Mr. Tomski wears the same jacket and tie he always wears to school. He doesn’t know whether to give the flowers to Granma or to wait for my mom. In the end, Granma takes them off his hands and puts them in a vase, which she sets on the table.
“Don’t they look sweet,” Granma says. I can tell she’s making an effort to be nice.
“Hey, Mom,” I call out, toward the bedroom. “Mr. Tomski’s here.”
“Please,” he says. “Outside of school, you can call me Tom.”
“Is that your name?” Granma asks, laughing. “Tom Tomski?”
Mr. Tomski has a lopsided face, with heavy cheeks and thick eyebrows. He also has a lot of very black hair, but either he didn’t comb it or it just got messy anyway, because it sticks out in all directions. When he smiles, it looks like he’s sucking on a piece of candy.
“My Christian name is Harlan, but I never liked it much. Everybody just calls me Tom.” He talks kind of slow—like he has nowhere to get to and doesn’t mind passing the time. Then Mom walks in, wearing a green dress. She gives him a hug and we sit down.
Granma has made meat loaf with tomato sauce, and Mr. Tomski eats his plate clean, twice. But he doesn’t “contribute much to the conversation,” as Granma likes to say. He lets her and Mom do most of the talking—they kind of fight and tease each other at the same time. “One thing I didn’t realize when I moved back home,” Mom says, “is just how much I would regress. It’s like Ben and me are the kids again. We even share my old bedroom. I used to lie in that bed and think, I wish I had a sister. Or a brother. And now I’ve got Ben.”
And she looks at me with big eyes, where I can see the makeup on her lids. But this is something private she told me—it upsets me that she’s telling it to Mr. Tomski. It also feels like she’s showing off, and one of the things she’s showing off about is how well we get along. I don’t know what to say, but it doesn’t matter because Granma says, “And I get to be the mean old mom again. I go in and say lights out, kids.”
But this isn’t even true. “You always go to bed first, Granma. Everybody falls asleep before me. I have to read with a flashlight under the covers.”
“It’s good to have a kid who loves to read,” Mr. Tomski says, just because it’s the kind of thing a teacher is supposed to say. “You never read again like you do when you’re young.”
“Oh, Ben always has a book in his hands,” Mom says. “Sometimes I can’t get him out of bed.”
Eventually, Mr. Tomski sits back and pulls out his tie again—he had tucked it inside his shirt, between two buttons.
“That was a fine meal,” he says. “Thank you, Mrs. Koehner.”
Granma smiles. “It’s nice to have people to cook for.”
Granma starts clearing the table and brings out coffee and an apple pie. Mr. Tomski shifts his head a little to the side, because those flowers are blocking his view, and says, “Jenny tells me that your father used to play basketball.”
It takes me a second to realize that he’s talking to me.
“I guess so.”
“He played in college, or so she tells me.”
“I don’t really know,” I say.
“Well, maybe you’d like to try out for the team some time. One of our kids is moving to Albuquerque at Christmas. We’ll have a vacancy on the roster.”
“I’ll think about it, Mr. Tomski.” I say this in my “polite voice,” but what I really mean is “leave me alone.”
“I tell you what.” He doesn’t seem to take the hint. “The new year is a good time to start new things. How about you come out anyway, when we get back from the holidays? We could use a manager; there’s always something to do.” He moves the flowers a little so he can look at me. “Not a bad way to make some friends,” he adds.
“That’s a great idea, Tom,” my mother says.
She gives me a sharp look, which means, Behave yourself. But I’m angry and don’t want to behave.
“Did you ever play basketball?” I ask him. “I mean, in college.”
Mr. Tomski leans back in his chair. “I always had a great love for the game of basketball. More love than talent. I played a little in high school. Mostly I sat on the bench. In college, though, I volunteered to be the team manager. I got to travel around with the players and watch their games. I also did things like wash their uniforms and keep score in practice, that kind of thing.”
“That doesn’t sound like much fun,” I say.
Mr. Tomski takes a sip of coffee. “You know what I always loved about basketball?” he asks me. “It’s like a problem to be solved. And part of that problem is people. You have to work out what kind of people you are dealing with, and what they can give you, and what they can’t give you. It’s a little like teaching that way.”
One of the things that annoys me about Mr. Tomski is the way he gives you his complete attention. I think he thinks that . . . I don’t know, it’s like he wants you to know he’s taking you seriously, but really it just makes you feel like a little kid. But he talks to everybody this way, even my mom.
“The other thing about basketball,” he says to her, “from a coach’s point of view, is that people leave you alone. This is a football town. If you’re the football coach, you get people breathing down your neck, partly just because of the money involved. It costs about five hundred dollars to outfit one kid to play football. Basketball is basically free. You can do what you want.”
At this point it’s a little after ten o’clock. Mr. Tomski puts his hands on the table and slowly pushes himself up. “It’s been a treat,” he says, mostly looking at Granma. “But it’s a school night and I need to get my beauty sleep.” He turns to me. “Good night, Ben. I’ve told your mother, she’s got a lot to be proud of. You’re not one of those kids a teacher has to worry about, though I wouldn’t mind hearing from you a little more in class. I have a feeling you’ve got good things to say.”
“I’ll try, Mr. Tomski.”
He smiles at me. “Tomski’s fine for the classroom, but we can work on that, too.”
Mom gets up. “I’ll walk you out,” she says. She follows him to the door and leaves it open as they stand on the front porch. I start helping Granma clear the dessert plates, but she’s not really doing anything—she’s just standing at the sink. After a minute, she kind of comes to attention. “Leave that, Ben. Why don’t you get ready for bed.” I can tell that she’s listening for the door to close; she’s waiting for Mom to come back in.
“Okay,” I say, but I don’t move either.
Then Mom comes in and says, “I can do this in the morning—I’m not teaching till third period.”
“I don’t mind,” Granma says.
“That was a nice meal you made. Tom said how much he enjoyed himself. . . . He hasn’t had much home cooking since his divorce.” Then she looks at me; her makeup has started to smudge around her eyes; she seems worn-out. “Ben, it’s late, and you’ve got an early start. If you get ready now, we won’t all be fighting for the bathroom.”
Even after I’m lying in bed, I can hear Mom and Granma talking in the kitchen. Just their voices, not the words. They must be doing the dishes—I can hear the clink of plates and pots, too, and fall asleep before Mom comes in.
Fourteen
ALL THE TEACHERS kind of give up teaching for the last two weeks of school before winter break. Even Mr. Tomski—I was worried he might try to talk to me in class, but he treats me just the same and leaves me alone.
There’s going to be a big Christmas band concert, and Mabley and some of her cafeteria friends spend every lunchtime rehearsing. Sometimes I see them in the halls, lugging their instruments around. It doesn’t really matter to me—I don’t eat lunch with Mabley anymore, but still I feel jealous watching them troop off together, talking about all the stuff you talk about when you’re doing the same thing together. She says hi whenever she sees me, but she’s friendly to everybody—she says hi to a lot of kids. It’s different for me. She’s one of the only people
I talk to.
It’s getting cold now. There are these low December skies that seem to go on forever, but I still go out to the court to eat lunch. Shooting and chasing the ball down warms me up. All morning I look forward to these twenty minutes by myself, and afterward, when I’m sitting in class again, I look out the window and imagine I’m still there.
On the last day of school, Mom offers to drive me home after class. “We can go out for hamburgers,” she says. We’re walking to the bus stop in the morning. It’s still dark outside. You can see lights coming on behind curtains, people getting up for work. It’s cold but not New York cold; there’s a mist in the trees. Part of me wants to catch the bus home with everybody else. But I say, “That’d be great,” because I think that’s what she wants to hear.
“It’s a date,” she says. “We could use a little just-you-and-me time.”
The usual crowd of kids is waiting at the corner—I can see them at the end of the block. But Mom stops for a second, with her hand on my sleeve. “There’s something else I want to say,” she says. “Your dad called last night. He’s still hoping to come for a couple of days between Christmas and New Year’s. There are people he has to see in the Houston office. But he’s not sure.”
“Where’s he going to sleep?”
“What? I don’t know, Ben. He’ll find a hotel.”
“Because I can sleep on the sofa, if that makes a difference. I don’t mind.”
“It wouldn’t be you on the sofa anyway,” Mom says. “Anyway,” she says again—she seems distracted. “You know what he’s like. There are plans and plans. It’s a long way from London. It’s a long way from Houston, too. But either way you need to be prepared, that’s why I mentioned it. Are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Mom. Don’t worry about me.”
She looks at me, holding me at arm’s length—like she’s checking my face for symptoms or something. “I’m going to say goodbye here.” And then she laughs. “It’s a little early in the morning for kids to have to talk to one of their teachers. That goes for the other way round as well.”
On the bus, Mabley sits on the seat in front of me—there are four kids squeezed on her bench. Normally, the driver doesn’t allow more than three. But today she doesn’t care, it’s the last day of school. Everybody’s talking about Christmas. Mabley’s going to San Antonio, where her grandparents live. They have a ranch, with chickens and pigs and a cow and three horses. “Basically,” she says, “they just put me to work. I love it.” Even when she talks about this place, her voice changes. Her grandmother has a real Scottish accent, even after fifty years in Texas. “She calls me that child,” Mabley says. “Is that child ever going to grow? What do you give her to eat? A crust of bread?”
The sun comes up while we wait in traffic at one of the lights. It’s so low in the sky, the driver pulls down the flap over the windshield. It’s a weird kind of white light; you can see the sunshine climbing over the raised highway, which casts a wide stripe of shadow over the road. All the cars sparkle.
Mabley leans over the back of her seat to talk to me.
“Are you going somewhere for Christmas?”
“My dad is coming,” I say.
She doesn’t say anything, but she makes her eyes wide and opens her mouth in wonder. Her face has a lot of expressions she can do. She uses it like that, too, like she doesn’t care about how she looks.
“Well, he said he was going to try to,” I tell her. “I don’t know.”
Something’s gone wrong with the heating when we get to school. It’s turning into a pretty warm day, but nobody can control the temperature. Ms. Kaminski opens all the windows; you can hear the cars going by outside. She has a Santa hat on, and the apple on her desk is a candy apple with a ribbon around it—Pete gave it to her as a present. Some kids leave early to get set up for the concert; there’s going to be an assembly in the afternoon. But nobody does any work anyway, and after lunch we all troop over to the main gym. The good thing about assemblies is you just have to sit there—you don’t have to do anything, or pay attention, or talk to anybody.
I’ve never seen Mabley play the saxophone before. She sits in a row on a plastic cafeteria chair with everybody else in the wind section. Her short yellow hair falls across her face, and she has to flick it aside, so she can read the music. The conductor, Mr. Hoskins, is a stocky guy, kind of square, with short gray hair, almost like a crew cut. He’s wearing a blue jacket that comes down pretty low on his pants. When he waves the baton around, it’s like his feet are stuck in cement in the ground and his whole body is trying to get away.
They’re playing the theme tune to some movie—I think it’s Braveheart. It starts out slow and squeaky and then gets loud and squeaky. The acoustics in the gym are pretty terrible anyway: it’s like a bad radio. Also, there are a lot of flutes. It’s one of those songs that’s meant to make you feel happy and sad at the same time, it’s pretty cheesy, but even though I don’t want to, that’s what I feel. All these kids are playing their best, and it’s not very good because they’re kids; but when they grow up, they’re probably going to stop playing musical instruments anyway, because that’s what most people do, and this is really the one time in their lives where they’re going to try to be good at stuff like this.
We spend the last class of the day watching a movie and then the bell rings and even before it’s stopped ringing kids are headed out the door. It’s like they’ve all eaten ten bars of chocolate, everybody’s got a sugar rush. I have to get my bags together but at least I can skip the traffic jam by the lockers in the hallway. Mom is a little late, but I wait for her by the Toyota, in the afternoon sunshine. The temperature is something like sixty-five degrees; it feels like a spring day in New York. Kids are streaming out, cars pull into the parking lot or inch their way behind the buses. Teachers come out, too. I see Mr. Tomski with something in his hair, like he keeps trying to get it out, rubbing his head with both hands, but he’s also smiling. And then someone stops to talk to him, and it’s my mom, and I wait for a few minutes watching them before she heads over to the car.
“There you are,” she says, opening the door. “Well, we made it. People say the first six months are the hardest.”
“First six months of what?”
“When you move somewhere, when you start over.”
“After that, everything’s easy.”
“Everything’s a piece of cake,” she says.
On Christmas Eve, my dad calls. Granma picks up the phone. She has a short conversation and then I hear her say, “Do you want to talk to the big one or the small one? All right, all right,” and she passes me the handset.
I’m sitting in my favorite chair and watching The Simpsons. It’s the one show my dad used to watch with me in New York. Sometimes I had to ask him to explain the jokes. But whenever it was on, I’d say, “Hey, Dad, Dad, it’s The Simpsons,” because I knew he’d let me watch. The Christmas tree next to the television is already decorated, and Mom comes in and says, “How can you stare at the TV with all those flashing lights?”
“He’s talking to his father,” Granma tells her.
“Oh.”
I hear all this, but I’m also listening to my dad. “I’m not going to be able to make it this time, Ben. I don’t know if your mother said something to you. . . . I was hoping to come see you for a few days after Christmas. But it’s not going to be possible. I’m sorry,” he says. “They’re working me pretty hard over here. Do you know what time it is in London?”
“What time is it?” I press the mute button on the remote control.
“Midnight,” my dad says, sounding closer. “Midnight on Christmas Eve. And I’m still in the office.” He laughs, but after a moment, he adds, “I miss you, Son.”
“I miss you, too.” Mom has gone back into the kitchen, Granma’s in her room; they’re leaving me alone. “Dad,” I say, “Dad,” and he says, “What?”
“What’s that school in London called, the one you ta
lked about?”
“What school?” he says.
“The one American kids go to, near where the Beatles used to . . .”
“It’s called the American School. Why are you asking?”
For a second I don’t answer.
“Why do you want to know, Ben?”
“I don’t know. I was just . . . telling some kid at school about it.” Then I say, “Dad, I’m not sure I like it here.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t really know anybody. The kids are all . . . they act like this is their home, and it’s not mine. On the last day of school, they were all making plans to see each other. I didn’t have anybody to make plans with.”
“Give it time, Son,” he says. “These things take time.”
“I want to live in London with you.”
I can hear him on the phone, even though he doesn’t say anything—I can hear him breathing. Eventually he says, “I’d like that, too. This is something we can talk about. Right now, they’re working me pretty hard. But we can talk about it.”
“I miss New York,” I say.
“Well, London isn’t New York. Okay, kid. I just wanted to say Merry Christmas. Everything’s going to work out. It’s hard at the beginning, but after a while . . . And if it doesn’t work out, you fix it, right? Is your mother around? I should probably say hello.”
“Mom!” I call out. “Mom!” But she can’t hear me, so I have to get up off the sofa. “Wait a minute, Dad,” I say and put down the phone. “Mom!” I shout, walking into the kitchen. For some reason it really annoys me that she can’t hear. But the tap is running; she’s standing over the sink and turns around. “What?”
“Dad wants to talk to you.”
“Oh, he wants to talk to me . . . ,” she says in a funny kind of voice. She walks into the living room, drying her hands on her apron.
“He says he can’t come.” I follow her quietly. I want to warn her. “He’s not going to be able to make it.”
She’s already angry when she picks up the phone.
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