Eli had heard his father say this same sort of thing a thousand times. Sometimes his mother would show a little spunk and say, “Maybe if your friends cried on the shoulders of their girlfriends, they wouldn’t be breaking up.”
But Leslie Harcourt never listened to anyone except himself—and he was a master at figuring out how to manipulate other people so he could get as much out of them as possible. Leslie knew that his wife, Miranda, was softhearted; it was the reason he’d married her. She forgave anyone anything, and all Leslie had to do was say “I love you” every month or so and Miranda forgave him whatever.
And in return for those few words, Miranda gave Leslie security. She gave him a home that he contributed little or no money to and next to no time; he had no responsibilities either to her or to his son. Most important, she provided him with an excuse to give to all his women as to why he couldn’t marry them. He invariably “forgot” to mention that all these “friends” who “needed” him were women—and mostly young, with lots of hair and long legs.
When he was very young, Eli had not known what a “father” was, except that it was a word he heard other children use, as in “My father and I worked on the car this weekend.” Eli rarely saw his father, and he never did anything with him.
But Eli and Chelsea had put an end to Leslie and all his Helpless Hannahs two years ago. It was Chelsea who first saw Eli’s father with the tall, thin blonde as they were slipping into an afternoon matinee at the local mall. And Chelsea, using the invisibility of being a child, sat in front of them, twirling chewing gum (which she hated) and trying to look as young as possible, as she listened avidly to every word Eli’s father said.
“I would like to marry you, Heather, you know that. I love you more than life itself, but I’m a married man with a child. If it weren’t for that, I’d be running with you to the altar. You’re a woman any man would be proud to call his wife. But you don’t know what Miranda is like. She’s utterly helpless without me. She can hardly turn off the faucets without me there to do it for her. And then there’s my son. Eli needs me so much. He cries himself to sleep if I’m not there to kiss him good-night, so you can see why we have to meet during the day.”
“Then he started kissing her neck,” Chelsea reported.
When Eli heard this account, he had to blink a few times to clear his mind. The sheer enormity of this lie of his father’s was stunning. As long as he could remember, his father had never kissed him good-night. In fact, Eli wasn’t sure his father even knew where his bedroom was located in the little house that needed so much repair.
When Eli recovered himself, he looked at Chelsea. “What are we going to do?”
The smile Chelsea gave him was conspiratorial. “Robin and Marian,” she whispered, and he nodded. Years earlier, they’d started calling themselves Robin Hoods. The legend said that Robin Hood righted wrongs and did good deeds and helped the underdog.
It was Miranda who’d first called them Robin and Marian, after some soppy movie she loved to watch repeatedly. Laughingly, she’d called them Robin and Marian Les Jeunes, French for “youths,” and they’d kept the name in secret.
Only the two of them knew what they did: They collected letterhead stationery from corporations, law firms, doctors’ offices, wherever, then used a very expensive publishing computer system to duplicate the type fonts, then sent people letters as though from the offices. They sent letters on law-office stationery to the fathers of children at school who didn’t pay child support. They sent letters of thanks from the heads of big corporations to unappreciated employees. They once got back an old woman’s four hundred dollars from a telephone scammer.
Only once did they nearly get into trouble. A boy at school had teeth that were rotting, but his father was too cheap to take him to the dentist. Chelsea and Eli found out that the father was a gambler, so they wrote to him, offering free tickets to a “secret” (because it was illegal) national dental lottery. He would receive a ticket with every fifty dollars he spent on his children’s teeth. So all three of his children had several hundred dollars’ worth of work done, and Chelsea and Eli dutifully sent him beautiful red-and-gold, hand-painted lottery tickets. The problem came when they had to write the man a letter saying his tickets did not have the winning numbers. The man went to the dentist, waving the letters and the tickets, and demanded his money back. The poor dentist had had to endure months of the man’s winking at him in conspiracy while he’d worked on the children’s teeth, and now he was being told he was going to be sued because of some lottery he’d never heard of.
In order to calm the man down, Chelsea and Eli had to reveal themselves to the son who they’d helped in secret and get him to steal the letters from his father’s night table. Chelsea then sent the man one of her father’s gold watches (he had twelve of them) to get him to shut up.
Later, after they’d weighed the good they had done of fixing the children’s teeth against the near exposure, they decided to continue being Robin and Marian Les Jeunes.
“So what are we going to do with your father?” Chelsea asked, and she could see that Eli had no idea.
“I’d like to get rid of him,” Eli said. “He makes my mother cry. But—”
“But what?”
“But she says she still loves him.”
At that, Chelsea and Eli looked at each other without comprehension. They knew they loved each other, but then they also liked each other. How could anyone love a man like Leslie Harcourt? There wasn’t anything at all likable about him.
“I would like to give my mother what she wants,” Eli said.
“Tom Selleck?” Chelsea asked, without any intent at humor. Miranda had once said that what she truly wanted in life was Tom Selleck—because he was a family man, she’d added, and no other reason.
“No,” Eli said. “I’d like to give her a real husband, one who she’d like.”
For a moment they looked at each other in puzzlement. Eli had recently been trying to make a computer think, and they both knew that doing that would be easier than trying to make Leslie Harcourt stay home and putter in the garage.
“This is a question for the Love Expert,” Chelsea said, making Eli nod. Love Expert was what they called Eli’s mom because she read romantic novels by the thousands. After reading each one, she gave Eli a brief synopsis of the plot, then he fed it into his computer data banks and made charts and graphs. He could quote all sorts of statistics, such as that 18 percent of all romances are medieval, then he could break that number down into fifty-year sections. He could also quote about plots, how many had fires and shipwrecks, how many had heroes who’d been hurt by one woman (who always turned out to be a bad person) and so hated all other women. According to Eli the sheer repetition of the books fascinated him, but his mother said that love was wonderful no matter how many times she read about it.
So Eli and Chelsea consulted Miranda, telling her that Chelsea’s older sister’s husband was having an affair with a girl who wanted to marry him. He didn’t want to marry her, but neither could he seem to break up with her.
“Ah,” Miranda said, “I just read a book like that.”
Here Eli gave Chelsea an I-knew-she’d-know look.
“The mistress tried to make the husband divorce his wife, so she told him she was going to bear his child. But the ploy backfired and the man went back to his wife, who by that time had been rescued by a tall, dark, and gorgeous man, so the husband was left without either woman.” For a moment Miranda looked dreamily into the distance. “Anyway, that’s what happened in the book, but I’m afraid real life isn’t like a romance novel. More’s the pity. I’m sorry, Chelsea, that I can’t be of more help, but I don’t seem to know exactly what to do with men in real life.”
Chelsea and Eli didn’t say any more, but after a few days of research, they sent a note to Eli’s father on the letterhead of a prominent physician, stating that Miss
Heather Allbright was pregnant with his child, and his office had been directed to send the bills to Leslie Harcourt. Sending the bills had been Chelsea’s idea, because she believed that all bills on earth should be directed to fathers.
But things did not work out as Chelsea and Eli had planned. When Leslie Harcourt confronted his mistress with the lie that she was expecting his child, the young woman didn’t so much as blink an eye, but broke down and told him it was true. From what Eli and Chelsea could find out—and Eli’s mother did everything she could to keep Eli from knowing anything—Heather threatened to sue Leslie for everything he had if he didn’t divorce Miranda and marry her.
Miranda, understanding as always, said they should all think of the unborn baby and that she and Eli would be fine, so of course she’d give Leslie the speediest divorce possible. Leslie said it would especially hasten matters if he had to pay only half the court costs and only minimal child support until Eli was eighteen. Generously, he said he’d let Miranda have the house if he could have anything inside it that could possibly be of value, and of course she would assume the mortgage payments.
When the dust settled, Chelsea and Eli were in shock at what they had caused, too afraid to tell anyone the truth—but if Heather was going to have a baby, then they had told the truth. One week after Eli’s father married Heather, she said she’d miscarried and there was no baby.
Eli had been afraid his mother would fall apart at this news, but instead she had laughed. “Imagine that,” she’d said. “But Miss Clever Heather did get her baby, whether she knows it yet or not.”
Eli never could get his mother to explain that remark, but he was very glad she wasn’t hurt by the divorce.
So now Eli had just seen the taillight of his father’s car pull away, and he knew without a doubt that the man had been there trying to weasel out of child-support payments. Leslie Harcourt made about seventy-five thousand a year as a car salesman—he could sell anything to anyone—while Miranda barely pulled down twenty thousand as a practical nurse. “As good as I make people feel, they don’t pay much for that. Eli, sweetheart, my only realistic dream for the future is to become a private nurse for some very rich, very sweet old man who wants little more than to eat popcorn and watch videos all day.”
Eli had pointed out to her that all the heroines in her romance novels were running corporations while still in their twenties, or else they were waitressing and going to law school at night. That made Miranda laugh. “If all women were like that, who’d be buying the romance novels?”
Eli thought that was a very good consideration. His mother often had the ability to see right to the heart of a matter.
“What did he want?” Eli asked the moment he opened the door to the house he shared with his mother.
For a moment Miranda grimaced, annoyed that her son had caught his father there. Escaping Eli’s ever-watchful eye was like trying to escape a pack of watchdogs. “Nothing much,” she said evasively.
At those words a chill ran down Eli’s back. “How much did you give him?”
Miranda rolled her eyes skyward.
“You know I’ll find out as soon as I reconcile the bank statement. How much did you give him?”
“Young man, you are getting above yourself. The money I earn—”
Eli did some quick calculations in his head. He always knew to the penny how much money his mother had in her checking account—there was no savings account—and how much was in her purse, even to the change. “Two hundred dollars,” he said. “You gave him a check for two hundred dollars.” That was the maximum she could afford and still pay the mortgage and groceries.
When Miranda remained tight-lipped in silence, he knew he’d hit the amount exactly on the head. Later, he’d tell Chelsea and allow her to congratulate him on his insight.
Eli uttered a curse word under his breath.
“Eli!” Miranda said sternly. “I will not allow you to call your father such names.” Her face softened. “Sweetheart, you’re too young to be so cynical. You must believe in people. I worry that you’ve been traumatized by your father leaving you without male guidance. And I know you’re hiding your true feelings: I know you miss him very much.”
Eli, looking very much like an old man, said, “You must be watching TV talk shows again. I do not miss him; I never saw him when you were married to him. My father is a self-centered, selfish bastard.”
Miranda’s mouth tightened into a line that was a mirror of her son’s. “Whether that is true or not is irrelevant. He is your father.”
Eli’s expression didn’t change. “I’m sure it is too much to hope that you were unfaithful to him and that my real father is actually the king of a small but rich European country.”
As always, Miranda’s face lost its stern look and she laughed. She was as unable to remain angry with Eli as she was to resist the whining and pleading of her ex-husband. She knew Eli would hate for her to say this, but he was very much like his father. Both of them always went after whatever they wanted and allowed nothing to stop them.
No, Eli wouldn’t appreciate such an observation in the least.
Eli was so annoyed with his mother for once again allowing Leslie Harcourt to con her out of paying the child support that he couldn’t say another word, but turned away and went to his room. At this moment his father owed six months in back child support. Instead of paying it, he’d come to Miranda and shed a few tears, telling her how broke he was, knowing he could get Miranda to give him money. Eli knew that his father liked to test his ability to sell at every opportunity. Seeing if he could con Miranda was an exercise in salesmanship.
The truth—a truth Miranda didn’t know—was that Leslie had recently purchased a sixty-thousand-dollar Mercedes, and the payments on that car were indeed stretching him financially. (Eli and Chelsea had been able to tap into a few credit-report data banks and find out all sorts of “confidential” information about people.)
Eli spent thirty minutes in his room, stewing over the perfidy of his father, but when he saw that his mother was outside tending her roses, he went back to the living room and called the man who was his father.
Eli didn’t waste time with greetings. “If you don’t pay three months’ support within twenty-four hours and another three months’ within thirty days, I’ll put sugar in the gas tank of your new car.” He then hung up the phone.
Twenty-two hours later, Leslie appeared at the door of Miranda’s house with the money. As Eli stood behind his mother, he had to listen to his father give a long, syrupy speech about the goodness of people, about how some people were willing to believe in others, while others had no loyalty in their souls.
Eli stood it for a few minutes, then he looked around his mother and glared at his father until the man quickly left, after loudly telling Miranda that he’d have the other three months’ support within thirty days. Eli restrained himself from calling out that within thirty days he’d owe not three months’ support but four.
When Leslie was gone, Miranda turned to her son and smiled. “See, Eli, honey, you must believe in people. I told you your father would come through, and he did. Now, where shall we go for dinner?”
Ten minutes later, Eli was on the phone to Chelsea. “I cannot go to Princeton,” he said softly. “I cannot leave my mother unprotected.”
Chelsea didn’t hesitate. “Get here fast! We’ll meet in Sherwood Forest.”
“What are we going to do?” Chelsea whispered. They were sitting side by side on a swing glider in the garden on her parents’ twenty-acre estate. It was prime real estate, close to the heart of Denver. Her father had bought four houses and torn down three of them to give himself the acreage. Not that he was ever there to enjoy the land, but he got a lot of joy out of telling people he had twenty acres in the city of Denver.
“I don’t know,” Eli said. “I can’t leave her. I know that. If I weren’t there
to protect her, she’d give everything she owned to my father.”
After the story Eli had just told her, Chelsea had no doubt of this. And this wasn’t the first time Leslie Harcourt had pulled a scam on his sweet ex-wife. “I wish . . .” She trailed off, then stood up and looked down at Eli. His head was bent low as he contemplated what he was giving up by not taking this offer from Princeton. She knew he hated the idea of high school almost as much as he loved the idea of getting on with his computer research.
“I wish we could find a husband for her.”
Eli gave a snort. “We’ve tried, remember? She only likes men like my father, the ones she says ‘need’ her. They need her tendency to forgive them for everything they do.”
“I know, but wouldn’t it be nice if we could make one of those books she loves so much come true? She would meet a tall, dark billionaire, and he’d—”
“A billionaire?”
“Yes,” Chelsea said sagely. “My father says that, what with inflation as it is, a millionaire—even a multimillionaire—isn’t worth very much.”
Sometimes Eli was vividly reminded of how he and Chelsea differed on money. To him and his mother two hundred dollars was a great deal, but the woman who cut Chelsea’s hair charged three hundred dollars a visit.
Chelsea smiled. “You don’t happen to know any single billionaires, do you?”
She was teasing, but Eli didn’t smile. “Actually, I do. He . . . he’s my best friend. Male friend, that is.”
At that Chelsea’s eyes opened wide. One of the things she loved best about Eli was that he always had the ability to surprise her. No matter how much she thought she knew about him, it wasn’t all there was to know. “Where did you meet a billionaire and how did he get to be your friend?”
Eli just looked at her and said nothing, and when he had that expression on his face, she knew she was not going to get another word out of him. Eli had an unbreakable ability to keep secrets.