Small Blessings (14 page)

Henry regarded him solemnly over his spiffy backpack. The only time he'd abandoned the thing had been in McDonald's, where the three of them and Rose Callahan had gone for breakfast. Tom had suggested this, not wanting to let go of Rose's company quite yet and thinking that there was no child on the planet who didn't like McDonald's.

It was only Rose who'd appeared at all relaxed during the McExperience. She'd sat herself down across from Henry and proceeded to employ the same social procedures with him she used with everyone: I am who I am, you are who you are, and with that as a given, why shouldn't the two of us get along just fine? It hadn't seemed to matter at
all
to her that Henry didn't talk. Rose chatted away as though they'd known each other since the dawn of time, talking about places she'd discovered in the woods that Henry might like to visit, asking him if he'd like to go to the gym with her one afternoon and shoot hoops. Henry had mostly stared down at his backpack while she talked, but occasionally he'd looked up at her with something in his eyes akin to wonder. Tom had empathized with the boy. How could anyone be as comfortable as Rose Callahan appeared to be in weird situations?

Tom's knees were beginning to hurt. Perhaps squatting down to look Henry in the eye had not been a good idea. Yet he couldn't just stand up again without saying
something,
could he?

He asked the first question that came to him. “How old are you, Henry?”

To Tom's amazement, Henry responded by lowering his backpack to the floor, unzipping the front compartment, and extracting a folded piece of paper that he handed (wordlessly) to Tom. Tom unfolded the paper and saw that it was a Xeroxed copy of a birth certificate for one Henry Thomas Putnam, born September 23, 1998, at Tulane Hospital in New Orleans. His mother was listed as Serafine Despré; which, to Tom, sounded very much like a name Retesia might have made up on the spot.

His father was listed as one Thomas Marvin Putnam.

So there it was in black and white: a physical impossibility masquerading as a legal responsibility. What had Retesia done, arbitrarily picked a father for her son out of her past? What chaos had this child been born into?

Tom looked up to find Henry watching him anxiously, savvy enough already to know a Rubicon when he faced one. “So,” Tom said, careful not to sound too hearty, “you're six years old, about to turn seven, then. You've got a birthday coming up in just a couple of weeks! We'll have to celebrate.”

Instead of answering, or even nodding, Henry reached for his paper. Tom handed it back and watched Henry carefully refold it, zip it back in its compartment, pick up his backpack, and hug it close.

Both knees cracked as Tom stood up. “Thank you for showing me your birth certificate, Henry. It made me feel quite proud to see myself written down there officially as your father.”

Henry's eyes snapped upward, and Tom thought he saw doubt flicker through their composure. This he construed as a good thing, for Tom was pretty sure Henry had gotten off the train expecting things
not
to work out.

Marjory was suddenly in his head, more perspicacious in memory than she'd ever been in life.
Henry
, she whispered,
is not me. He can still be all right.

Tom looked down at the small, brown, abandoned six-year-old standing before him, separated from his own heart by only the bulk of a blue backpack. He reached down and grasped a strap. “May I put this down for a moment, Henry?”

Henry allowed his backpack to be dislodged without protest. Tom put it carefully on the floor at the boy's feet. He thought of Rose Callahan's ease with the boy; of how she'd treated him as she would treat any small boy with whom she was breakfasting.
If I'm to be this child's caretaker for three months,
he thought,
I need to let him know I care.

Reaching down, Tom picked up the boy and held him close. Henry didn't respond, but neither did he struggle. Which, Tom figured, was a start.

So here they were, father and son, in the world according to Retesia Turnball. He held this strange, contained child as close as he dared, his heart suddenly quite fierce with feeling, his head ticking off all the things to be done in preparation for Marjory's funeral tomorrow. Of course, Agnes would right now be roaring through to-do lists with an efficiency he could only dream of. Besides, what he really
wanted
to do was take Henry shopping for bunches of new room stuff. Did that mean he was trying to buy some kind of relationship with him?

Marjory's ugly chicken loomed, whole again and on its shelf. The fact of the matter was the hideous thing had delighted her, made her happy for almost a whole week. So who was he to sneer at it? Who was he to monitor other people's happiness? If a new bedspread and matching jammies would bring a smile to Henry's face, why should he give his own motives for buying them a second thought? If this boy needed anything, he needed a reason to smile.

Tom carried Henry over to the bed, planning to sit down. This turned awkward when he had to physically maneuver the boy into his lap, first bending him in the middle and then folding his legs down. But he managed it, and put both arms around the little boy. Henry sat straight-backed as any marine.

Now what?

It came to Tom that the one thing he didn't have to do was hurry. Today would pass; he'd get done what he got done; Henry would either relax a bit or he wouldn't. The thing to do was for him, Tom, to relax and take his time. Let things come to him instead of rushing at them as he usually did.

Tom looked down at Henry's froth of tight curls and thought again of his own father. Eddie Putnam had never talked down to his son; he had always talked
to
him. He might have dumbed his language down a bit or simplified his sentence structure, but with the exception of Santa Claus, his father had never, at least as far as Tom could remember, tweaked his presentation of reality.

“Henry,” he said. “I want to talk with you about this father-son business.”

Henry blinked and, as if this were possible, seemed to stiffen.

Tom soldiered on. “Here's the way it seems to me. It seems to me that your birth certificate says I'm your father and that's one thing to consider. But it's not, perhaps, the most
important
thing.”

Henry blinked again. Tom thought he could
feel
the boy waiting for the next in his short lifetime's long line of dropping footwear to fall
. Here, said they, is the terror of the French, The scarecrow that affrights our children so …

“It seems to me, Henry, that the most important thing is how you and I
feel
about being father and son. Isn't that what you think?”

Henry's eyebrows ran together.
Is he thinking?
Tom wondered.
Or is he just worrying harder?
“I don't know,” Henry said, in a voice just loud enough to be a voice.

“Well, that's fine. But what I really want to say to you right now is that I
do
know. Okay?”

Henry said nothing.

Tom gently tipped Henry over against his chest, holding him, patting him, trying his best to transmit his own surprisingly profound sense that everything was okay now and was soon to get even better. “What I want you to understand, Henry, is that I feel just grand about your being here.”

Silence. Then a slight movement from Henry. “Am I going to school here?” he asked in the same whispery voice.

“Of course. We have to get ourselves through tomorrow. Through my wife's funeral that I was telling you about on the ride home today…” Tom's voice caught and he stopped, as Marjory was there again. Just for that moment, he missed her. Missed
her.
Marjory, as she'd actually been; defeated by life from the get-go, but always,
always
trying to figure out why, so she could fix herself.

Tom looked down to find Henry looking up at him, his blue eyes fastened directly on Tom's own. “I'm sorry your wife died,” he whispered.

Tom suddenly couldn't stop himself; he hugged Henry to his chest so tightly that, if one of them were drowning and the other one were rescuing, it would have been impossible to tell which was which.

*   *   *

Around nine thirty, Tom was in the kitchen eating a bowl of rocky road ice cream when Agnes came in carrying Henry's backpack. “That's—that's Henry's!” he said, shocked at Agnes's behavior. “We can't just rummage around in Henry's stuff!”

Agnes waved Henry's privacy aside like a fly. “Have you
looked
in this thing?”

“Of course not! It's Henry's private space.”

“Oh, please.” Agnes plunked the backpack down on the kitchen table, finally swept clean of rose petals. “The last thing Henry needs is us not giving a damn about the details of his life. Would you like to know what's in here?”

Tom stared at the big blue thing. “Would that be right?”

“Right or wrong, I've already looked. And believe me there are things our boy Henry needs much more than his space. So, you want to know what Henry's mother sent along with him?”

“He already showed me his birth certificate.” Tom felt again the weight of that small boy in his arms. “Did you see that?”

“I did. Who the hell is Serafine Despré?”

“I'm assuming it's a name Retesia made up for some reason.”

“Why would she do that?”

Tom shrugged. “Because she's Retesia?”

Agnes thought for a moment and then nodded, as though Retesia being Retesia were excuse enough for anything. “So, did you notice the date of Henry's birth?”

Tom nodded
,
acknowledging that whoever Henry's biological father might be, it wasn't he.

“Speaking as a lawyer,” Agnes said, “your name listed as Henry's father on his birth certificate means that unless some guy comes forward claiming
he's
the father and backs up that claim with DNA testing, legally you
are
Henry's father. Speaking as a person, however, legalities are not the best organizing principles when it comes to six-year-old boys. This boy needs you and me to step up and sort his life out.”

Tom realized he'd been holding his breath only when he let it out. “I couldn't agree more.”

Agnes nodded. “Good. Now, for the third time, do you want to know what's in Henry's backpack?”

“Yes,” Tom said. “I do.”

“Well,” Agnes said, “first of all, there's not one ticket stub but two, and they're from Picayune, Mississippi, to Charlottesville, not from New Orleans to Charlottesville.”

“You're kidding.”

“I'm not kidding. You want to see them?”

Tom's curiosity once unbound, had taken over. “No, no, I'll take your word for that. What else did you find?”

“One change of clothes, one pair of pajamas, underwear, and socks, all of which are brand-new. There's also one brand-new teddy bear from the Vermont Teddy Bear Company—which means Teddy is a very pricey bear.”

Tom frowned. “That's not a lot, is it? For such a long visit.”

“Maybe not, but that's all there was room for,” Agnes said.

Tom knew his mother-in-law loved nothing more than bombshells. “And why is that all there was room for?”

Agnes leaned forward and jammed a finger into Henry's backpack. “Because there are fifty thousand dollars' worth of hundreds in here, as well as a cashier's check for four hundred and fifty thousand more dollars.”

“What?”
Tom stared down at the blue backpack, trying to comprehend that it did indeed contain half a million dollars. That made Henry, the small, mute boy asleep in the upstairs guest room, a demi-millionaire. No wonder he'd held on to the thing. Tom imagined Retesia hovering over him, telling him again and again not to let go of it for
any
reason!

“So?” Agnes demanded.

“You're kidding?” Tom said.

Agnes threw both hands up. “Stop asking me that. I am
not
kidding! What the hell is the story with this child? You knew his mother. Do you have a clue?”

Tom fiddled his spoon around in the melting pond of rocky road. “I didn't really
know
her, you see. That—that wasn't the point of our relationship.”

“Of course it wasn't the point! But I thought you two might have talked
occasionally.
”

Tom began pulling at his right earlobe, as though that might help him remember. “Her family came from either Iceland or Norway, I think. Or maybe Sweden. But wherever they came from, it was a couple of generations ago. Retesia never talked about them—I mean in terms of seeing them or having any contact with them.”

Agnes was now in full lawyer mode. “You said she was newly widowed. Is Turnball her married name or her maiden name?”

Tom pulled harder on his earlobe. “I … I don't know. I don't even know if that's her real name or just her poet name. She could be Susan Smith for all I know.”

“Had she been living in New Orleans before she came here ten years ago?”

“Not that I remember. I think she'd been living in Detroit. Although maybe it was St. Louis.”

“Well, I Googled her before I came down here. There wasn't much—nothing at all after 2002. There was a little flutter in 2000 when she won something called the Dorothy Prize for her poetry. It looks as though she was living in San Francisco at the time. I couldn't find any reference to her teaching anywhere after she left here.”

Tom gave up on his earlobe. “I'm sorry. I wish I could remember something helpful, but I just can't.”

They sat in silence for a couple of minutes.
What now?
Tom thought. Taking in a lost boy was one thing; taking in a lost boy with a half-million bucks in his backpack was something else entirely.