Noelle

by Greg Kincaid

  “Right,” he said. “Okay, kids, it’s late now, and we have school tomorrow.” Link gripped Emily’s small right hand in his own and turned to Keenan. “Let’s go, buddy. Tell everyone adios, and we’ll hit the road. The truck is running.”

  Keenan didn’t budge. Mary Ann was reluctant to interfere, but she didn’t want a scene either. “Keenan,” she said with her most commanding teacher voice, “recess is over. Your dad is waiting. You’re going to have a good time at his house.”

  His lower lip trembled, but he stood his ground. “I want to go home. To my mom’s. That’s where I live.”

  Exasperated, Link checked his temper. “Keenan, your mom gets to see you almost every night. This is my one night to see you. I’ve been looking forward to it. You can go back to your mom’s tomorrow. I would really like it if you stayed with me tonight.”

  Keenan felt it was all unfair. He didn’t like Link’s apartment. He didn’t feel good there, and he missed his mom and worried about her. Plus, he was tired and wanted his own bed, not that weird mattress at his dad’s. “I just want to go home. Be in my own bed.”

  Link upped the ante with a strong utterance of his son’s name: “Keenan.” And then a simple command: “Now.”

  Keenan took the stick that he’d been drawing with on the barn floor and started tapping it against the barn wall, settling into a beat. Tap. Tap. He then turned away and looked up at the ceiling, as if he had not a care in the world, and started rapping, to himself yet not to himself. “I go to work.” Tap. Tap. “You go to school.” Tap. Tap. “Otherwise…” Tap, tap. “We both be a fool.” Tap. Tap. He set the stick down and returned his attention to Elle, still not budging an inch.

  Link stared at Keenan in total disbelief. How could someone he loved so much do something so hurtful? His anger flared, and he gritted his teeth, trying to keep control of himself. He wanted to grab Keenan. Get in his face. Make him behave. Make him treat his father with respect. He stepped forward, ready to explode with rage.

  Out of nowhere Christmas came up off the ground with surprising quickness and growled at Link. A warning. There was a scent in the air, and the old Lab found it threatening. Mary Ann froze. Elle also seemed to sense some danger. She rolled off Keenan’s lap and took a few steps toward Link. But it was different with Elle—her tail wagged, and she ran up to Link and pawed at his leg for attention.

  Link stopped and muttered, “No son of mine—” but caught himself, tried to breathe, in and then out, regularly, to regain control. He turned, unclenched his fists, shook his head, and walked away, down the corridor and straight out of the barn. He wished he could just explode and, with the explosion, disappear from existence.

  —

  George shut the car door and reflexively started toward the house. He wondered why Link Robinson’s old truck was in the driveway with the noisy diesel engine left running. He considered reaching into the cab and turning off the ignition, but he stopped, turned, and looked toward the barn. Something caught his eye. The barn lights were on. Either Mary Ann was still down there with Link’s kids or she’d left the lights on. He looked again. Closer, trying to take in the entire scene as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. There was something else out of place. A man was huddled by the side door to George’s shop, sitting on the ground. His head hung between his knees. Todd? No, it was Link. Concerned, George moved toward the barn. The body language was unmistakable. George, a veteran of wars between men, had seen this posture before. Too many times. Grief. Dejection. Loss. Or worse, as if someone or something had died.

  —

  Link was twelve the last time he’d felt this dejected. It was just after he lost his mother to cancer. His parents had divorced when he was nine. Link’s mother had kicked Randy Robinson out three years earlier, and for good reasons. He was mean and abusive. Link never saw him again.

  The day after his mother’s funeral, Link went to live with his paternal grandparents twenty miles down the road in Crossing Trails. They were nice enough, but he barely knew them, they seemed old, and he felt very alone. He lay in bed that first night in their strange house, buried beneath the covers, and cried until the tears would no longer flow. The loneliness hurt so deeply then. Yet it hurt more deeply now. Link couldn’t understand what he’d done wrong—then or now—why he deserved to be punished so viciously. Abandoned by those he loved. At some core level, the answer seemed obvious. Unavoidable. He just wasn’t worthy of anyone’s love. Not then. Not now. It all came rushing back to him. The pain of that night so many years ago. The pain of this night. A swirl of pain, past and present.

  Link tried not to cry. If they heard him, on top of everything else, that would add to his humiliation. You drunk. You crybaby. He didn’t want anyone to hear or see him. Not like this. He needed to get up, get into the truck, and drive off. Mrs. McCray could take the kids home to their mother—it was where they wanted to be. Let them have it their way. There was little left for him in Crossing Trails—or anywhere, for that matter. His grandparents were both gone. The only family he had was Abbey and the kids, and now that was falling apart. His own children didn’t even want to be with him. Crossing Trails was the only town where he even had any friends, but there were nearly none left, and there was no work to be found. He had, in a word, nothing.

  It didn’t feel heavy, but still it was startling—the arm that was quite suddenly around him. Link looked over. It was George. Sitting beside him like a long-lost buddy, like the father he never had. That was good. He needed it. The AA meetings had helped Link to be less self-conscious about asking for help or accepting it.

  George tried to find the right words. He’d seen enough suffering in his life to have had some practice at solace. “It’s okay, son. Everybody has nights like this. I’ve had them. We’ll both have more of them before it’s done. You’ve just got to walk through it.”

  Link felt kindness and strength from George. He felt safe enough to let the tears flow. It was okay. “Yes, sir, tonight was a bad one.”

  “Do you want to tell me about it?” George asked.

  Link thought for a second about the sequence of events, searched for a simple way to sum it up. For some reason the date popped into his head. It made more sense now. He explained it to George. “Twenty-two years ago, almost to the day, my mother died. I don’t think about it much. Not anymore. But I guess it’s put me on edge. My son, Keenan, he doesn’t like me very much. He blames our divorce on me. Maybe he’s right. I don’t know. Anyway, he was singing this rap song about people without jobs being losers. He knows I hate the song. He and Abbey made it up. I guess he was trying to get back at me.”

  “Did it work?”

  Link gave a little frustrated chuckle. “Yeah. It really worked.”

  “You’re not the only father with a kid who seems to enjoy pushing buttons.”

  “You got a kid like that?” Link asked.

  “Sure. Five of them. That’s what makes them kids.”

  “So what do you do about it?” Link asked.

  “You know why kids push our buttons?” George asked.

  “To see if we’ll explode?”

  George thought about it. “I doubt they really enjoy watching us blow up. I suspect they push our buttons to see if they can trust us to not blow up.”

  “I exploded.”

  “Bloody limbs everywhere?” George asked.

  “Total carnage.”

  “That’s okay. So defuse the wiring mechanism. That way it’ll never go off again.”

  “How do we do that?” Link asked.

  George stood up and offered Link his hand. Link took it, so George pulled him to his feet. “If you own your buttons, others can’t push them.”

  —

  When students came to Mary Ann with their problems, they were usually tightly wrapped within the students’ immature perspective.

  As she stood in the barn in the awkward silence after Link disappeared, she imagined what Keenan would say the next day to his own school counse
lor, Ms. Nester. “I was supposed to go to my dad’s house last night, but he got all mad and walked out on me. Just like he did on my mom. He doesn’t care about us.” She was willing to bet that Keenan would run with that narrative. Maybe for a week or two. Maybe for years. It could even stick with him for a lifetime. Mary Ann sat down beside him. That was not going to happen.

  “Keenan, do you know why your dad is mad?”

  “He gets mad a lot.”

  She leaned over and scratched Elle. She held the little dog’s head in her hands. “You sure like Keenan, don’t you, Elle?” Mary Ann returned her focus to Keenan. “I figured out something really important—maybe ten years ago. Took me a long time. Can I tell you about it?”

  Keenan shrugged, so she continued. She wanted to introduce a concept that would take him his whole life to fully grasp. For now she’d just put it out there. Keenan was a smart kid, so it was worth a try. “There are two kinds of people in the world, Keenan. Happy people and angry people. You get to choose. Which group do you want to join for your whole life?”

  “The happy ones.”

  “Me, too. That’s a good choice. So your homework is to figure out what makes you happy and what makes you angry. Okay?”

  “Sure.” Keenan wasn’t sure what she meant. “No one likes to be angry, do they?”

  “If you picked up something very hot, like the handle on a frying pan, and it was burning your hand, what would you do?”

  “I’d drop it.”

  “That’s right, Keenan. You’d let it go, fast. Anger is like a hot metal handle. You have to let it go, fast, or it can burn you.” Keenan didn’t say anything. She doubted that he got it. That was okay. Children seldom grasp hard ideas the first time around. Nonetheless, she tried to finish the point. “Maybe your anger toward your father is something you’re hanging on to? Something you can learn to drop. That way you can be happy again. No one can be angry and happy at the same time. It just doesn’t work that way.”

  Elle climbed up on Keenan’s lap and started trying to get in the boy’s face. She was being a pest. Mary Ann doubted that Keenan needed any more irritation from the dog. “No, Elle,” she commanded. “Get out of Keenan’s face.” When the dog ignored her, Mary Ann reached over and pulled her gently by the collar and repeated the command: “No. Elle.”

  Emily, who’d gone to her brother’s side after their dad had left, stretched. She raised one hand, as if she wanted the teacher to call on her, and reached over with the other hand to tug on Mary Ann’s sleeve. Mary Ann felt bad for the little girl. “I’m sorry, honey, have we been ignoring you?”

  “Mrs. McCray, why does No-Elle like Keenan so much?”

  Mary Ann laughed. Emily had heard Elle’s name and the word “no” put together so often that she thought they were permanently fixed that way. “No-Elle has very good taste in young men.” Mary Ann leaned over and gave Keenan a little hug. “Don’t you think?”

  When Keenan smiled, acknowledging the compliment, she felt she had his attention, so she tried to nudge him just a bit further. “Sometimes saying that you’re sorry is like dropping that hot handle on the frying pan.”

  Keenan begrudgingly conceded the point. “Just saying ‘Sorry’?”

  “Yes. You didn’t mean to hurt your dad’s feelings. Right?”

  “I’ll say I’m sorry, but I still don’t wanna spend the night.”

  “Okay. Why don’t you try that? I think it might make you feel not so angry, and then you can feel happy again.”

  Keenan thought there might be an easy way out. “I can’t say sorry ’cause he’s gone.”

  “He’s right here.” Keenan turned around to see George and Link walking through the corridor of the barn. Elle bolted off Keenan’s lap and scampered the length of the hall, her tail wagging frantically. Link reached down and picked the little dog up. “It’s been ten minutes, Elle, not ten months!”

  Keenan rose and approached his father sheepishly. He stood next to him and mumbled, “I’m sorry.”

  Link bent and hugged his son. “I’m sorry, too. I shouldn’t have gotten mad. It’s just a silly song. Right? I’m also sorry for drinking and driving while you and Emily were in the car. That was the dumbest thing I’ve ever done.”

  Keenan nodded in agreement. He gulped hard. “But, Dad? I still don’t wanna spend the night.”

  “That’s okay. I’ll drop you and Emily by your mom’s house tonight. When you’re ready, you can stay with me.”

  Keenan wondered when it became her house and not their house, so he asked, “Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why isn’t it your house, too?”

  Link thought a minute. Technically it was still his house, at least until the divorce was final, but he didn’t want the kids thinking he could just move back in if he wanted to. He squatted so his face was at the same level as Keenan’s, remembering what he’d learned in that courthouse basement, and spoke calmly—maybe he had picked up something from those parenting classes. “When moms and dads get divorced, they live in different houses. I wanted your mom to have our house. That way she can stay there with you and Emily. That’s what we agreed on. What we thought was best for you and your sister.”

  Up to now Keenan hadn’t understood. He’d thought his dad had just walked out. Left them for a long vacation that never ended. This new version made no sense. “You had to move out?” Keenan asked, still confused, even uncertain that his father was telling him the truth.

  “Sure. Either Mom had to move out or I had to move out. So I did.”

  “Did you want to move out and Mom didn’t?”

  Link laughed. “Would you want to move out and live on Sam’s smelly sofa?”

  Keenan thought a moment. The pieces to the puzzles of life can be assembled and reassembled in so many ways. He unlocked a few and tried putting them back together differently. “His apartment stinks. His bathrooms are dirty.”

  Link concurred. “Yeah. Sam’s a mess.”

  “So you don’t like Sam’s apartment?” Keenan asked.

  Link tried to help Keenan understand. “Sam is my friend, but I hate his apartment. It’s the only place I have, Keenan. I’m sorry. There’s nowhere else I can go. I can live there almost for free. I want to be with you and Emily every day and every night. Sometimes, Keenan, we wish for things but we can’t have them.”

  Keenan remembered now something his mother had said. She was on the phone talking to one of her friends in hushed tones. “But if you had a job, couldn’t you have a better place for us to stay at—with you?”

  Link stood up. He remembered what George had just told him. He tried to own his own plight, take some responsibility for his own situation. “Yeah, Keenan. I guess you’re right. I’m working on that. It might be harder than you think. Let’s go. I’ll take you home. To Mom’s house.”

  —

  For Link, Emily, and Keenan Robinson, it was a long, quiet ride back into Crossing Trails. They passed houses decorated with bright lights, Christmas trees visible through living-room windows. It dawned on Link that Christmas was only a little more than week away, and he might not even get to see his children on the most important holiday of the year. He had no money to buy them presents. It was enough to drive a man to drink. He smiled at his own sick humor, dimmed his headlights as a car approached from the opposite direction, and looked over at the children.

  They were both asleep.

  When he pulled into the driveway, Abbey saw the headlights from Link’s truck and came out to help.

  Link explained what had happened. “They’re both asleep. Maybe they should spend the night in their own beds. Is that okay?”

  “Sure. It was a tough evening to schedule the overnight. Let’s try again next week. Otherwise, did everything go okay when you picked them up at the McCrays’?”

  “Yeah. Just fantastic. Couldn’t be better.”

  “That bad?” she asked.

  “Yes. That bad—at first anyway. In the end things got better.
Keenan just isn’t ready to stay with me.” It took some time to settle in for Link, just as it did for his son. “Actually, it’s not so much about me, like I thought. He doesn’t feel comfortable at Sam’s place, is all. I don’t want to force him. Not now.”

  Mary Ann was up on Tuesday morning before the alarm had sounded or the sun had risen. It had been a busy few days. She and Mr. Smethers had pulled off a great concert on the previous Friday night. The audience loved the music and seemed to enjoy having Mrs. Claus at the helm. Admittedly, she was nervous, but it turned out fine. She’d spent the rest of the weekend making wardrobe adjustments and getting ready for Anna Claus’s road trip.

  If Santa had reindeer, she guessed she could use some help, too. Like it or not, Elle was it. Mary Ann used black Velcro straps to attach the forest-green stretch fabric around the little dog. Along with her miniature red felt boots and a white cap, it was as close to a Christmassy outfit for a dog as she could come up with.

  After she double-checked her luggage, Mary Ann sat down at the kitchen table and finished her coffee. She was nearly set to go. She went over her mental checklist and couldn’t think of anything else.

  She had never left George alone like this around the holidays—or most other days, for that matter. It felt very strange to them both. But it was only for a few days.

  Mary Ann was excited, though. She even felt a certain sense of adventure and independence. Part road trip, part escape. After she rinsed her coffee cup, she joined George in the living room. There were a few things she needed him to do.

  She set the Christmas cards on the table beside his chair, along with a printout of addresses and two ballpoint pens. “George,” she said, “can you believe it? I still haven’t sent out these cards, and it’s less than a week to Christmas.”

  George’s handwriting was poor. Embarrassingly bad. The idea of sharing his scrawl with their closest friends and neighbors was not appealing to him. Still, he looked up and said, “I can probably get to that.”

  “ ‘Probably’ sounds tentative.”