Sons from Afar (21 page)

Robin just sat there looking excited.

“So you and James have been running this business?”

“Mostly me and James,” Sammy told Mr. Norton. “Sometimes someone else—a friend of my sister's, he has a car so we drive around to the docks, but he's in college now but—sometimes he'd give James time off. Sometimes we'd take his boat instead. James doesn't like it as much as I do.”

Mr. Norton nodded, listening. He painted mustard on the top of his second slice of ham, and cut a bite.

“But if you've been doing this for four years, you must have been awfully young when you started.” Mrs. Norton turned her brown eyes on Sammy again. He agreed. She was impressed and he liked that. He liked the way her eyes rested on his face. He liked having her look at him. He liked looking back, too. She was awfully pretty. “Didn't your parents worry about you?”

Sammy shook his head: No, they didn't. It was the truth, anyway; neither of them did, not his mother or his father, for one reason or another. He answered the question she really meant to ask. “There are life preservers—my grandmother makes us wear them. We never go out in rough weather, because the crabs just don't bite on windy days. We take good care of the motor, and there are oars, too.”

“I can't get used to that much independence,” Mrs. Norton
said, smiling at herself and looking down the table to Mr. Norton.

“We know you can't. Don't we, Robin?”

Mrs. Norton didn't mind their teasing. “But how would we get Robin there so early?” she asked.

“In summers—you've never been through a summer here—I get up at dawn or before and then take a siesta in the early afternoon when the heat is at its worst. The heat can get pretty bad. I've warned you about summers, love. But since I'm up anyway, I could drive him over. Wait till you see the summer dawns, Robin—everything sort of silver before the sun rises . . .”

“You think this is a good idea, don't you?” Mrs. Norton asked Mr. Norton.

Robin was practically holding his breath with excitement.

“I think it'll be fine. It'll be hard work, but Robin's up to some hard work,” Mr. Norton answered. “I think you ought to let him, yes.”

“Then it's okay with me,” Mrs. Norton said.

“All
right
,” Robin said, smiling at Sammy as if he'd just heard that the world was perfect after all.

“And if it doesn't work out—” Mrs. Norton continued.

“It'll work out,” Robin interrupted her. “It'll be great.”

“If it doesn't work out,” she insisted, “then you'll tell us. One or both of you will tell us. Promise?” Mrs. Norton asked Sammy.

“That sounds pretty fair to me, Robin,” Mr. Norton added.

“Okay,” Robin agreed. “Is that okay with you, Sammy?”

“Sure,” he said.

“That's that, then,” Mr. Norton said. “Summer might also be the right time to get Robin that bike. That's yours by the door, isn't it, Sammy? Do you ride to school?”

“Sure,” Sammy said.

“You don't ride by yourself, do you?” Mrs. Norton asked him.

Sammy could tell by then what Mr. Norton had meant about her having city reflexes. “I've been riding a bike for years, because—well, we don't have a car. At first, my sister always rode with me, to make sure I knew how, and to be safe, but ever since then. I mean, when I had a paper route, I had to ride my bike because the houses were so far apart.”

“How old were you?”

“About third and fourth grade.”

“And your parents didn't worry?”

“No,” Sammy said. Which was the truth.

She looked at him, then at Robin, then at Mr. Norton. “Go ahead, say it, Ben, I know you're thinking it. You too, Robin, I can see you two ganging up on me. I'm too protective, that's what you're thinking, isn't it?” She smiled at Sammy. “I guess, I'm beginning to think they might be right. Just beginning,” she told the two of them. “So don't get too many ideas. And now it's time for dessert. Does anyone want lemon meringue pie?”

Everybody did. They all helped clear the table. Mrs. Norton brought out the pie, its meringue topping looking like white waves, toasted white waves; Mr. Norton brought out two mugs of coffee, and the cream for it in a little pitcher. When they had settled down around dessert, Mrs. Norton asked Sammy, “What does your father do?”

She didn't ask it like it was an important question, more as if just for something to say. But Sammy still didn't know what to answer. He took a bite of the pie and put it into his mouth, and he didn't taste it. While he chewed, he looked at Robin, who was eating away at his own piece, and then at Mr. Norton, who was watching Sammy. As soon as Sammy met his eyes, Mr. Norton looked down the table at Mrs. Norton.

As soon as Sammy swallowed, she had her eyes on him again.
He looked right back at her, and he didn't want to tell her any lies. Or the truth, either.

“I've said something wrong, haven't I? I'm sorry,” she said. She meant it. She didn't like hurting people.

“It's all right,” Sammy told her. “Really. I just—don't have a father. I mean, I do, but I've never seen him.”

“Oh. Then it really was the wrong thing to ask,” she insisted. “I really am sorry, Sammy.”

Sammy didn't mind.

“Your poor mother. How does she manage?”

Sammy took a deep breath. “We live with my grandmother, my mother's mother, where my mother grew up. All of us do, I'm the youngest. There are four. Gram adopted us, five years ago. She has a farm and a big house and it's pretty nice. We used to live up in Massachusetts, on the Cape, when I was little. Then we came down here. My mother died, and—Gram takes care of us, and my sister Dicey, she's at college right now, and we take care of ourselves.”

He never stopped looking at her while he told her this. She didn't stop looking at him. “I guess, it's no wonder you're pretty independent,” was all she said about it, when he'd finished.

Sammy grinned. “Yeah.” He tried to explain to her: “My grandmother is—I really like my grandmother. Some of the things she gets up to—” He couldn't explain, so he stopped talking.

“But if you don't have a car, how does she get around?” Robin asked. “Does she have a bike too?”

“No, she uses the boat to get downtown in. Or Jeff—he's Dicey's friend, the one who sometimes comes crabbing—he's got a car. Or Mr. Lingerle, Maybeth's piano teacher, he's our friend.”

“Isaac Lingerle? The music teacher?” Mr. Norton asked.

Sammy nodded. He didn't know why Mr. Norton asked in that wondering way, but “He's our friend,” he repeated, to let Mr. Norton know.

“I can't imagine living that way,” Mrs. Norton said to all of them. “I can't imagine not having a car. It isn't anything I can even begin to imagine.”

“Positively un-American?” Mr. Norton asked.

“Bikes and boats. No horses?” Mrs. Norton asked. She was teasing now, too.

Sammy was enjoying himself. “No horses, no animals. I tried to have chickens, for a long time. But Gram says the only good chicken is a fried chicken.”

Then they all laughed, sitting around the table where the plates sat on bright woven mats and the pie had the same golden color as the light outside the windows.

After they cleared the table, and Sammy was told that Robin and his dad always did the dishes so he should get on along home before the sun went down, Mrs. Norton said she hoped he'd come again, soon. Sammy said he'd like that, which was true. He told her, if she let Robin have a bike, he'd ride with him for a while, to check him out and be sure he was safe. She said thank you, not teasing at all. Sammy said thank you, for the dinner. Robin walked down to the end of the driveway with him, just bubbling away with excitement. “I knew if they met you it would be okay.”

“It's hard work,” Sammy warned him.

“That's fine.”

“I had a good time,” Sammy said, looking back at the house.

“Good. I wanted you to. She used to be nervous about guests, and worry about not being able to have things nice enough, but Dad doesn't care so now she doesn't either.”

Sammy waited.

“I don't mind if my dad is only a schoolteacher. I probably shouldn't say that.”

Sammy didn't know about that. “He acts like a real father, doesn't he?”

“Yeah. He likes me.”

“Yeah,” Sammy agreed. “Look, I'll see you tomorrow, at school. Okay?”

Riding alone back to town, through town and out the long road home, Sammy's mind was whirling. The trouble was, he kept remembering the way Mrs. Norton's eyes had looked at him, and it made him feel sort of squishy inside, it made him feel good. And that made him nervous, because—he'd never had that feeling before. Then he looked around him, as the road swept under the wheels of his bike, and he couldn't stop smiling. It was a perfect evening. The sky was filled with dark gray clouds moving across from the east. The lowering sun shot out long bars of golden light under the approaching clouds. The whole landscape around him, fields and trees, was washed over with that light.

Sammy was looking forward to having James check over his English report for spelling and grammar errors. James wouldn't find any, he almost never did, but that wasn't what Sammy was thinking of. He was thinking that he'd done a good job, and he thought James might be impressed. James ought to be impressed—it was about the best thing Sammy had ever done for school. But he wasn't sure if it was as good as he thought. He wanted James to read it. Sammy didn't like that feeling of wanting James to be impressed, and he thought maybe he wouldn't let James read it. Anyway, it wasn't anything written by a lazy-brained person, that was for sure.

J
ames licked the final envelope, and sealed it. He put it on top of the three-inch pile of envelopes, to go out in the mail Monday morning. Leaning his elbows on the desk, he rubbed at his eyes. He had the office to himself on this Saturday afternoon. He'd come in at eight and been working steadily for almost six hours. During morning office hours, he'd been interrupted by the phone ringing and patients arriving or leaving; but since noon, when he'd wolfed down the sandwiches Gram had packed for him, not even noticing what kind they were, it had been relatively quiet. Dr. Landros had told him, as she left, that once she'd had lunch and done her grocery shopping she'd be at home. Dr. O'Hara had gone up to Salisbury when a patient went into labor about four weeks early. “I don't like it,” she had said to Dr. Landros. “Neither do I,” Dr. Landros had agreed. “I'll be on call this afternoon, so you go see what can be done. It might be false labor. You were just boasting about the premie unit up there, anyway.”

“Or it might be something wrong, and I'll have a lawsuit on my hands. I saw her Tuesday, she looked fine, but—”

“Leslie,” Dr. Landros had said, as if she was speaking to someone pretty stupid, “this isn't the big city, there aren't lawyers on every corner offering percentage deals on malpractice suits. You'll cross that bridge when you come to it.”

“I better run. I'll talk to you later,” Dr. O'Hara had said, running out of the office.

They were cousins of some kind, James had learned. Dr. Landros had practiced for years, but she said everybody wanted specialists or psychiatrists, and she was sick of locking her car and double-locking her apartment and being robbed anyway. Sick of accident cases where people swore at her because she insisted on the strict truth about their injuries. Sick of . . . about everything. “I figured, what the hell, if I'm going to hit change of life, I might as well change my life,” she told James. She liked being near the water. She liked fishing. She liked the quiet. She liked being a GP, too. “I'm a doctor,” she said, “not some specialist.”

James looked at the stack of duplicate forms, now ready to be filed in the tall cabinets behind him. He was tired, bored, ready to go home. But if he filed them now they'd be out of the way. He started sorting them into alphabetical order, separating Dr. Landros's cases from Dr. O'Hara's. Most of them were Dr. O'Hara's, the final entries after the six-week postpartum checkup. Dr. O'Hara said that statistically more babies were born in March and April than any other months. “It's all those June weddings, the people who aren't getting married still get feeling romantic, sentimental—it's something about June.”

Dr. O'Hara had been married, but she didn't have any children. James thought that had something to do with her going into obstetrics. She'd been divorced for about six years now, but she didn't have anything good to say about men. He'd gathered, from bits and pieces of conversation, things he'd overheard and things he'd been told, that Dr. O'Hara's husband had treated her pretty badly. Not hitting her, or abandoning her, or anything like that, just ordinary bad treatment between two people. She had paid the cost of sending him to law school, working as a waitress at night and a checkout girl in a supermarket during the day.
Waitressing was better money for the hours, she'd said, but the supermarket job was a steady income, and had the benefits, too, the medical insurance. Her husband—James didn't even know what his name was because she never named him, and had gone back to her maiden name after the divorce—went to school. During the summers he couldn't work, at first because he had to write his paper for law review, because if you were on law review then you got a better job, and then because he was offered a position clerking for a judge that didn't pay anything but had a lot of prestige. Then, once he'd graduated, he was working six, seven days a week, to beat out the other new lawyers in the company he'd joined. He said he didn't want children yet, he wanted a house instead, and a Mercedes, he wanted to enjoy himself after all that work; then he said he wanted to marry someone else.