by James Howe
He is a man about my grandfather’s age or maybe older. He squints at me as if he has never seen a twelve-year-old tie salesman before, which I venture to say he has not, and when I ask if I may be of assistance, as per page something-or-other of the six stapled pages, he looks around as if trying to spot the spaceship in which I arrived.
“You’re awfully young,” he goes. I acknowledge the truth of what he is saying, but tell him that I am trained and ready to be of service.
“Usually, Mr. Kellerman helps me,” he grumbles, letting me know that the service I am trained and ready to provide will not be required.
“I’ll go get him,” I say, and then think to ask the man his name.
“Mr. Mars,” he says. I think this is pretty funny, having just had the alien thing going on in my head, but I keep my amusement to myself.
The stockroom is eerily silent. Every time I put my foot down, the floor creaks. “Mr. Kellerman?” I go in a hushed voice like I’ve just stepped into an alternate universe. The theme to The Blair Witch Project starts playing in my head. I have not seen The Blair Witch Project, so I do not know if in fact what I am hearing is the theme, but I imagine this is what it must sound like, this creepy music I’ve got going in my cranium as I make my way down shadowy aisles piled high with boxes, breathlessly anticipating some lunatic with hollow eyes and an ax jumping out at me at any moment. I am wondering if my mother’s mind worked the way mine does, and if that’s why she was an actress, and what I will be. That is, if I survive the attack of the murderous fiend who is lurking behind men’s dress shirts, sizes 151/2 to 17, to my right.
As it turns out, there is no murderous fiend lurking there, but there is someone. He does not hear me at first, just as I do not hear him. His back is to me, his left hand stretched out to hold on to a shelf, his right hand dangling at his side. If I didn’t know it was Mr. Kellerman, I might really be spooked, on account of that creepy music going in my mind a few minutes back, because the way he is bent forward he almost looks headless.
I clear my throat and say, “Mr. Kellerman?”
He jumps a little at the sound of my voice, but doesn’t turn to face me. “What are you doing here?” he says. “We can’t both be on break at the same time. You should be out on the floor.”
“I know that, Mr. Kellerman. But there’s a man, a customer—”
“Well, take care of him!” he barks at me.
“But he asked for you, Mr. Kellerman. It’s Mr. Mars.”
Mr. Kellerman heaves a big sigh and slowly turns around. “Fine,” he says. “Fine. Take your break, Mr. Goodspeed.”
It does not get any better the rest of the day. He hardly speaks to me and I do not know how to tell him I am sorry his mother died. The way he is acting, I am wondering if it is even true. All I know is that I have never been so glad to hear the voice say, “Shoppers, the store will be closing in fifteen minutes.”
When the doors do close, I am ready to hightail it out of there, but Mr. Kellerman surprises me.
“May I walk with you a ways, Mr. Goodspeed?” he asks. “You live in Shadow Glen, I believe. I am on Fair-lawn, just two blocks away from you.”
I cannot see any way out of this, so I say okay, and figure he must have his reasons. All I hope is that he is not hiding an ax up his sleeve.
As we walk in silence, he finally blurts out, “I want to apologize for my behavior today.”
“That’s okay,” I go.
“No, it is not okay. I have behaved badly toward you since you began working at Awkworth & Ames and today was the worst. I have been under a great deal of stress, but that is no excuse for incivility.”
“Honest,” I say, “it’s okay. I mean, I know ... well, I’m sorry about your mom. Dying and all.”
“Thank you,” Mr. Kellerman says. There is something in his voice that is different, like he is opening a door to a room inside himself that no one goes in usually and he is asking me to step inside and take a seat.
“My mom died, too,” I tell him.
“I know,” he says back, which surprises me at first but then I remember it’s a small town and my dad did work at Awkworth & Ames for a while, back in his drinking days.
We are quiet for a few minutes then, except for the sound of our feet hitting the pavement.
“How do you survive it?” he asks at last.
“What?” I say.
“I wonder how I will survive it.”
Before I can say anything, not that I know what to say, he starts pouring words out like they’ve been living in this room just waiting for a visitor. “I guess I was always something of a mama’s boy,” he says. “She was terribly protective of me, which I resented when I was young, but I can’t blame her. How could I, knowing . . . there was another child, a baby named Patrick, before I was born. He died of crib death at four weeks of age. Can you imagine? That’s not even a life. When I came along, she hovered over me and fretted about every little sniffle. I have no doubt she checked on me every night to make sure I was still breathing—probably right up until the time I left home for college.
At school—not college, of course, but elementary school and ... what grade are you in?”
“Seventh,” I tell him.
“Ah, yes. Well, all the way through high school really, I was made fun of. Mama’s boy, sissy. I came home crying so many afternoons. And she would stroke my hair and tell me not to listen to them. As if I could help listening to them. But she meant well. She always meant well.
“If it hadn’t been for my father, I don’t know if I would have been able to leave home and go off to college. He pushed me, insisted that I needed a life of my own. He was right, of course, but at the time I thought he just wanted to be rid of me. He was a very distant man, my father. I never really understood him. Amazingly, I did make my own life. I studied business and met a lovely woman who became my wife. Alice was her name.”
We come to a corner and wait for a light.
“Do you mind my telling you all this, Bobby? It feels good to talk.”
I tell him no and am struck that this is the first time ever he has called me by my first name. But I am also thinking how weird it is he is telling me all this, him being a grown-up man and all and me just a kid. It makes me think that Pam was right about his not having any friends and that thought makes me sad. I mean, where would I be without the Gang of Five?
“Alice and I lived in Boston,” Mr. K goes on. “That is, until Father died. I never thought they had much of a marriage, to be quite frank with you, but my mother was beside herself with grief. She had always been a bit frail and now she just seemed to come apart. Her only sister lives in California. They were never close. So there was no one but...”
“You,” I put in. The light changes and we start across the street.
“Me,” he says. “Yes indeed. Just me. And Alice, of course, but Alice was not happy about the addition of my mother into our lives. No, she was not. And Mother was adamant about not leaving Paintbrush Falls, since she had lived here all her life, so I had no choice but to return, although I assumed it would be just for a short time. But she became sick, needy. I gave up my job in Boston, went to work at Awkworth & Ames, and Alice ... well, Alice left me, didn’t she? My mother became my only companion. Life grew small. And time endless.”
We are walking along Fairlawn Avenue now. I wonder which house is his. I am dying to pee, on account of having had a large Coke during my break and not thinking to go to the bathroom since. It is very distracting, having to pee this bad when you are listening to somebody pour out their life’s story.
“I have just had a thought,” Mr. Kellerman says as he starts digging in his pocket. “It’s quite peculiar. You know how a moment ago I said I never understood my father? Well, here’s something, Bobby. I have never truly understood myself. Isn’t that a terrible thing to say? I am forty-five years old and I do not understand why I have made the choices I have. I have always listened to other voices telling me who I am and how I
should live. I believed those voices telling me I was a sissy and a mama’s boy. I believed my father when he told me I should go away and I believed my mother when she said I should come back. I believed Alice when she said I was a coward and not worthy of her love. Over time, the voices became fewer and fewer until there was only my mother’s voice and now her voice is gone. Who is there left for me to listen to?”
He pulls keys out of his pocket as we stop in front of a dark gray house.
“Yourself,” I say, and he looks at me like I’ve spouted something in a foreign language.
I think maybe I have. I think maybe I am spouting a foreign language all the time these days, except that it is really my own language and I am just learning to speak it.
“Mr. Kellerman,” I say. “May I use your bathroom? I’ve got to pee really, really bad.”
Mr. Kellerman laughs. Not at me. Just because he is surprised, I think.
Inside, after I’ve peed, I am walking down the hall from the bathroom to the living room and the walls are covered with all these photographs. What amazes me is this: Mr. Kellerman was a kid once. There’s a picture of him standing with his parents where he appears to be around my age. He looks happy.
Suddenly, a light goes on and Mr. K is there, nodding at the picture I’m looking at.
“My thirteenth birthday,” he says. “We had just come from Tucker’s. Remember Tucker’s?”
I say yes, knowing that he’s referring to the horse farm that burned down a longtime back.
“You liked to ride?” I ask.
“Oh, heavens, no, I wasn’t allowed to ride,” he answers. “Too dangerous. But I loved horses. Mother and Father took me there to feed them, pet them. I knew them all well. I was devastated when that fire occurred, but thank heavens all the horses were saved in time.”
He looks at me then and says, “How sad for you to have lost your mother so young.”
I shrug, not knowing how to respond.
“We have both lost our mothers,” he sighs. “And do you know? We have something else in common. Our names.”
“Our names?” I say.
“I’m also Robert.”
“Honest?” As if he would be lying.
“Honest,” he says with a smile.
He reaches out his hand, which spooks me and I jump.
“I just want to shake hands, Bobby,” he says, “a gesture that I hope will signify a new beginning. I regret my anger toward you and I thank you for walking home with me and listening.”
“That’s okay,” I say, and I shake his hand.
As I walk the other two blocks home, I get to thinking about all that he has told me and about the two things we have in common. It is not that I hate Mr. Kellerman, not that I even dislike him anymore, but I can’t help it. I hope that those two things are all we have in common and all we ever will.
21
I SLEEP in on Saturday morning, seeing as how I do not have to start working Saturdays until November. Sleeping in is one of my favorite things to do in the whole world. I have a stack of books and comics sitting by my bed and after I wake up, somewhere around ten or eleven, I just reach out my hand and grab whichever one I touch first, and lie there reading until my stomach starts growling. Then I ask, “Are you hungry in there?” and if I get a growl back, I go get some breakfast.
My dad is usually long gone by the time all this happens, on account of his always working Saturdays at the nursery, except in the wintertime.
Well, this Saturday my hand is in the air, not yet making contact with my pile of books and comics, when I hear the phone ring and before you know it my dad is standing there, going, “It’s for you, lazybones. Someone named Addie.”
I think, Being a father is like being a stand-up comic in an empty room. I decide when I am a dad I will not even try being funny with my kids.
“Tell her I’ll call her back,” I say.
My dad hands me the portable phone and goes, “I would, but I’m already late for work. Oh, and there’s another reason. What is it again? Oh, yeah, I’m not your servant. I’ll see you at dinner.”
“Why are you calling me at the crack of dawn?” I say into the phone.
“It’s nine o’clock,” Addie says.
“Exactly.”
She goes into a ramble about how we have to get together to work on her campaign speech, because the assembly is on Thursday and we need time to consider every golden word. I remind her that it is the crack of dawn on Saturday and that is a long way from Thursday and golden words are not like ducks we’re going out to shoot and we have to get there early so we can hide before they can see us. This analogy breaks down about halfway so that we spend the next five minutes with Addie going, “What? I don’t get it,” and me trying to explain it and realizing that it doesn’t really make sense, the conclusion of which is my saying, “Maybe you don’t want my help writing this speech since I cannot even have a coherent phone conversation.”
But Addie is not buying this and will not get off the phone until I promise to come over there around lunch-time.
This I do not mind because both Addie’s parents are good cooks and they always have interesting things to eat there, even if they are vegetarian. Besides, I am thinking vegetarian might be a good thing for me to consider becoming since I would not mind parting company with some of my fat cells. I decide to ponder this seriously while making some waffles for breakfast.
Addie’s and my attempts at speechwriting do not go well. After a lunch of lentil burgers and vegetable shakes, which are pretty good (except I do not recommend drinking the vegetable shakes in clear glasses since in appearance the word “sewage” comes to mind), we get down to work and Addie hauls out about five hundred index cards on which she has written notes, mostly to do with historical documents. I tell her that I do not think a history of the Pledge of Allegiance or an analysis of the First Amendment is going to win many votes. She gets all huffy about all the time she has put in and all the notes she has taken, and when I tell her maybe she should have put more thought into what she was going to do before doing it, she says, “I take umbrage at that remark.”
Umbrage. I swear.
I try to persuade her to take a simple approach, to talk about name-calling and stick to that, but she says this is a presidential campaign speech, as if CNN is going to be there to cover it and the middle-school band will be blatting out “Hail to the Chief.”
Finally, we give up trying and I say, “What’s bugging you today?”
She gets all fired up and goes, “Fine! I want to talk about the speech and all you want to talk about is stupid Colin and how he doesn’t know we’re going together! Fine! We’ll just talk about that then!”
“Okay,” I say. I wonder: Are all girls like this?
“Fine!” Addie says for the third time, landing on her sofa and scattering two cats. “I just don’t understand boys, okay?” I laugh at this. “That’s what I mean. Why are you laughing? Colin is so dense! I asked him if he would walk me home yesterday and he said sure, and then when I said something about the dance, he was, like, huh? I mean, isn’t it obvious we’re going to the dance together?”
“Obvious to you, maybe.”
“Why isn’t it obvious to him? I hate love.”
I know what she means. I remind her about the heart I found in art class, and how it couldn’t be Kelsey who drew it but there aren’t other girls in class I wish it were from.
All of a sudden, Addie gets all sympathetic, like she’s ten years older than me and engaged or something and I’m her pimply little brother. “It’s hard to love somebody when they don’t love you back,” she says, her voice getting all gooey like the marshmallows she doesn’t eat because they’re made with gelatin and she’s that kind of vegetarian. “I’m lucky at least to know that Colin likes me. Even if he is as dense as a ...”
She stops, not knowing what he is as dense as. I cannot help her out, because my mind is on Kelsey and then I get to thinking about Pam and females in g
eneral and my stomach hurts and I tell Addie we should try working on her speech another time, I’ve got to go.
She says okay, because she recognizes a lost cause when she sees one.
I figure on going right home, but Joe is out on his porch next door and calls over to me I should come in, Pam is about to streak both their hair and do I want to be streaked, too? I tell him no, but I’ll watch.
So now I’m in Joe’s kitchen and Pam is standing there with Joe’s head in the sink and this bottle of coloring that is red. Not normal hair-color red, red like a maraschino cherry.
They’re really into it, laughing and teasing each other, and I am looking at Pam and thinking once again how she is the most beautiful creature I have ever seen and that if we were back in olden times she might have been made into a goddess because she is so beautiful. Sometimes I cannot stop my mind. It’s scary.
So while I’m having all these thoughts, she says, “joe told me about the No-Name Party and I think it is so great. I remember what middle school was like for me. It totally sucked. Everybody labeled everybody else. It was so easy to hate yourself!”
“Weren’t you popular?” I ask, thinking this is like asking the Pope isn’t he religious.
Pam lets out a rip-snorter of a laugh then and I think she is going to fall off her stool. “No way!” she gives at last.
“But you’re so beautiful,” I say. I can’t help it, the words just come out. I don’t think my having a crush on her is a big secret anyway. She is too smart and I am as easy to read as a Frog and Toad story.
But she doesn’t say any of that or make me feel stupid. Instead, she looks at me like I’ve just handed her every flower in the garden.
“Thank you, Bobby,” she says. “But you know something? Being beautiful didn’t matter. In some ways, it made things worse. People expect things of you when you’re beautiful. They expect you to be happy all the time, as if being beautiful is the same thing as being happy. What’s even worse is they expect you to make them happy. I remember walking into a room one time and everybody broke into smiles, as if I was this surprise package that had just arrived to brighten everybody’s day. Maybe it should have made me feel good, but it didn’t. I hated it. I felt like I had to be the person they imagined me to be. The fact was I was awkward and incredibly shy.”