The Things I Want Most (33 page)

“Mom, relax. I have to get in shape, and Mike chose to come.”

“Why, Richard,” I asked, very amused, “this sudden concern over getting in shape?”

“Well,” he said, “I must get some direction back in my life. In order to do that I have to regain control over my body and my career.”

“Since when have you been in control?”

“Ha, ha.” He smiled, but his eyes were snapping.

“No offense, Richard, just joking”

Sue rushed Mike upstairs, and Richard pawed through some of his files. “Dad, I'm going to take a shower and start work. Great talking to you last night.”

“I had a good time, too.”

Then Richard said, almost as an afterthought, “I enjoy running with Mike. He listens to everything you say.”

In the next few days a complex and curious symbiosis flashed into being between our educated and overweening eldest son and our abysmally uneducated, naive, and vulnerable foster child.

They actually like each other. They began running together each night after dark, and until then Mike would sit quietly in the barroom, watching Richard plug away on his computer. They even took meals together, Richard lecturing between
swallows with one finger jabbing in Mike's direction as the kid nodded quickly.

“What's this all about?” I asked Sue.

“I don't know,” Sue said. “The two of them are thicker than thieves. What do you suppose they're talking about?”

I shrugged. I couldn't think of one single thing they had in common.

“Maybe you'd better find out.”

But I didn't follow up on my conversation with Sue and hence hadn't the foggiest idea of what was actually happening until Richard came into my room a week later.

“Dad.”

“What?”

“Did you know Mike has goals and plans for himself now?”

“Richard, don't light that cigar in here, please.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” he said, ignoring me as he drew deeply against a lit match and then exhaled a cloud of pungent blue smoke. “But I'm trying to explain his goals to you.”

“What? What goals?” I gave up on the cigar.
Goals?
Mike? What could Richard be talking about?

“Well, we worked things out on our run tonight,” Richard said.

“Worked things out? What things?”

“His life, of course. His education and his career progression.”

“What!”

“Well, for more than a few evenings now I've been detailing to Mike the new career decisions I've evolved, and tonight he actually changed tables. He began to tell me what he wanted to do and just how he was going to go about doing it.”

I was stunned. “What is he going to do?”

Richard sat down in my leather chair and waved one hand in a trail of dismissive cigar smoke. “Oh, he thought he wanted to be a cook, that once out of high school he'd get a job in a restaurant and, as he tritely put it, practice.”

“Thought?” I asked with a little pit opening in my stomach, “Thought? What did you say back? You
did
encourage him, didn't you?”

Richard waved that hand again and then jabbed the glowing tip of the cigar in my direction as he smiled indulgently. “Encourage him? Of course not, Dad, It's absurd, ridiculous. ‘Don't you ever dare consider being a cook,' I said.”

“What!”

“Yes, of course,” Richard said expansively. “I told him a cook makes minimum wage plus five cents an hour at McDonald's. ‘You, Mike,' I told him. ‘You must be a chef.' ”

“A chef?” I repeated weakly.

“Yes,” Richard went on with the cigar marking his punctuation like a miniature skywriter in the air above him, “not only a chef, but a credentialed chef. Then I pointed out that to be such a thing he'd have to forget about on-the-job training in a local restaurant specializing in meat loaf and pizza and hamburgers. I mean, Dad, fish sauces alone take months to master. The degree of knowledge required is exquisite. And the state schools are out, too, I told him—they have no name at all, and you'd be mixing with people with far less aspiration. No, no. I explained to him that, barring, I assume, the Cordon Bleu in Paris, he'd have to attend the CIA, the Culinary Institute of America, or maybe the VCI, the Vermont Culinary Institute, or as a very last resort, the Cornell Hotel Management School.”

I was at a total loss for words.

“Of course,” Richard said, getting up and turning his back, “we'll have to keep him out of that retarded special-ed program and get him into a halfway decent high school, and his reading must pick up dramatically”

“Yes, of course,” I said, looking at Richard like he'd grown two heads. “Of course.”

“Fine,” Richard said, stretching. “I'll get him a videotape on the CIA and make sure he has some better reading material.”

“Thank you, Richard.”

When Richard had trucked off, followed by a line of little blue clouds, I spun around in my chair and reassured myself out loud. “Well, at least Richard got him talking about the future. That's a step.” But then I thought bleakly,
Yes, a step
. The kid came up with his first simple basic life plan, and Richard stepped right on it, crushed it, told him it wasn't good enough.

But then a comforting thought occurred to me.
Mike has known Richard for only a week. Richard couldn't exert a lot of influence after that short a period. Mike probably doesn't even pay any attention at all to what Richard has to say
.

Then, moved by that thought, I got up and walked inside to Mike's room.

“Mike, it's eleven o'clock. Why isn't your light off?”

“I'm reading.”

I stared down at him. “Is that
The New York Times
you're looking at?”

“Yes,” he said. “All the other papers are trash, except of course
The Wall Street Journal.”

“I see. Who told you that?”

“Richard.”

“Yes,” I answered softly. “Yes, of course,” and then sat next to him on the bed. “And what are all those little circles you've drawn on the paper?”

“Those are the words I don't understand. Richard explains them to me. Richard says that is the way to improve my vocabulary.”

“Okay,” I said, touched in spite of myself, “but he can do that tomorrow. It's late. I want your light out in ten minutes.”

“But I haven't done the Metro section yet, and Richard says the human body needs only four hours' sleep.”

“Ten minutes, Mike.”

“Richard says that arbitra … arbitra …”

“Arbitrary,” I said, helping him.

“Yes, Richard says arbitrary time limits are a sign of weakness.”

“I know, Mike, he used to say the same thing to me when he was twelve and I was putting
him
to bed.”

“Richard says …”

“Mike, the light is going off in ten minutes.”

“But Richard says …”

“Don't you dare quote Richard to me once more, Mike.”

But Mike still had some prosaic issues left in his life, as well. The next afternoon he complained about our putting soda into his lunch Thermos. Apparently it shakes up on the bus ride and then blows the top off, soaking his lunch.

I said, “How long has this been happening?”

He said, “It happens every day.”

Puzzled, I asked him,” Why didn't you tell us before?”

Mike just shrugged his shoulders.

“Well, I'll make sure you get fruit drink from now on.”

“Never mind.”

“Why?”

Mike shrugged again. “Today was my last day. I start at the elementary school in two weeks. Summers almost over.”

The next day I got Mike away from Richard and put him to some physical work, and that in turn led to another animal encounter.

We have a friend, Henry, who lives about five miles away. We're helping him get windows and siding on the house he's building. Henry and his wife, Pat, have a small farm where they raise horses. The weather was brutally hot, but Mike worked
like a Trojan out in the sun with Frank and Liam, loading about three thousand pounds of steel scaffolding into Henry's horse van, then helping unload it at the building site.

Later, Henry took Mike into the paddock where the stallions were loose. The horses were chuffing, pawing the ground, and kicking from the sight and smell of strangers inside the fence. Mike was startled and hung back, but Henry looked at me. I nodded okay, and then he coached Mike on how to approach a big stallion from the front, breathe into his nostrils, and stroke his head. Mike then inched his way up to the enormous animal.

The technique Henry showed him worked like magic, and Mike was all smiles and laughing, hugging the horse and then turning back to us to show off. Henry and I clapped.

In the evening Richard, Mike, and I had a venison dinner (pan-fried with garlic and then drizzled with béarnaise sauce), the three of us quietly alone in the barroom, Richard and I drinking a bottle of wine, Mike with his Kool-Aid—the blue Kool-Aid that, being a budding connoisseur, he prefers with game. I don't like the color and think it has a distinct swimming pool bouquet, but he soaks up gallons of it.

The next night David and Susanne came over, and there was a long conversation among Richard, David, Susanne, Frank, Brendan, and Henry. A few minutes before midnight David came up to find me where I was working at my desk.

“You remember that concern you had with Mike having to work out some sort of future for himself?”

“Yes,” I said. “I do. What about it?”

“Well,” David chuckled, “it certainly looks like Richard nailed that for him. Before he went to bed, Mike talked and talked about becoming a chef and getting good marks in school.”

I looked down at my desk. “I know. I was upset with Richard a few days ago, but now I'm cautiously pleased. I mean, Richard's a madman, but something about what he has to say actually
clicked in with Mike. The kid's thinking about the future. More than that, he's a little bit more confident about his abilities, and we haven't had any sort of explosion out of the boy since Richard walked in the door.”

“And when Richard walks out in a couple of weeks?” he asked with his eyes questioning, gauging my reaction.

“Oh, we'll handle it, I suppose. Something of Richards confidence in him will stick. We'll try to fill in the blanks as we go.”

“So you feel better now?”

I smiled. “Yeah, yeah, I do”

“Okay,” then David smacked his hands together and rubbed them vigorously “I wanted to get that out of the way. But that's not the real reason I came upstairs.”

“No?” I asked.

“No. It's just midnight. Do you know what today is?”

I tried to think. “No.”

“Follow me.”

Curious, I walked out into the dark foyer, where I found Sue and the boys together in the dark, grinning.

“What's going on?”

“Sssh.” David put his finger to his lips. He opened the door to Mike's room and tiptoed in with everybody else following, then flipped on the light. One boy grabbed Mike's arms and another his legs.

Mike woke up screaming, “Let go, let go.” But David tickled him and then sprayed him with a bottle of beer or wine or something. “Congratulations, Mike.”

They let go of his arms and legs. “Congratulations!”

“What?” Mike said, sitting up, his face flushed and angry. “What is everybody doing?” Then he screamed, “Leave me alone. Get out of here.”

“Congratulations, Mike” David was grinning even wider.

“What?”

David chuckled. “It's the twenty-eighth of August, nineteen ninety-four,” and then I understood what this was all about.

“So?” said Mike, even angrier.

“So, you little woodchuck,” I said from the background, “you made it through a whole year with us”