometimes felt
lost in it. She twisted the wedding band she still wore, turned and examined
her body closely in the full-length mirror. No drooping or sagging, yet, she
reflected, but there were those little lines around her eyes, and the grooves
of sadness between her nose and mouth, visible, especially when she was tired,
as now.

I’m twenty-seven years old, she told
herself, nearly twenty-eight, and though it only shows a bit, Grant’s right.
Time is passing... Neither of us is getting any younger. But how can I marry
him, knowing the way it is with him and Philip?

The sight of Grant doing what could only
be termed showing off, three days before had imprinted itself on her memory. He
had come galloping up full tilt on his new horse, Glider, thundering across the
field, intending, they could all see, to jump the hedge surrounding the
farmyard. At the last minute the horse had balked and Grant sailed up over its
neck to land in the hedge unharmed. Philip, Bill, and Kathy had laughed. As she
rushed to help him, Eleanor had to admit that Grant did look funny with one leg
stuck up in the bushes, his head hanging down. Of course he was fine, though he
had bruised his knee. He got to his feet without her assistance, his face red
with white patches at the corners of his mouth. His eyes looked utterly mad he
advanced on a still giggling Philip and threatened him with his riding crop.
She’d screamed his name and stopped him in time, of course, and Bill had
stepped between Grant and Philip.

“Back off,” he’d snarled at Bill.

“You put that whip away.”

Grant had lowered the sort crop. “I
wouldn’t really have hit the kid.” Then he’d added, “But he does have to learn
not to laugh at others and he has to get over his childish fear of horses.
That’s why I brought Glider over.”

Then, before Eleanor could prevent it, Grant
scooped Philip up and tossed him into the saddle, jeering, “Let’s see how you
do, jumping a fence.”

Philip, of course, had screeched and
clung to Glider’s mane, howling like a banshee. The horse had reared if it
hadn’t been for Bill catching the big black’s reins and taking the child from
the saddle, the horse could have run away with Philip and hurt him badly.
Philip, once safely on the ground, had run off to disappear into the woods, not
to return until Eleanor called him. He had obviously hidden out until he knew
Grant would be gone, and while he hid there in the safety of the forest,
dreamed up his latest playmate for himself.

Eleanor yawned tiredly and pulled on a
nightshirt.
Oh well, I’ll leave him to it
for now
. She slipped between the sheets.
He’ll be back in school before long, and it’s a while until summer
vacation. By then he will have forgotten...

The yellow school bus shuddered to a
stop, brakes squeaking before the doors hissed open to release Philip at the
end of the driveway up by the farmhouse. Eleanor, leaning on the fence watching
calves play, raised her hand to wave to her son who came hurtling toward her,
lunchbox banging against his knee, plastic bag full of what she knew would be
weird and wonderful drawings to be hung all over the kitchen walls.

“Hi, Mom,” he panted. Never could that
child walk, and arrive anywhere in a condition less than out of breath, his
mother thought as she bent to kiss him.

“You have a good day, son?” she asked as
hand-in-hand they walked down the grassy slope to their home.

“Sure.” He grinned, showing his new set
of overly-large upper incisors. “I punched Jamie Peters on the school bus.”

“What for?” Eleanor glared at her son as
she pushed the kitchen door open.

“Because he pulled Lorna’s hair.”

“Oh... I see. Well, why not let Lorna
fight her own battles?”

“Oh, she did. She bopped him with a
book, but I punched him anyway. I don’t like him.”

Philip kicked off his new sneakers,
saved for school, not play, and looked behind the kitchen door for his grubby
ones. He gave his mother an accusatory glare, which she answered by saying,
“Ever think of looking in your closet? Some things do get put away, you know.”

“Can I go barefoot, Mom?”

Eleanor made a production of walking to
the window and gazing out and up. “Snow’s still on the mountain,” she said.
Philip, who knew quite well there was still snow on the mountain, and therefore
knew as well that he could not go barefoot outside, was ever hopeful that just
once his mother might forget to check. He sighed. Not until the last vestige of
snow had left the top of the nearest mountain would his mother deem it
“bare-foot-weather.”

He dashed into his room, from which
emitted terrible noises for a few moments, then ominous silence.

“Hang up your pants!” Eleanor called,
and was rewarded by hearing the closet door squeak open then shut with a crash.
“And come get your shoes!”

Philip pelted back into the kitchen,
skidded to a stop complete with squealing brakes sound-effects, grinned his
most engagingly, and said, “Did you remember to make doughnuts today? Sticky
doughnuts?”

“One sticky doughnut coming right up,
sir,” Eleanor replied, opening the can and passing him one. She licked her
fingers and her lips and opened the can again, this time retaining a doughnut
for herself. She bit into it, savoring. “I shouldn’t give in to you and make
things I know are bad for me,” she said. “I always tell myself I’m not going to
indulge, then I do. I’m going to get fat.”

Philip hooted. “Aw, Mom, you won’t get
fat.” Then, still holding his own doughnut, he said, “But can I have another
one, please? For Jeff?”

“Oh?” Eleanor pursed her lips, cocked
her head to one side. “You really think ‘Jeff’ needs a doughnut?”

“Uh-huh,” he nodded. She bit back a
smile at her son’s earnest claim. “He doesn’t have a mom to look after him and
he lives alone in a camper. He can make cakes and things in his little oven,
but he couldn’t make these.” Philip waved his doughnut around as sticky crumbs
of icing scattered all over the floor. “He doesn’t have a deep fryer.”

More to save her kitchen floor than
anything else, Eleanor gave Philip the extra treat he’d requested and pushed
him out the door. “Okay, okay,” she laughed. “After a story as full of detail
as that, I guess you deserve one for ‘Jeff’.”
Not to mention creativity
. A camper? Philip had been indignant when
she’d declined to buy one for him so they could go to Disneyland like his
friend, Tommy, and family had done last year.

As Philip warmed up his jets for
takeoff, his mother called loudly above the racket. “And don’t be late! We’re
going out for dinner with Grant!”

The whining jets suffered an abrupt
flameout and Philip protested. “Aw, Mom, can’t I have dinner with Kathy and
Bill or”—hopefully—“Jeff?”

Eleanor shook her head. “Not tonight,
love. Grant’s going to ask the chef to make a big juicy hamburger for you with
cheese, bacon, tomatoes, and lots of sauce. Sound good?”

“Fries, too?”

“Fries, too.”

Waving two the two sticky doughnuts, one
half-eaten, the other intact, from his wingtips, which the uninitiated might
have considered handlebars, Starfighter Philip screamed away, kicking in his
afterburners as he soared out over the rapidly diminishing terrain three
thousand miles below him.
Boy, nobody’s
ever taken one of these birds this high before.

In a flash he had found the section of
forest he wanted and the Starfighter became a helicopter which was landed with
great expertise and all the correct sound effects in the clearing. Lying there beside
a pile of peeled logs, it masqueraded as a battered bike.

The glade was empty and the pilot stood
near his machine looking for the enemy. The sound of a truck in low gear
alerted him and he huddled behind a bush, lurking... waiting. In the month since
school had been back in after Spring Break, much as been done in the clearing
and as always, Jeff had left quite a bit for Philip to do this afternoon. There
were littered patches beside naked logs, underbrush still to be uprooted or cut
back., and the helicopter pilot forgot his mission as Jeff limped into the
clearing. “Hi, Jeff. Want a doughnut?”

A smile lit the face of the man. “Surely
would like a doughnut, sport,” he said. Philip produced the pair of sticky buns
and leaning against a stump the two munched in companionable silence until the
last crumbling bit of icing had been licked from each finger. Jeff said,
brushing the icing off a short curly beard, “That was great. Who made them?”

“My mom. She’s a good cooker. I’ll bring
you another one after school tomorrow.”

“That would be nice, Phil, but if you
keep bringing goodies like that, I’m going to end up looking like a big old
tub.” He picked up his axe and began limbing a tree which lay on the ground.

“That’s what my mom said, that doughnuts
make her too fat.”

Jeff leaned on the handle of his axe and
looked quizzically at the boy. “Your mom isn’t fat, is she?”

“Nah. She’s skinny. Grant says she
doesn’t eat enough. We’re going out to dinner at the hotel tonight with Grant
and I’m getting a gooey hamburger with cheese and bacon and tomatoes and fries,
too.”

“Fries, too?” Jeff whistled, impressed.
“Can you eat all that?”

“Sure. I’ve got a hollow leg.”

“It sounds like a good dinner. I’d like
to have that, too. Where is this hotel you and your mom and Grant are going
to?”

“Oh, Grant doesn’t have to go to it. He
lives there. It’s his. Appleton’s Hotel and Resort. You know.”

“Yes,” Jeff said slowly. “I know. I’ve
driven by it. Pool, air conditioning, gourmet dining, luxury cabins, riding
trails, horse rentals? Live band on weekends. That the one?”

“Yes. Hey, Jeff, why don’t you come too?
We always have a table right by the windows and there’s four chairs and only
three of us to sit there.”

“Well, sport, that’s a nice thought, but
it’s not such a good idea. You see, if your mom and Grant are going to get
married, then they probably wouldn’t want a stranger horning in. He’ll be your
stepfather when they marry, you know, and you’ll be a family.”

“Yeah... I know.” Philip had no idea how
revealing his answer was to his friend.

“When do they plan to get married, son?”
Jeff asked.

“Grant says the minute my mom stops
acting like she’s a love-lorna girl and tells the judge to say my father’s
dead. What’s a love-lorna girl?”

Jeff’s face relaxed from its tight lines
and he grinned at the child. “I think you mean ‘lovelorn’, Philip. It means
she’s in love with someone.”

“Oh, yeah. Grant says she only thinks
she is because she can’t love ghost for the rest of her life. My mom says she
doesn’t know who she’s in love with unless it’s me and her computer. I asked
her about it after I heard her and Grant fighting one night when they thought
it was asleep.” He cocked his head to one side and Jeff felt his heart tumble
painfully at the so familiar mannerism—so familiar and last seen so long
before...

Philip’s voice broke into his thoughts.
“Hey, Jeff...” He frowned, as if unsure of the rightness of asking this
question.

“What is it, Phil?”

“Well... When Grant was yelling at my
mom, he said it was crimmal to let a king-size bed go to waste like that. I
know a crimmal is someone who has to go to jail, and my mom laughed when I
asked her and she said she wasn’t being crimmal at all and not to worry about
what Grant says. She’s not going to go to jail, is she?”

“No, son! She is most definitely not
going to go to jail,” Jeff replied emphatically. “Tell me, Philip, what does
your mom look like?”

Philip thought hard for a moment. “She’s
kind of pretty. Not like Miss Walker, but she’s okay.”

“Is her hair black, brown, gray?”

“Don’t know, it’s kind of like...
like... like a root beer popsicle. And so’s her eyes.”

Jeff threw back his head and roared with
laughter. “A root beer popsicle! Oh, Phil, that’s wonderful. Who,” he asked,
sobering somewhat, “is Miss Walker?”

“She’s my teacher. She has real pretty
yellow hair and it’s always blowing in the wind when we’re outside playing. She
can run faster than me and she has blue eyes. She’s real pretty.”

“She sounds nice. So you think your
teacher’s prettier than your mom, do you?”

“Well... Maybe not much, but a little
bit. She’s not quite as nice, though. I love my mom best. Better even than
Lorna.”

“Another girl in your life? Who is
Lorna?” There was absolutely no work being done on the clearing today. Jeff
didn’t care.

“She’s my girlfriend. I think I love
her. That’s why I thought Grant was saying love-Lorna. I figured maybe my mom
loved Lorna, too.”

Jeff laughed deep in his throat and
rubbed his hand over the straight-haired head by his knee. “Well, sport,
there’s lots of time for you to think about loving Lorna. Right now we have a
cabin to build. I don’t want to be living in the camper come winter, so let’s
get on with this before the snow flies. What kind of fireplace should we
make—stone, brick? You see, we have to do that first. We’ll build the cabin
around it.”

“Oh, stone,” Philip replied, earnestly
and without hesitation. “Stone’s the nicest. The one in Grant’s restaurant is
made out of orange bricks and it doesn’t even look like a fireplace. You can
see into it from both sides and it only has pretend logs. The one in our
house’s made out of big gray stones. My father built it, mom says. She said he
could build anything. I wish I had a picture of him, but we don’t. My grandpa—I
don’t remember him—put them all away so my mom would quit crying and now we
can’t find them.”

“What do you know about your father,
Phil?”

“He is tall and skinny and his eyes are
like mine, just a little darker.”

“That’s all?”

“Well, my mom says he’s a hard act to
follow... She didn’t say that to me though, she said it to Kathy. And he likes
trees and he went away to the jungles ’cause they have special trees there,
different, and he wanted to learn how to save them. They give us
ox—oxy-something so we can breathe right.”

“Oxygen.”

“Yeah. My dad’s a hero. He got lost in
the jungle and they’re still looking for him. I’m going to go to the jungle and
help look for him as soon as I can. Then my mom won’t have to marry Grant.”

Jeff raised his head, turned his face
away from Philip and swallowed hard. “Listen,” he said. “Is that your mom
calling you?” And sure enough, faint and far away, came the high clear call.

“That’s her! See you tomorrow, Jeff!”

“No... See you tonight, Philip. I’m
going to the hotel for dinner, too. But...” He hesitated for a moment, eyeing
the boy, and Philip interrupted.

“Are you?” His eyes were alight. “But
listen, Jeff...” Philip’s ears turned pink. “You won’t say anything to...
Anybody about Lorna, will you?”

“Of course not. Wouldn’t you like your
mom to know you had another girl besides her?”

“Oh, Mom wouldn’t mind. But Grant...”
His nose wrinkled. “He’d make fun of me.”

“I won’t say a word, sport. But tell you
what. Just in case I forget, and mention it, we’ll pretend we’re strangers and
not even say hi to each other. It’ll be our secret that we’re friends building
a log cabin together. Okay?”

“Sure Jeff!” And the call came again
still faint, but with an undertone that meant business.

~ * ~

Philip, on his half-broken mustang,
burst from cover at the crest of the hill and ran down, firing his rifle into
the horde of Indians who filled the bottom of the valley. Single-handed, he
wiped out eighteen of them, dodging wildly from pine tree to pine tree. The
remainder leapt upon their pintos and galloped out across the prairie, leaving
behind a beautiful Indian princess whom Philip grabbed by the hand as he
dismounted.