The Popsicle Tree

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The Popsicle Tree Page 4

by Dorien Grey


  “So?” I prompted, knowing full well what the “so” meant, but not willing to let him off the hook so easily.

  His face reflected his anxiety over a perceived rejection, but he took a deep breath and forged ahead. “So I was wondering if it would be okay if we could take care of him while they’re gone.”

  I set my drink down on the coffee table and took his hand, looking into his face until his eyes finally came up to meet mine.

  “We both work, Babe.”

  “I know, but I was thinking we could put him in the same day care Kelly goes to. It would only be for ten days. Samuel and Sheryl will pick him up on their way back…and I haven’t seen Joshua for a long, long time, and I know you’ll love him, too, and you won’t have to do anything. I mean, I’ll watch him when we’re home, and…” His mounting anxiety was clear in his voice, and I couldn’t torment the poor guy any further.

  I squeezed his hand and kept my eyes on his. “So you told them we’d do it?” I kept my voice very calm.

  He looked momentarily startled, and shook his head.

  “No! I mean, I told them I’d have to talk to you first, and if you don’t want to do it I’ll understand, but if we don’t do it I don’t know what they’ll do. Maybe they’ll have to cancel their trip, or maybe they can buy another ticket and take him with them, but they haven’t had a vacation just the two of them since…well, I don’t think they’ve ever had a real vacation, and…”

  “Okay, Babe,” I said, with far more conviction than I felt. “Okay, we’ll do it if we can get Joshua into day care for those days.”

  Jonathan threw his arms around me and gave me a lung-emptying hug.

  “Thank you, Dick! I’m so glad I found you!”

  He released the hug and got up from the couch to go to the phone to call Wisconsin.

  So it’s only ten days, I told myself. You’ll survive.

  *

  While Jonathan was checking on dinner, I called Carlene and told her what I’d found out about her ex, Jan’s, being on vacation until Monday. I asked if she had received any further notes or harassment, and she said no. I was still curious as to why the phone had been disconnected, but didn’t bring it up.

  Jonathan came in from the kitchen.

  “Is that Carlene?”

  I nodded.

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “Sure.” I handed him the phone.

  “Can you go turn off the potatoes for me?”

  I nodded and went to the kitchen to do it. When I returned, Jonathan was writing something down on the inside cover of the phone book.

  “Thanks so much, Carlene. I’ll call them right now. Tell Kelly I said ‘hi.’ I’ll talk with you later. Bye.”

  Hanging up the phone he turned to me. “Can I call them right now, or should we wait until after supper?”

  By “them,” I was quite sure he meant the sisters who ran the day care center.

  “Maybe you should wait until after we’ve eaten,” I suggested. “Probably it’s their dinner time, too.”

  “Yeah,” he said, a bit reluctantly, “we should eat first.”

  *

  “So, exactly when are Samuel and Sheryl and Joshua coming?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?” He looked surprised. “I’m sorry! I was just so happy to know they were coming, I…”

  “That’s okay, hon. So, when?”

  “Well, Samuel actually asked for an extra day in addition to his extra week. They’ll leave Cranston a week from this Friday, be here sometime Sunday, then leave Monday. And if we can get Joshua in day care by then, they can come with us…or me, or whatever…when he goes in the first day. I’m sure he’ll be more comfortable his first day if they take him in. I just hope Happy Day will take him.”

  By the time we were about done with dinner I could tell, by frequent glances toward the living room, that Jonathan was chomping at the bit to make his phone call, so I told him to go ahead, and I’d clear the table. He hurriedly finished what was left on his plate and got up from the table, coming around behind me and putting his hands on my shoulders. He bent over and nibbled the top of my left ear.

  “I love you,” he whispered, then went quickly to the living room, and the phone.

  While I was more than a little conflicted over the idea of living with a four-year-old for ten days, I knew how important it was for Jonathan. And I was happy to see that he was taking control of the situation by making all the arrangements himself. I suppose I was also thinking, selfishly, that riding herd on a rambunctious—is there any other kind?—four-year-old boy for ten days might dampen his enthusiasm for our having a kid of our own.

  Don’t get me wrong, I really love kids, but I just didn’t know how I’d feel about being around them 24 hours a day. Ten days I could manage: eighteen years…?

  I’d cleared the table and started washing the dishes when Jonathan came back into the kitchen.

  “They think they can take him! They don’t usually do it, but when I told the one I talked to that Carlene recommended them, and that it will only be for ten days, she said they probably could. They want to see us tomorrow at one o’clock!”

  “Us?”

  “Well, she said me, ’cause I was the one who called her, but I’d like you to come. I can take a long lunch, and…”

  “I’d like to, Babe, but this job I took on just before I came home is going to stick me in the library and at the Hall of Records most of the day. But I can take the bus, and you can use the car.”

  He looked disappointed, but said only, “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  *

  Riding the bus to work wasn’t bad, but I missed the flexibility a car provided. On the way into town, I thought again about George Cramer, and wondered how his talk with Judi had gone. I’d held off sending him a bill, just in case he might need me again, but not having heard from him, I assumed the situation had been resolved, and I made a mental note to send it the next day. And I also thought of George’s offer to perhaps give us a break on a car. I’d decided it probably would be better all around if Jonathan didn’t buy my car. It’s not that he’d blame me if I sold mine to him and something went wrong, but…I could just hold onto it for a while, letting him use it, then trade it in on something a little later, maybe using some of the money he’d been saving. Or maybe we should just get Jonathan a car for work and I could keep mine a bit longer.

  *

  I was able to stop by the office for about half an hour, just to check mail and phone messages and drop off the materials I’d gotten from the Hall of Records and the library. I would put it all together the next day and get it to the attorney. I got home only about ten minutes later than normal. Carlene and Jonathan were having a cup of coffee when I came in, seated on the couch in front of the coffee table, which was almost completely covered by photographs. Kelly was seated on the floor busily playing with several toy cars. He paused in mid-”rrrrrrrrrr” to look up at me.

  “Hi,” he said, and picked up his “rrrrrrrrrr” where he’d left off.

  “Hi, Kelly. Hi Carlene,” I said, moving to the couch to sit beside Jonathan.

  “We got in!” Jonathan proclaimed, obviously delighted.

  “Well, good.” I was still not exactly one hundred percent sure if it was good or not and realized I had no idea how much day care might cost—though I knew Jonathan would insist on paying for it, even if it meant dipping into his “car fund.”

  “And our New York photos came back! They all turned out fantastic! I asked Carlene down to look at them, and to tell her about Happy Day. It’s great, Dick. Joshua will love it, and he’ll be there with Kelly, and the sisters who run it are really nice.”

  He leaned over quickly to give me a peck on the cheek.

  “Here,” he said, gathering up all the photos. “I’ll put them together so you can look at them a little later.” The stack was about four inches high.

  “It looks like you had a wonderful time,” Carlene said. “
Jonathan was telling me all about it.”

  Gee, what a surprise! I thought. He’s usually so shy about talking.

  “And he’s right about Happy Day, Dick. It’s really a nice place and they are wonderful with the children.”

  “How many kids do they have there?”

  “Only eight!” Jonathan said, rising quickly from the couch and moving past me to go to the kitchen. “Be right back.”

  “I wonder how they can run a business with only eight kids. They must charge a fortune.” Though I realized even as I said it that I doubted that Carlene had a fortune.

  “Not really,” Carlene said. “They come from a wealthy family, so they don’t really need the money. It’s really more a labor of love for them. They only accept children with working gay parents.”

  Jonathan returned with my Manhattan and handed it to me.

  “Can I have a cookie?” Kelly asked.

  “Not right now, honey,” Carlene said. “We’ll be having dinner in just a little bit.”

  “That’s okay,” Kelly responded. “I can still eat a cookie.”

  “You can have a cookie for dessert,” she said, smiling at him, then turned her attention to Jonathan and me. “I think we’d better go. Thanks for showing me the pictures, Jonathan. You’re a good photographer.”

  She got up, then bent over to pick up Kelly’s cars, one of which he refused to part with, and they went toward the door. Suddenly she stopped and turned around.

  “I wasn’t going to mention this,” she said, “and I probably shouldn’t bother you with my paranoia, but…”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, today when I came to pick up Kelly at Happy Day, there was a car parked across the street, and the man in it was taking pictures out the car window. He was still there when I brought Kelly out, and I think he was still taking pictures, but when he saw me looking at him, he drove off.”

  “That’s odd, but given the nature of kids’ family situations, I wouldn’t be surprised if a non-gay parent checked up on things every now and again.”

  “I suppose that’s true, but…I’m pretty sure I’ve seen him before.”

  “Oh? Where?”

  “Here.”

  CHAPTER 3

  “Here?”

  “In front of the building…a day or two ago. I’m sure it was the same man, but I may be wrong. He was just standing on the sidewalk looking at the building. He didn’t have a camera and I just remember thinking, ‘I wonder what he’s looking at.’ I didn’t pay any more attention to him and I think he just walked away, but when I saw the man in the car I could swear it was the same man.”

  Maybe she was being paranoid. Maybe she wasn’t. And it was the “maybe she wasn’t” that bothered me.

  “Why don’t you give me a call after you get Kelly to sleep? I’d like to talk to you a little more about all this.”

  Kelly was holding her outstretched hand and leaning at about a fifty-five degree angle away from her—I wasn’t sure if he was trying to pull her to the door, or was just being a four-year-old boy curious as to how far he could lean without falling over.

  “I will.” She took a few steps toward the door, which apparently caught Kelly by surprise and made him scramble to regain his balance.

  When they’d gone, Jonathan returned to his seat next to me.

  “How long before dinner?” I asked.

  “How long will it take you to cook it?” he asked, then quickly hunched his shoulders and raised his hands in front of his face as if warding off an expected assault and added, “Just kidding! Just kidding! It’s already in the oven.”

  “You’re a real card, Quinlan.”

  He smiled broadly. “I’m glad you think so.”

  “So have we got time to look at the photos first?”

  “Sure!” he said happily, reaching for the stack.

  *

  At eight thirty, Carlene called, speaking softly. I thought about asking her to come back down, but knew she wouldn’t want to leave Kelly alone, and I didn’t want to suggest my going up there for fear of waking Kelly. Well, the phone would have to do.

  “About this man you saw. What did he look like?”

  “Well, I didn’t really have all that good a look at him either time. It was really hard to tell positively if the man in the car was the same man or not.”

  Well, that was helpful, I thought.

  “But they were both dark skinned—Italian, Greek, or maybe Mexican or Spanish—and they both had jet-black hair and a thick mustache; you know, the kind that makes a sort of horseshoe around the mouth? I’m quite sure it was the same man.”

  It sure seemed so from her description, however muzzy it may have been. “And you don’t remember ever having seen him before he showed up in front of the apartment?”

  “No, I’m sure.”

  “Well, it sounds pretty much like a private investigator to me. Would Jan be likely to hire a private investigator?”

  I knew that was pretty unlikely, since if it was her ex who’d left the note, she obviously knew where Carlene lived before the guy with the mustache appeared on the scene.

  “No, Jan spends money as fast as she gets it. I can’t see her hiring an investigator. And what reason would she have?”

  Point, I thought.

  “Anyone else you can think of who might hire one? Your ex-husband, for example?”

  “Oh, no, I was never married, and Roy would be the last person in the world to care where I was or what I was doing.”

  “Well, there’s Kelly.”

  “Roy doesn’t know about Kelly, and wouldn’t care less if he did.”

  “How did you meet Jan?”

  “At work.”

  “This was before or after you met Roy?”

  “I was three months pregnant when I met Jan.”

  “So they didn’t know one another, I assume.”

  She paused. “Yes, they did, oddly enough. I never did figure out how or why, but I do know that if there’s one person in the world Jan loathes, it’s Roy. I figured a lot of it was because of Roy getting me pregnant, but apparently it went back a long way before we met.

  “Roy was a stockcar racer, and I was a starry-eyed teenager who didn’t really know what I wanted. When I told him I was pregnant, he wanted me to have an abortion…he said he hated kids and wasn’t about to have his life ruined by having one. So he gave me the phone number of some guy he heard of who performed abortions, gave me a hundred dollar bill, and said he’d call me in a week or so. I said I’d do it, but I couldn’t. When he called the next week I told him I’d done it, but that I never wanted to see him again. And I didn’t.”

  “Sounds like a real nice guy.”

  “You have no idea. I really wish I knew what he’d done to Jan to make her hate him so, but knowing Roy, I’m sure she had her reasons. Roy’s dad was a really shady character who made a ton of money with a string of auto body repair shops, most of which were fronts for bookie joints. Roy bragged that his father had served a couple of years in prison for it. And his mother’s a shrew who has every nickel Roy’s dad left when he died—Roy didn’t get a cent except for what she doled out to him when she felt like it. That’s probably why Roy shows her nothing but contempt. I think he started dating me because he knew his mother wouldn’t approve, and she most certainly did not.

  “Jan really looked after me through my pregnancy, but I think she was afraid that Roy or his mother might find out about it, and when she suggested that we request a job transfer to the Cincinnati office, we did. I didn’t tell anyone I knew except my sister, who had just moved to Carrington. She couldn’t stand Roy, either, but I wouldn’t listen to her.”

  “Has your sister talked to Jan, do you know?”

  “Jan called her a couple of times wanting to know where I was, but Beth wouldn’t tell her. Beth and Jan never got along, either. Both of them were always trying to protect me in their own ways, but their ways were poles apart.”

  “I appreciate you
being so open, and about the only thing I can think of for now is that if you see the guy with the mustache again, and if he’s in a car, try to get the plate number. I can track it down from there.”

  “Thank you, Dick. No wonder Jonathan loves you.”

  “That’s very nice of you to say, and you’re more than welcome. I’ll talk to you tomorrow, or if you need to reach me at the office, feel free. I’m in the book under Hardesty Investigations. Have a good night’s sleep.”

  “I will. And thanks again.”

  *

  The next week was a total blur. There were really only two major highlights amidst dealing with a couple of minor cases and Jonathan spending just about every nonworking hour getting the apartment ready for his relatives. I received a comfortingly large check from the case I’d worked on while “on vacation” in New York—long story—and, thanks in no small part to that check, Jonathan and I found ourselves at Cramer Motors.

  I’d figured that with Joshua needing transportation to and from day care—even though Carlene would probably be willing to take him in and pick him up with Kelly, it would be an imposition—and Jonathan having been building up his “car fund” so diligently, it was time we looked into getting him a car of his own. Not surprisingly, Jonathan agreed one hundred percent.

  So on Wednesday I picked him up from work and we drove into The Central and Cramer Motors. We parked on the street and as we walked onto the lot, my crotch immediately called my attention to the fact that Clint was on duty, talking with two other guys I assumed to be customers. Ignoring it, we started walking around, looking at various prospects. By mutual agreement, we skipped the high-end cars and concentrated on the more reasonable and practical.

  Jonathan had just climbed into a little Volkswagen when Clint appeared.

  “Good afternoon, guys,” he said, his charm-and-sex-appeal engines running full bore. To my crotch’s delight, he recognized me. “Hello, Dick!” he said warmly, extending his hand. “I’m glad you came back!” He bent forward slightly to look into the car at Jonathan who, when he looked up from running his hands over the dashboard and steering wheel, was obviously as impressed as I had been the first time I saw him.

 

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