“Why do you need to be adopted?”
“So we’ll all have the same name and be a family. Because he likes me, mostly, that’s what I think.”
“Do you like him?”
“Sure. He’s not my real father, though.”
“Yeah, but it doesn’t sound like your real father is anywhere around.”
He shouldn’t have said that, he could tell, but it was too late. Robin held on to the ball, kind of rubbing it into his glove, twisting it there, studying it. “It’s a lot of work being a colonel,” Robin said. “He flies F-110s. I’ve got a model of one of those. I’m going to be a jet pilot too, if I’m good enough.”
“By that time,” Sammy said, trying to ease things up a little, “jets will probably be obsolete. You’ll have to fly—I dunno, some kind of spaceship, like—”
“In Star Wars?” Robin’s face lit up. He tossed the ball to Sammy. “Do you think things will move that fast?”
“How would I know?” Sammy joked, glad Robin was so easy to distract. “I left my crystal ball at home.”
“I can never tell,” Robin said, “whether I should be scared, about the bombs and all, or excited about space exploration.”
“I know what you mean.”
“My dad says he can’t tell either. I thought I wanted him to say something different, you know? But it turns out I feel better knowing that he doesn’t know. Isn’t that weird?”
What was weird, Sammy thought, was the way Robin had this terrific stepfather but kept insisting on his real father. If Sammy had had a stepfather, he wouldn’t have minded: and now he wondered why his mother never did have another boyfriend to marry. Maybe it was because she had all those kids. Or maybe she didn’t want any boyfriend except his father, maybe she loved him and didn’t know how bad he was. Maybe if you loved someone, it didn’t matter how bad he was.
They tossed the ball, talking a little every now and then, until a white sedan pulled up behind the blue one. A man got out of it. He waved to Robin, then went into the house. “My dad,” Robin explained. Sammy had figured that. “He stays at school to get his work done there, so he can concentrate on us when he gets home. Mostly that works, but sometimes he has to bring work home anyway. He likes us. Well, Mom especially. They met at a teacher’s convention and he wanted to marry her right away. As soon as he clapped eyes on her, he says. I dunno, Sammy, can you imagine that?”
“Getting married? No.”
“Anyway, she wouldn’t, not for a couple of years. Dad came and took a summer job in Louisville, so he could see us a lot. See her, especially. He told me my father sounds like the kind of man it would be hard on a woman to be married to. Dad says they were just all wrong for each other. He says some people shouldn’t ever get married, but he’s the marrying kind.”
Sammy thought of his own father, who was the non-marrying kind. But he couldn’t imagine that it could have been worse for Momma to be married, and almost missed the catch.
“What about you?” Robin asked.
Sammy didn’t want to talk about himself. “What about me?” He fired the ball so hard it burned out of the kid’s glove. Robin wasn’t stupid; he ran to pick up the ball and when he turned to toss it back he didn’t ask any more questions.
Robin’s mother called them in to wash their hands, and then they sat down at the dining-room table. Mr. Norton sat at one end and Mrs. Norton sat at the other. All the plates and serving dishes were in front of Mr. Norton, who was a round-faced man, with thin light brown hair that needed cutting. He smiled a lot and asked questions as he served them their plates. “How do you feel about succotash? Do you want your ham sliced thin or thick? Robin, will you pass your mother the mustard?”
Sammy got the second plate, after Mrs. Norton. He started to pick up his fork to eat, but then he noticed that Robin’s mother hadn’t started, so he put it down again. He guessed maybe every meal in this house was as fancy as Thanksgiving.
Once they started eating, they got down to the business at hand. The grown-ups ran the discussion, like school. “Robin tells us that you want him to go crabbing with you this summer,” Mrs. Norton said.
She was looking at Sammy as if she wanted to look right inside him to see what he was like. Her hair was soft curls, held up on top of her head by a big wooden barrette, but wisping like strings of coiled cornsilk around her face. She had big, round brown eyes, gentle.
“Yes,” Sammy said. He just looked into those eyes. “We’ve been doing it for about four years. Before, my brother worked with me, he’s fifteen, but he’s got a job in an office now, so he can’t.”
“Is your brother named James?” Mr. Norton asked.
Sammy didn’t want to have to look away from the brown eyes, but he did.
“I have him in class,” Mr. Norton said. “I teach French in the high school.”
“Oh,” Sammy said. He didn’t know what he should say next, so he took a big forkful of his baked potato. “This is a good dinner,” he said to Mrs. Norton. She laughed, and agreed with him.
“We don’t know what working with you would entail for Robin,” Mr. Norton said.
Sammy explained about how you had to get out to the boat at about dawn, and then set the line and run it, for a couple of hours or sometimes longer, depending on how the crabs were biting. He told them about taking the haul to the town docks, to be picked up by the restaurants. He ate and explained. He estimated how much money Robin might earn, after they’d paid for bait and gas. “It’s hard work,” he said, looking at Robin’s excited face. “And sometimes it’s cold, and wet—the eel smells, and when the jellyfish come in they can sting you.”
Robin just sat there looking excited.
“So you and James have been running this business?”
“Mostly me and James,” Sammy told Mr. Norton. “Sometimes someone else—a friend of my sister’s, he has a car so we drive around to the docks, but he’s in college now but—sometimes he’d give James time off. Sometimes we’d take his boat instead. James doesn’t like it as much as I do.”
Mr. Norton nodded, listening. He painted mustard on the top of his second slice of ham, and cut a bite.
“But if you’ve been doing this for four years, you must have been awfully young when you started.” Mrs. Norton turned her brown eyes on Sammy again. He agreed. She was impressed and he liked that. He liked the way her eyes rested on his face. He liked having her look at him. He liked looking back, too. She was awfully pretty. “Didn’t your parents worry about you?”
Sammy shook his head: No, they didn’t. It was the truth, anyway; neither of them did, not his mother or his father, for one reason or another. He answered the question she really meant to ask. “There are life preservers—my grandmother makes us wear them. We never go out in rough weather, because the crabs just don’t bite on windy days. We take good care of the motor, and there are oars, too.”
“I can’t get used to that much independence,” Mrs. Norton said, smiling at herself and looking down the table to Mr. Norton.
“We know you can’t. Don’t we, Robin?”
Mrs. Norton didn’t mind their teasing. “But how would we get Robin there so early?” she asked.
“In summers—you’ve never been through a summer here—I get up at dawn or before and then take a siesta in the early afternoon when the heat is at its worst. The heat can get pretty bad. I’ve warned you about summers, love. But since I’m up anyway, I could drive him over. Wait till you see the summer dawns, Robin—everything sort of silver before the sun rises . . .”
“You think this is a good idea, don’t you?” Mrs. Norton asked Mr. Norton.
Robin was practically holding his breath with excitement.
“I think it’ll be fine. It’ll be hard work, but Robin’s up to some hard work,” Mr. Norton answered. “I think you ought to let him, yes.”
“Then it’s okay with me,” Mrs. Norton said.
“All right,” Robin said, smiling at Sammy as if he’d just heard that the w
orld was perfect after all.
“And if it doesn’t work out—” Mrs. Norton continued.
“It’ll work out,” Robin interrupted her. “It’ll be great.”
“If it doesn’t work out,” she insisted, “then you’ll tell us. One or both of you will tell us. Promise?” Mrs. Norton asked Sammy.
“That sounds pretty fair to me, Robin,” Mr. Norton added.
“Okay,” Robin agreed. “Is that okay with you, Sammy?”
“Sure,” he said.
“That’s that, then,” Mr. Norton said. “Summer might also be the right time to get Robin that bike. That’s yours by the door, isn’t it, Sammy? Do you ride to school?”
“Sure,” Sammy said.
“You don’t ride by yourself, do you?” Mrs. Norton asked him.
Sammy could tell by then what Mr. Norton had meant about her having city reflexes. “I’ve been riding a bike for years, because—well, we don’t have a car. At first, my sister always rode with me, to make sure I knew how, and to be safe, but ever since then. I mean, when I had a paper route, I had to ride my bike because the houses were so far apart.”
“How old were you?”
“About third and fourth grade.”
“And your parents didn’t worry?”
“No,” Sammy said. Which was the truth.
She looked at him, then at Robin, then at Mr. Norton. “Go ahead, say it, Ben, I know you’re thinking it. You too, Robin, I can see you two ganging up on me. I’m too protective, that’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it?” She smiled at Sammy. “I guess, I’m beginning to think they might be right. Just beginning,” she told the two of them. “So don’t get too many ideas. And now it’s time for dessert. Does anyone want lemon meringue pie?”
Everybody did. They all helped clear the table. Mrs. Norton brought out the pie, its meringue topping looking like white waves, toasted white waves; Mr. Norton brought out two mugs of coffee, and the cream for it in a little pitcher. When they had settled down around dessert, Mrs. Norton asked Sammy, “What does your father do?”
She didn’t ask it like it was an important question, more as if just for something to say. But Sammy still didn’t know what to answer. He took a bite of the pie and put it into his mouth, and he didn’t taste it. While he chewed, he looked at Robin, who was eating away at his own piece, and then at Mr. Norton, who was watching Sammy. As soon as Sammy met his eyes, Mr. Norton looked down the table at Mrs. Norton.
As soon as Sammy swallowed, she had her eyes on him again. He looked right back at her, and he didn’t want to tell her any lies. Or the truth, either.
“I’ve said something wrong, haven’t I? I’m sorry,” she said. She meant it. She didn’t like hurting people.
“It’s all right,” Sammy told her. “Really. I just—don’t have a father. I mean, I do, but I’ve never seen him.”
“Oh. Then it really was the wrong thing to ask,” she insisted. “I really am sorry, Sammy.”
Sammy didn’t mind.
“Your poor mother. How does she manage?”
Sammy took a deep breath. “We live with my grandmother, my mother’s mother, where my mother grew up. All of us do, I’m the youngest. There are four. Gram adopted us, five years ago. She has a farm and a big house and it’s pretty nice. We used to live up in Massachusetts, on the Cape, when I was little. Then we came down here. My mother died, and—Gram takes care of us, and my sister Dicey, she’s at college right now, and we take care of ourselves.”
He never stopped looking at her while he told her this. She didn’t stop looking at him. “I guess, it’s no wonder you’re pretty independent,” was all she said about it, when he’d finished.
Sammy grinned. “Yeah.” He tried to explain to her: “My grandmother is—I really like my grandmother. Some of the things she gets up to—” He couldn’t explain, so he stopped talking.
“But if you don’t have a car, how does she get around?” Robin asked. “Does she have a bike too?”
“No, she uses the boat to get downtown in. Or Jeff—he’s Dicey’s friend, the one who sometimes comes crabbing—he’s got a car. Or Mr. Lingerle, Maybeth’s piano teacher, he’s our friend.”
“Isaac Lingerle? The music teacher?” Mr. Norton asked.
Sammy nodded. He didn’t know why Mr. Norton asked in that wondering way, but “He’s our friend,” he repeated, to let Mr. Norton know.
“I can’t imagine living that way,” Mrs. Norton said to all of them. “I can’t imagine not having a car. It isn’t anything I can even begin to imagine.”
“Positively un-American?” Mr. Norton asked.
“Bikes and boats. No horses?” Mrs. Norton asked. She was teasing now, too.
Sammy was enjoying himself. “No horses, no animals. I tried to have chickens, for a long time. But Gram says the only good chicken is a fried chicken.”
Then they all laughed, sitting around the table where the plates sat on bright woven mats and the pie had the same golden color as the light outside the windows.
After they cleared the table, and Sammy was told that Robin and his dad always did the dishes so he should get on along home before the sun went down, Mrs. Norton said she hoped he’d come again, soon. Sammy said he’d like that, which was true. He told her, if she let Robin have a bike, he’d ride with him for a while, to check him out and be sure he was safe. She said thank you, not teasing at all. Sammy said thank you, for the dinner. Robin walked down to the end of the driveway with him, just bubbling away with excitement. “I knew if they met you it would be okay.”
“It’s hard work,” Sammy warned him.
“That’s fine.”
“I had a good time,” Sammy said, looking back at the house.
“Good. I wanted you to. She used to be nervous about guests, and worry about not being able to have things nice enough, but Dad doesn’t care so now she doesn’t either.”
Sammy waited.
“I don’t mind if my dad is only a schoolteacher. I probably shouldn’t say that.”
Sammy didn’t know about that. “He acts like a real father, doesn’t he?”
“Yeah. He likes me.”
“Yeah,” Sammy agreed. “Look, I’ll see you tomorrow, at school. Okay?”
Riding alone back to town, through town and out the long road home, Sammy’s mind was whirling. The trouble was, he kept remembering the way Mrs. Norton’s eyes had looked at him, and it made him feel sort of squishy inside, it made him feel good. And that made him nervous, because—he’d never had that feeling before. Then he looked around him, as the road swept under the wheels of his bike, and he couldn’t stop smiling. It was a perfect evening. The sky was filled with dark gray clouds moving across from the east. The lowering sun shot out long bars of golden light under the approaching clouds. The whole landscape around him, fields and trees, was washed over with that light.
Sammy was looking forward to having James check over his English report for spelling and grammar errors. James wouldn’t find any, he almost never did, but that wasn’t what Sammy was thinking of. He was thinking that he’d done a good job, and he thought James might be impressed. James ought to be impressed—it was about the best thing Sammy had ever done for school. But he wasn’t sure if it was as good as he thought. He wanted James to read it. Sammy didn’t like that feeling of wanting James to be impressed, and he thought maybe he wouldn’t let James read it. Anyway, it wasn’t anything written by a lazy-brained person, that was for sure.
CHAPTER 10
James licked the final envelope, and sealed it. He put it on top of the three-inch pile of envelopes, to go out in the mail Monday morning. Leaning his elbows on the desk, he rubbed at his eyes. He had the office to himself on this Saturday afternoon. He’d come in at eight and been working steadily for almost six hours. During morning office hours, he’d been interrupted by the phone ringing and patients arriving or leaving; but since noon, when he’d wolfed down the sandwiches Gram had packed for him, not even noticing what kind they we
re, it had been relatively quiet. Dr. Landros had told him, as she left, that once she’d had lunch and done her grocery shopping she’d be at home. Dr. O’Hara had gone up to Salisbury when a patient went into labor about four weeks early. “I don’t like it,” she had said to Dr. Landros. “Neither do I,” Dr. Landros had agreed. “I’ll be on call this afternoon, so you go see what can be done. It might be false labor. You were just boasting about the premie unit up there, anyway.”
“Or it might be something wrong, and I’ll have a lawsuit on my hands. I saw her Tuesday, she looked fine, but—”
“Leslie,” Dr. Landros had said, as if she was speaking to someone pretty stupid, “this isn’t the big city, there aren’t lawyers on every corner offering percentage deals on malpractice suits. You’ll cross that bridge when you come to it.”
“I better run. I’ll talk to you later,” Dr. O’Hara had said, running out of the office.
They were cousins of some kind, James had learned. Dr. Landros had practiced for years, but she said everybody wanted specialists or psychiatrists, and she was sick of locking her car and double-locking her apartment and being robbed anyway. Sick of accident cases where people swore at her because she insisted on the strict truth about their injuries. Sick of . . . about everything. “I figured, what the hell, if I’m going to hit change of life, I might as well change my life,” she told James. She liked being near the water. She liked fishing. She liked the quiet. She liked being a GP, too. “I’m a doctor,” she said, “not some specialist.”
James looked at the stack of duplicate forms, now ready to be filed in the tall cabinets behind him. He was tired, bored, ready to go home. But if he filed them now they’d be out of the way. He started sorting them into alphabetical order, separating Dr. Landros’s cases from Dr. O’Hara’s. Most of them were Dr. O’Hara’s, the final entries after the six-week postpartum checkup. Dr. O’Hara said that statistically more babies were born in March and April than any other months. “It’s all those June weddings, the people who aren’t getting married still get feeling romantic, sentimental—it’s something about June.”