The King of Jam Sandwiches

by Eric Walters

  “Are you insane?”

  “You’d be surprised.”

  “Where do you even get ideas like that?” I asked.

  “My social worker says that because my father was never there, I likely have issues with men.”

  “You have a social worker?”

  “I’ve had lots of social workers. I’m in foster care. Do you think they’d give me an electrician? If I have issues with men, then you might have issues with women. Doesn’t that make sense?”

  “I don’t have issues with anybody,” I said.

  “Are you sure? Because I have issues with almost everybody.”

  “Yeah, big secret.”

  “So why don’t you want a girlfriend?”

  “I don’t want a girlfriend because I just don’t have time for one.”

  “They don’t take up much time.”

  “More time than I have. You don’t understand,” I said. This was getting really irritating.

  “Then explain it.”

  “If I did tell you, you’d think I was strange.”

  “Oh, Robert. Your being strange is one of the things I like best about you. It’s why we’re friends. Just tell me.”

  I stopped walking. I took a seat on the steps of a walk leading up to a house. Harmony stood right in front of me. I had to decide exactly what I was going to tell her or if I should tell her anything. She had blurted about me and my mother to Mrs. Levy. Would she tell people about this too?

  “If I tell you, you can’t tell anybody,” I finally said.

  “I won’t.”

  “Okay, like I said, this is going to sound strange.” I took a deep breath. “I get up every morning knowing that I have to work hard.”

  “That’s no surprise.”

  “Not just hard. Harder. I get up thinking that I need to work harder and longer than everybody in the entire world, and if I do that, I can gain just a little. And if I do that every day, day after day after day, eventually I might, well, become somebody.” There. I’d said it. She stood there looking down at me.

  “I know it sounds stupid but—”

  “It doesn’t sound stupid at all. It makes complete sense,” she said, nodding. “Except you’re wrong about one thing.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Robert, you already are somebody.”

  “What?”

  “You already are somebody.”

  And that’s when I burst into tears.

  NINE

  We sat at my kitchen table and sipped cups of tea. I would have offered her something else, but tea and water were all we had in the house. I’d locked Candy in the bathroom, and she’d finally settled down. She only yipped once in a while. It had taken her much longer to settle down and stop barking and growling than it had for me to stop crying. But I hadn’t stopped feeling bad and very embarrassed. I’d known this girl for only two days, and I’d started crying in front of her. The only thing that made it better—or worse—in any way was that Harmony had started crying too. That had shocked me.

  I glanced at my watch. Five thirty. Still safe. My father wouldn’t be home for at least another half hour. Depending on traffic, maybe even an hour. Of course, sometimes it wasn’t the traffic and he didn’t get home until nine or ten at night. Those were the times I wondered if he was going to come home at all. None of that mattered now. I just needed to get Harmony out of here before he arrived. But I needed to say something first.

  “I want to apologize to you.”

  “For what?” she asked.

  “For getting so upset earlier.”

  “I cried too,” she said. “How about if we just pretend it never happened?”

  “Sounds good. Thanks.”

  “That’s what friends do.” She paused. “You might not know this, but I don’t have many friends.”

  I almost said, Big surprise, but I stopped myself. “It’s probably hard to make friends when you keep moving around.”

  “It’s not that. It’s just that, well, I don’t have that much in common with kids my age.”

  “I get it. When I’m talking to you, it’s like talking to somebody older,” I said.

  “I feel the same way. But usually when people say things like that, it feels almost like an accusation. Why don’t you act your age? Who are you trying to fool?”

  I laughed. Again I knew exactly what she meant.

  “Sometimes I don’t just feel old, but old and tired,” she said.

  “I get tired.”

  “Do you ever get so tired that you just want to go to sleep?”

  “Sometimes I get so tired that I can’t sleep,” I answered.

  “I understand that. Too many thoughts and too much to be worried about. Do you ever want to just go away, never come back, disappear?”

  “Disappear. Do you mean, like, die?”

  “It would be easier.” She paused, and I held my breath. “Not that I’d ever hurt myself or anything.”

  I exhaled. Thank goodness.

  “Maybe we feel tired because we have to think about things other kids don’t have to think about,” I said.

  “That’s probably it. Some people have to be older because of what life gives them. You have to be older just like I do. And so you know, like I said before, I won’t tell anybody that you’re poor,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I won’t tell anybody that you’re poor.”

  “I’m not poor.”

  Harmony gestured around the room.

  “My father just doesn’t like to spend money on things.”

  He didn’t like to spend money on anything. The last new thing to come into the house had been a dishcloth—two months ago. The old one had been in ribbons.

  “I guess that explains why you don’t have a cell phone.”

  “You don’t have one either,” I said.

  “I had a phone. My mom hocked it.”

  “Really?”

  “She sold her phone too. That’s why I can’t get a hold of her now.”

  “She just took your phone and sold it? That’s awful.”

  “That’s not the worst. Sometimes I’d come home from school and find the kettle was gone, or the toaster, or living room furniture, or even some of my toys.”

  “She’d sell your toys?”

  “All the time. When I was little I didn’t even notice. I just thought I’d lost them. The first time I really noticed was when she sold my favorite toy—a stuffed polar bear.”

  “That’s terrible,” I said.

  “I always snuggled with it when I went to bed, and one night I couldn’t find it. I looked under the bed and under the covers and said I wouldn’t go to sleep until we found it. My mother made lots of excuses and then finally admitted what she’d done.”

  I couldn’t imagine how Harmony must have felt—no, wait. I could imagine it.

  “She told me she’d go and buy it back the next day. That’s the only reason I was finally able to get to sleep that night,” she said.

  “And did she get it back?’

  She shook her head. “Of course not, but even that wasn’t the worst.”

  I waited. Wondering, wanting to hear, but also not wanting to hear.

  “One Christmas morning I woke up and there were, like, a dozen wrapped presents under the tree.”

  “How is that bad?”

  “I got to open the presents. There was great stuff, and I got to play with it all day.”

  “Still wondering how that was bad,” I said.

  “I got to play with it that day. The next day she returned it all to the stores. They weren’t really my presents.”

  Harmony laughed, but it wasn’t a real laugh. It was sort of a laugh-so-you-don’t-cry laugh.

  “She’d sell whatever she could to get money for alcohol or drugs. Is that your father’s problem too?”

  “No. He doesn’t drink except for when he goes out on a Saturday night. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him drunk.”

  “That makes it
even more confusing.”

  “What’s so confusing?”

  “He has a job, and he doesn’t do drugs or drink, and you say he has money, but there’s no food in the house.”

  “We have food.”

  “I’m not talking about just potatoes and bread and jam for your sandwiches.”

  “We have different food, and we have lots of food.”

  “Look, I know I shouldn’t have, but when you were checking on the dog, I looked in the fridge. It’s almost empty, and I bet there’s not much in the cupboards either.”

  She was right. There wasn’t much in the cupboards or fridge. But we had food. “We have lots and lots of food.”

  “You don’t have to lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying.” I got to my feet. “Come with me.” I went to the basement door, opened it and clicked on the light. “Be careful. The stairs are steep.”

  I started down, and Harmony followed. As we went, I realized I was not just telling her things I didn’t tell people but was now going to show her something I didn’t show to anybody.

  “Is this the scene where the beautiful, innocent young girl goes into the dark basement and then gets murdered?” she asked.

  I looked back at her. “First off, I think you’ve already proven that you can take me, and second… innocent?”

  “I notice you didn’t argue the beautiful part.”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. I hit a second light switch, and the far side of the basement became visible.

  Harmony gasped. “Wow.”

  There against the back wall were the shelves. They were almost floor to ceiling, and they were filled with cans and packages of food.

  “I told you we had lots of food.”

  “You didn’t tell me you had a grocery store in your basement.”

  “We just like to be prepared,” I said.

  “Prepared for what, the zombie apocalypse?”

  The shelves were full of tinned meat and cans of peas, corn, carrots, mixed vegetables, peaches and pears. There were glass jars of spaghetti sauce and lots of packages of pasta to go with them. There were dozens of boxes of cereal, packages of crackers and jars of jam and peanut butter. And just to the side of the shelves sat a gigantic bag of potatoes.

  “There’s enough food down here to feed an army.”

  “Or two people for six months,” I said. Or one person for a year.

  “But why?”

  “It’s good to be prepared in case we can’t shop.”

  “You could miss shopping for a few months and be okay. So is this what you do with the money you earn at your job?”

  “Nope. My father just stocks up whenever there’s a sale.”

  “Well, I guess there were lots of sales,” said Harmony. She grabbed a mega-giant jar of jam. “Enough jam to make sandwiches for the rest of the year! Long live the king!”

  I picked up a clipboard. “This is where my father keeps track of all the food we have. It has to be rotated out regularly so it doesn’t go bad.”

  “Canned stuff goes bad?”

  “Everything spoils eventually.”

  She looked at me. “Are you getting philosophical on me?”

  “No, I really mean food. Canned stuff can last for years. Packaged spaghetti and noodles too, if they’re kept dry. Bread and cereal get stale even if they’re sealed. Potatoes start to root or rot. If it goes bad, then we wasted money.”

  “And your father doesn’t like to waste money,” she said.

  “Only people with lots of money can waste it.”

  Harmony’s gaze went back and forth along the shelves. “What I now don’t understand is, if you have this much food, how come you’re so skinny?”

  “It’s here for a reason,” I explained.

  “And eating it isn’t the reason?”

  “Eating it takes away the reason.”

  “I’m thinking the reason is that you and your father are paranoid.”

  I was going to argue, but she was right. My father and I were paranoid, but in different ways. His paranoia had allowed me to convince him we needed this food supply. And we did. At least, I did. I had almost run out of food the time he took off for a week. Now he could be gone for six months and I’d be okay. He could die and I’d be okay for six months. Now that I had the banking password, I could always buy more food. The money I got from my job would help too.

  “Do you ever just take a can of something and eat it and not tell him?” Harmony asked as she picked up a can of meat.

  “Sometimes.” I hesitated. Could I trust her to keep a secret? “I change the numbers on the sheets so he doesn’t know anything’s gone.”

  “And he doesn’t notice?”

  I shook my head. There were times he didn’t even notice me, let alone changed numbers on some sheet of paper. It wasn’t that hard to take a can of meat.

  “That means you could do it all the time,” she said.

  “I only do it when I need to.”

  Candy started barking again. Somebody was at the door or walking by the house—or my father was home. I’d lost track of time. I had to hope it was a stranger.

  “Come on. We have to go upstairs right now.”

  I rushed across the basement, flipping the light off before Harmony had made it completely into the glow of the stairway light. We raced upstairs, and I flicked off the light and closed the basement door just as the front door opened.

  “I’m home!” my father yelled.

  I turned to Harmony. “It’s my father. Please don’t mention that I took you down to the basement.”

  She looked confused, but she nodded.

  I went over to the stove, put the pot of potatoes on a burner and turned it on. Candy started yipping and yelping. She was happy to hear my father’s voice. He always treated Candy well. I quickly let her out of the bathroom.

  “Hello!” he called out from down the hall. I tried to judge his voice. He sounded happy, but not too happy. Maybe the elevator was halfway down—or halfway up—and this wouldn’t be too bad.

  “Don’t take anything he says personal, okay?” I said to Harmony.

  She nodded solemnly.

  “That highway is usually so crowded and such a death trap, but somehow today the traffic wasn’t nearly as—” My father stopped talking as he walked into the kitchen and saw Harmony.

  “Dad, this is my friend Harmony.”

  “Hello,” she said.

  He looked at her intently, like he was trying to figure out a puzzle. “Harmony…like a symphony orchestra?”

  “Something like that,” she said.

  “You know, I once had neighbors who had a dog named Harmony. Strange thing was, that dog couldn’t sing a note to save her life.”

  He laughed at his joke—a sure sign that the elevator was heading up. Harmony gave a weak little smile.

  “Not that I’m calling you a dog—”

  “Harmony is in my class,” I interjected. “We were here studying.”

  “Huh. I don’t see any books out. Were you studying biology? You know, sex education?” He waggled his eyebrows.

  “Harmony is my friend!” I snapped, trying to cut him off before he could say more or she could react to him.

  “I’m just kidding around,” he said with a frown. “You never seem to be able to take a joke.”

  “Oh, he can take a joke,” Harmony said. “Robert is actually quite funny.”

  “Robert?”

  “It is my name,” I said.

  Everybody at school had reacted to her calling me that, so why wouldn’t he? A part of me wished she’d just call me Robbie. On the other hand, I liked that she didn’t. I was Robert. It was my name. The name my parents—my mother—had given me.

  “It certainly is. Perhaps I should call you Mr. Robert instead?”

  “Robert will be fine,” I said, ignoring his sarcasm. “The potatoes are on the stove. Harmony has to go now, and I’m going to walk her home.”

  “Are you going to
carry her imaginary books as well?”

  I didn’t respond. “I’m going to walk Candy. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

  I walked out of the room. I had the urge to grab Harmony and pull her along, but I knew if I did my father would make some comment about us holding hands. I called for Candy and she came. She snarled and growled at Harmony. I clicked her leash onto her collar.

  As soon as I closed the door behind us, Harmony spoke. “What is your dad’s problem?”

  “I don’t know where to even start.”

  “I really wanted to ask him why he came home so early tonight,” she said.

  “You can’t ever ask him that. Please. Don’t.”

  “I wouldn’t do that to you. Never,” she said. “You know you don’t have to walk me home.”

  “Yeah, I know, but I need to get away from him for a few minutes and Candy needed a walk,” I explained. “It will also give me a chance to settle down, not feel so angry.”

  “You don’t seem that angry.”

  “I am. Look, I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t need to apologize for him. He really is a jerk, isn’t he?”

  “Sometimes. But some people really like him.”

  “Some people are stupid.”

  My father often had a girlfriend, although they never seemed to stick around for more than a month or two. Maybe they were stupid enough to date him but smart enough not to stay.

  “At least he didn’t hassle you about spending money on your new pants.”

  I laughed. “He didn’t notice them.”

  “How could he not notice? They are spectacular pants.”

  “Just what I’ve always wanted. Spectacular pants. But believe me, I doubt he’d have noticed if I wasn’t wearing any pants.”

  “Let’s try to avoid testing that theory when I’m around,” Harmony said.

  We came up to her house—her foster home—and stopped.

  “Are they treating you okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, they seem nice…surprisingly nice…but it could all be an act.”

  “So you’re not thinking of running?”

  “Not tonight. Besides, there’s really no point. I’ll wait it out. It won’t be that long. My mother will probably get her act together in a couple of weeks—four or five max.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Then you’ll go home.”

  “Don’t sound so disappointed.”