The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  A slight swelling in her consonants—reminiscent of the accent he’d detected when they first met—was her only residual hint of distress. Otherwise, she appeared unflapped, standing in her tidy kitchen, a pot of tea steeping on the sideboard.

  “Your real-estate lady waved me down just now,” he said. “She wants you to know she’s praying for you. They’re all asking God to take away your quote-unquote trials and tribulations.”

  “Well, I found an earring I thought I’d lost.” She was wearing the matched set, ice-green droplets that made her eyes jump. “The burglars must’ve shaken it loose from a chair cushion.”

  Either despite or because of Ona’s bravado, Quinn felt knee-weak. It was the weakness he’d felt as a teenager hearing his brother howl the news that Dad just called from the “place” and Mom was dead, the news tearing a hole in the day, exposing Quinn in his bedroom where he stood before a mirror practicing guitar poses. The news had been coming for months, and yet it toppled him, literally; he hit the floor, a six-foot fourteen-year-old dropping like a shot goose.

  He was here to return the car. To close a door, gently. But he couldn’t quite find his balance. The thought of those fuckers in Ona’s house—putting their filthy hands on her things, on her—filled him with a sticky rage. “You must have been scared, Ona,” he said. “Were you scared?”

  “I’d like to have Louise’s vase back. That’s one thing.” She opened a cupboard. “I’ve got supper if you’re hungry.” It was four thirty in the afternoon. She rustled two plates to the table—mismatched ones, he noted, and well used. “You might as well keep the car for now.”

  Quinn couldn’t think, not while she was looking at him this way.

  “The patrolmen have been so nice,” she added. “I don’t want to put them in the awkward position of pulling me over. I figure I’ll lay low for another couple of weeks.” She crooked her finger, remembering something. “Look here.” She opened her microwave, an old-fashioned type with a dial. Inside was a stash of mail. “Strangers are sending me checks.”

  Quinn sorted through a dozen envelopes of different types—some printed with business logos, others smaller and flowery and handwritten. The checks ranged in amount, though fifty bucks seemed to be the going rate.

  “Holy shit,” Quinn muttered. “How much total?”

  “Five hundred plus. Is this pity money?”

  “At least they’re not camped in the yard with candles.” After the boy’s death and a hysterical Sunday feature on Long QT Syndrome, Belle had returned over thirty checks with the same frigid note and typewritten signature.

  “It’s because I’m old. That’s all it is.” She scanned one of the letters. “It’ll take me a good week to write my bread-and-butter notes.”

  “You’re keeping the money?”

  “I need a new roof.” She inspected one of the checks. “You know, it was just my word, but people believed me anyway. My age, I’m talking about. They went on my word.” She looked up. “I’ve something else to show you.” She reached into the pocket of her sweater and handed over a “doc.”

  Quinn looked it over. “You got a learner’s permit?”

  “One of the church ladies gave me a ride to the DMV. Killed me to ask, but I passed the eye test in four seconds. I got ninety percent on the written test, too, and I’ll have you know I studied my head off. I’m two-thirds back to legal.” She tucked the permit back into her pocket. “What do you say to a couple of driving lessons in exchange for the use of my car?”

  It would be so easy to give it back, just return the damn thing and beat a path out of this house, haunted as it was with his son, with the weight of obligation, with his huge and pointless regrets. Six weeks ago, five, and he would have: out like a man shot from a cannon. But that was before Ona thought him a gentleman and made him want to be one. “No time like the present,” he said, and ushered her out the door.

  “It’s the parallel parking that gets me,” she said, hands on hips, glaring at the innocent Reliant. “All the docs in the Western Hemisphere won’t park that car for me.”

  Quinn set out her trash barrels, which were made of aluminum and made quite the clatter when hit—multiple times. A few neighbors came out to investigate, including Shirley Clayton, who called, “Everything all right over there?” Even her voice was pink.

  “Doing my bit for safer highways, Shirley,” he called back.

  Lesson concluded, he followed Ona into the house, where she pulled a glass dish out of the fridge. “Leftovers, I’m afraid. I’ve got just enough left for two servings.”

  “You’re giving me Ledbetter’s lasagna?”

  “I hate to throw food out.”

  “It’s a week old,” he said. “Plus spinach.”

  “You could use the iron, if you don’t mind my saying. You look terrible, Quinn. Worse every time I see you.”

  “Would it kill you to give me one of those fancy plates?”

  She smiled with her long, square teeth, and he realized he’d have to bide awhile, disconnect more gently, for she was fragile and alone and far less hardy than she seemed to think. He swung by every couple of days, running her to the bank or the grocery store or the library, often in the slim window of time between a GUMS shift and an evening gig. On one occasion she spotted his gear in the back seat and asked him to bring his guitar inside, where he recalled the chords for “Till the End of Time,” a Perry Como classic he’d learned years ago for a wedding. “It’s been rattling in my head all day,” she told him, and she croaked out all the words, face aflush, after Quinn twice lowered the key.

  In the meantime, coming and going, he passed Shirley Clayton’s FOR SALE sign and fanatically trimmed hedges, realizing what he looked like: the caretaker. And when he found Ona inevitably at her door, or, sometimes, at the end of her driveway, looking for him, he felt more than ever like the thing he resembled.

  By August she was cooking for him regularly, old-country recipes spooned onto the good plates: comfort food, shapely and aromatic, formed with root vegetables and cream. “You’ve gotten so thin,” she said, and he felt like the opposite of the caretaker. He felt like the child.

  Then Belle summoned him to her house, where, like a Scout reporting to his leader, he cataloged his good deeds. Lined them up like evidence.

  “I’m glad she’s all right,” Belle said. “It’s good that you’re looking after her.” She had a band on her finger, white gold with twinkly diamonds. He looked around pointedly, wondering about Ted, but felt he’d lost his right to ask.

  “How’s work?”

  She shrugged. “Another false start. They’re being wonderfully patient.”

  Curious absences—another table gone, a floor lamp—gave the room a feeling of undernourishment. He could make no story from objects kept versus objects cast away. She was holding a framed picture of the boy—same one Quinn had in his apartment.

  “He’d be proud of you,” she said. “He was so ridiculously fond of her.”

  “It’s a little more than I bargained for,” he admitted. “I don’t know how to, you know, wrap it up.”

  She regarded him for a long, laden moment. “What you bargained for,” she said, “is a friendship. You’re not supposed to wrap it up.” She set the picture on an ugly end table—a remnant from their first wedding, a present from one of her aunts. “I went through some more things,” she said, opening a quilted box of the sort found in fairy tales. “I picked out some mementos. Just a few. For a certain few.”

  She lifted the cover but kept its contents secret, cradling the box like a kid determined not to be cheated from during the big test. This did feel like a test and his nerves curdled. At least he’d been chosen. He wondered what Amy had gotten.

  From the frilly box Belle eased a perfectly appointed object: a stapled sheaf of papers on which the boy had pasted calendar listings from newspapers and broadsheets, three years’ worth of time-place listings for Quinn’s relentless employment. He leafed through the neatly arrange
d pages—hundreds of scissored clippings arranged into prim patterns—amazed to find himself so assiduously trailed.

  “When did he do all this?”

  “No idea,” Belle said. “I didn’t think he followed you at all.”

  Quinn’s skin heated up as bars and clubs flitted past his eyes, school cafeterias and auditoriums, restaurants and function rooms, festival stages and town squares. Had the boy counted these things? The band names, the venues, the days upon days? There were so many, his every booking plucked from the pack and smoothed out and glued in place and weirdly sanctified and possibly committed to memory.

  Fitted into this handmade book, Quinn’s life should have looked small. But the opposite had happened. The boy had made his life look large. And productive. And worth something. So many pages, so white and clean and carefully made; hundreds of notices, over and over, in varying styles of newsprint. He recalled his own childhood book of stamps, a mess of curling corners and dripping glue.

  He set down the sheaf, breathing through parted lips.

  “And this,” Belle said, producing a CD, one of dozens the boy had stacked into pillars.

  “What’s on it?”

  “Nothing,” she said. “They’re all blank.”

  It felt light and cold, like the boy’s own hand in his hand.

  “You brought music into his life,” Belle said. “I thought it might remind you.” Her generosity—her willingness to find goodness here—struck him like a wall of water.

  She closed the box and walked him to the door. When he tried to lay down the check she stopped his hand. “You don’t honestly think this helps,” she said, “do you?”

  He shook his head. “It helps me.”

  “That’s who I meant, Quinn. I meant you. You don’t honestly think this helps you.” She closed his fingers around the crackling check. “No more,” she said. She took him by the shoulders and kissed his cheek. “Sooner or later,” she whispered, “you’re going to have to feel something.” The CD was her parting gift, the clippings his consolation. Quinn was done here. He knew her painfully well.

  The next day, Quinn led Ona through another parallel-parking drill. She hit only one trash can per try. To celebrate the improvement, Ona invited him in for cake.

  “Wow,” Quinn said, eyeing a dense, reddish cake festooned with nasturtium blossoms from the front yard.

  “I haven’t heard from your lady,” Ona said, setting out the good plates. “How is she?”

  “Married.”

  “I was hoping she could track down some docs,” Ona said. “Do you think she forgot?”

  “She’s not really back at work yet.”

  “Oh.” Ona shook her head. “Poor little thing.”

  “I hope it lasts,” he said, helping himself to a piece. “Belle’s marriage, I mean. Not the cake.” He tried to mean it; he did mean it.

  “Of course it will last,” she said. “That Ledbetter fellow’s a striver.”

  “I’m a striver,” he said.

  She cocked her head at him. “You’re a dreamer.” She switched plates. “Take this piece, it’s bigger.”

  “It’s good, Ona. What’s in it?”

  “That’s a secret.”

  He guessed applesauce, some Depression-era substitute for butter. “Are the flowers edible?”

  “Of course they’re edible. Why else would I put them on a cake?”

  He looked at her, his little squirrel of a friend. “Which are you?” he asked. “Striver or dreamer?”

  “Striver,” she said. “But I’m changing. Figure that, at my age.” She took a dainty bite of cake. “Do you want the car for another week?”

  He paused. Decided. “If you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  He had not loved his son enough. This knowledge lived like a malignancy on his heart. He wanted to believe that the boy, in a future now lost and impossible, would have forgiven him, would have taken their blundering history and found its logic and shaped it into items on a list. And that this—eating cake with Miss Ona Vitkus—would be one of those items.

  “Ona,” Quinn said, “what was he like?”

  “Who?”

  Quinn said nothing.

  “I didn’t know him long enough to say,” she said quietly. “But I can tell you what I was like in his company.”

  He waited. “Well?”

  “Dreamer,” she said, and her eyes glittered beneath their melting folds.

  Chapter 20

  This was his life now: cramming his calendar, watching his money. The money had taken on nearly biblical significance, an ironclad symbol of rectitude, all his other choices porous by comparison. He would pay, in the parlance of his Catholic mother, “without a show.” If Belle refused it, he’d leave the money to molder in a separate account, a mounting reminder of his fatherly failure. Child support with no child.

  The night was cool, summer on the wane, lots of stars. He parked the Reliant in the back lot of Jailbreak, where the guys arrived en masse for their weekly gig. “Did you bring extra cord?” he called to Gary.

  Gary sprang out of his Jag, all smiles. “Roger that.”

  Quinn lifted a speaker from the back of Rennie’s SUV, idly wondering how long his back would hold out. Music could be hard on the body. He followed the guys into the fuggy warmth of Jailbreak, where they found another band setting up in their place.

  “What the hell?” Alex said.

  ROCK STEADY, read their sign, in horror-movie red paint. Two good-looking college types pulling cord across a riser, a teenage drummer fooling with his kit. The one off-note was a middle-aged shipwreck in a Sox cap tuning a vintage Strat.

  The guys turned to him as one face. Quinn sighed. “I’ll talk to Sal.”

  “You want me to do it?” Rennie asked. “You look like roadkill, I’m not kidding.”

  “Be my guest.” Quinn had no energy tonight for Sal, Jailbreak’s stingy, volatile owner.

  “I’ll go with you, Ren,” Gary said, setting down a gear bag. “Watch our stuff.”

  Quinn nodded, queasy with fatigue, and parked himself against the far wall next to Alex, hundreds of staples from ripped-down posters needling into his back.

  “Check out that guy’s Strat,” Alex said. “Nineteen fifties, bet you anything. I wonder where he got it.” After a minute, he added, “Wonder if he’d sell it.”

  Quinn closed his eyes, trying to ignore the house music—Mariah Carey’s moany-groany, three-octave pyrotechnics—adding and subtracting all the gear he’d bought and sold over the years. The numbers took on overbright, reproving colors.

  The place was half empty but in another hour would be packed with people willing to dance for hours. Alex wore the same red Hawaiian shirt he always wore. Gary liked T-shirts with logos, and Rennie favored golf shirts in slimming black. They’d once sat with him in his motherless apartment on Sheridan Street, eating his father’s store-bought biscuits and writing up their first set lists. They’d knocked their fists together for luck and over the years talked endlessly about gear, whole hours sucked into the pros and cons of modifying pedals or tracking down some Russian tubes, as if the Benders’ dusty forty-song repertoire required a regular infusion of cutting-edge technology.

  These guys had known and loved his mother. For this alone he stayed.

  “Did you see this morning’s paper?” Alex asked. “Big puffy story on that band you sub for? Hearts-and-flowers local-boys story, color picture of them with Mommy in their home studio, square footage off the freakin’ charts.” He laughed. “The mom’s a babe.” A pause. “You listening?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Okay, so they turn down a sweet deal from Warner Records, babe-Mom goes nuclear—”

  Quinn popped awake. “They turned down Warner?”

  “Oh, yeah. The lead singer—what is he, twelve?—goes on and on about God’s work and all this other bullshit, like Warner is the epitome of godless commerce and they’re gonna hold out for a megabucks r
ecord company that also loves the Lord. Can you believe that?”

  “Yeah, if you’re really asking.” He felt a complex inrush of pride and envy.

  “But that’s not the story. You didn’t see it?”

  “I had a wedding in Bangor.”

  “Well, the story is they turn down a big, sloppy kiss from Warner and then lo and behold, guess what, there really is a megabucks record company that loves the Lord. How’s that for luck?” He chuckled ruefully. “I mean, holy shit.”

  “Who’d they sign with?”

  “Solomon. Biggest fish in the God pond. Your choirboys took the offer.” Alex checked his watch, which must have cost him six hundred dollars. “Well, not all of them. Their lead guitarist quit. Decided he was an atheist.”

  This news settled like a stone in his stomach.

  “If I were you,” Alex said, “I’d get myself baptized. Rock your soul in the bosom of Abraham before the gravy train takes off without you. Oh. Wait.” He knocked on the tattered wall. “I guess then we couldn’t do, you know—this. Maybe Colin could fill in for a while.” Colin was Alex’s nineteen-year-old nephew, a geology major who played guitar like a girl.

  The interloping band had begun its sound check. “What if we’d really buckled down . . .” Alex began. This line of thinking was a trope the guys resurrected every few years. But it was just talk. What they really wanted? Exactly this: to live Quinn’s teetering life vicariously, once a week, while socking money into their IRAs.

  Quinn said, “Go see what’s taking so long.”

  Alex took the hint. “Watch our stuff.”

  Quinn nodded.

  “Are you watching?”

  “I’m watching.”

  Alex took off, joining the guys at the far end of the bar where a debate had reached full throttle, Rennie in his new Nikes and ass-flat jeans, Sal jabbing his finger at a schedule book. Quinn whistled out a long, irritated breath, deciding to run interference, but the middle-aged player of the trespassing band skittered into his path, face as white and starchy and expressionless as comfort food.