One Small Thing (32 page)

“Which one? The one that will be here this weekend?”

Avery started, forgetting that tomorrow, Bill and Marian were coming. She would be home after all. “No. Not Dan’s dad. Your mom’s dad. Galvin Gold.”

“What did he want?”

“I’m not really sure,” Avery said. Flora shook her head, and Avery closed her eyes and breathed out. “Well, he seems to want to see you. But he’s not asking in the right way.”

“Why do you care?” Daniel asked, letting his backpack slip to the floor. “You haven’t cared before. You don’t even like me.”

“
Mi’jo
,” Flora said, but Avery glanced at her and raised her eyebrows, wanting his words.

“You’re right. I haven’t been around. I haven’t helped you enough.” She walked over and bent down, putting her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry. I just—I was jealous. Dan had a child and I didn’t. I didn’t know how to make you my child. I still don’t. But I want to try.”

She tried to keep the tears at the corners of her eyes, but they spilled over and then she was leaning against the cabinets, her hands on her face, sobbing. The Dan she never knew. All his pain. His parents. Her father. Isabel. The baby, who didn’t have a room any more. Daniel without a mother. Randi. Randi having to live with Galvin Gold. Herself in the hotel bathroom, lumpy and green and adulterous. Everything inside her body, even organs she didn’t really understand—pancreas, spleen, appendix, duodenum—seemed to pulse and burn. Behind her eyelids, blotches of red and yellow hovered and faded, until everything was black. All of this feeling and memory and pain came at once, in the kitchen, Flora clucking over her, and then the soft, small hand on her shoulder, patting her, saying in words he must have learned from Randi, “It’ll be okay. There. There.”

TWELVE

When he came home from work, Avery opened the door, her eyes runny and bloodshot. She didn’t give him enough time to ask her why she was home, instead handing him the yellow notepad, her hand shaking. “He called again. He wants money. He’s using Daniel.”

Dan looked at the scratchy writing on the pad, unable to focus on the words. Why was she home? And why did she look so awful? He stepped inside and put down his briefcase, remembering the phone conversation they’d had back in July, the quiet noise behind her in the St. Louis hotel room and her insistence that she was alone. So there really was someone else, and she was going to tell him. She’d come home to pack. To tell him that it was over. To leave.

“Dan! You’ve got to call the police. He can’t harass us like this. He’s a bad man. He’d hurt Daniel.”

Us
, Dan thought.
Daniel.

“I know. You’re right. Where’s Daniel?”

Avery looked over her shoulder. She was still in her travel suit, her collar unbuttoned, her part (usually a straight, white scalp strip) crooked, her hair almost knotted in the back. “He’s finishing his homework. I sent Flora home. She has a new granddaughter, you know.”

Dan swallowed and looked down at the floor, wondering if he and Avery were really having this conversation. Already, it had gone on longer than most of the talks they’d had in the past months, and he couldn’t move away, even if he was supposed to call the police and Midori and Vince. He didn’t want this to stop.

“Did he hear the phone call?”

“Yes.” Avery motioned him to come closer. “He asked me what he wanted.”

She smelled like airplane food and silk and herself. Not the self usually covered with Estee Lauder or one of those smooth, milky lotions on the bathroom counter. Not her work body, perfumed and deodorized and powdered. Like Avery, in the morning after a night of sleep; like Avery after sex, the warm, tan smell of her skin, salty, slightly oily, known.

“What did you tell him?”

She rubbed one eye with two fingers and sniffed. “I don’t know. It probably didn’t make sense. He knows something’s wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

She dropped her hand from her face and looked at him, her blue eyes glassy and exhausted, her mouth twitching with tears. “I kind of—I was upset, that’s all. You better talk to him, okay? And then call the police. I’m so tired. I’ve got to take a shower.” Avery reached out and grabbed his arm, and Dan put his hand on hers, pressing, holding, not wanting her to leave. Because, he knew, that’s what she was going to do. She was being nice and concerned because she felt guilty.

And then she leaned in, closer, and rested her head on his shoulder. He looked down at her messy hair and brought a hand up to hold her, to let her rest, to try to bring her back to him.

“Dad?” Daniel was in the doorway, staring at them. Avery jerked away and walked down the hall towards the bedroom.

“Hi, kiddo. How are you?”

“Avery’s upset,” Daniel said. “There was this phone call from my mom’s dad.”

Dan watched her walk down the hallway until she turned into the bedroom and closed the door behind her. Something was so different, her body dense and scared and heavy, her eye makeup smeared, her nylons snagged, a long, thin run up the back of her left calf. She’d been crying and she’d needed him, leaning against him as she used to. But why now? What did she want? What was she going to do?

Daniel hit the toe of his shoe against the tile and pulled on the lock of hair behind his ear. Breathing in and turning away from the hallway, Dan walked over to his son and picked him up, even though he was ten-years-old and struggled against the embrace.

“I’m too big!” he said, his body stiff. “This is baby stuff.”

But Dan didn’t listen, pressing Daniel’s skinny body against his chest, feeling the rapid beat of his boy’s heart against his own ribs. And then Daniel’s head was on his shoulder, just as Avery’s had been, allowing the embrace, holding his father around the neck, ignoring Dan’s tears.

“So what are we going to do?” Dan asked Vince. “If we can’t get a retraining order, then what?”

“It’s hard to restrain someone who is only calling on the phone. It’s harassment, but my advice is to change your phone number. If he starts coming by the house, that’s another story. If he starts calling your work as well, then we can move on it. But it’s only been a few phone calls at this point. I don’t think any judge is going to do much with that.”

Dan paced the patio out by the pool, Daniel watching a television show while he heated up the goulash he’d made earlier in the week. His mother’s recipe. “But what am I supposed to tell Daniel? He’s already asked Avery what the call meant. This can’t be good for him. We were just starting to get into some kind of groove here.”

“You’re right. It’s not good for him at all. But you can only do what you can do—and then, when we have to, we’ll get the law involved. It’s not like we can control Daniel’s entire environment. You can’t do everything.”

Dan nodded to Vince’s words, but he didn’t like them. He hadn’t ever had control of Daniel’s environment until now. And then what had he been able to give him? A house where the husband and wife were barely speaking. Where a long-missing grandfather wanted to whisk the child away to a drinking vacation in some sleazy Florida hotel? Where the other set of grandparents hadn’t even met him? “Okay,” he said slowly. “Fine. But Vince?”

“What?”

Dan breathed out, the memory of his father sitting heavily on his chest. When Dan first didn’t listen to Bill, he’d lose his toys and then his playtime outside after dinner, Jared and all of his friends running around the street as he sat looking out of his bedroom window. Later, it was nights out at the movies or the television. Finally, it was the family altogether, the police escorting him away from the front door. The sergeant had said, “Kid, don’t come back for awhile. Things have a way of working themselves out. Understand?” But things were still as bad as they’d been, worse, even, both Avery and Daniel barely here at all.

“He can’t take him or anything, can he? I know I’ve asked this before, but there isn’t some legal precedent I don’t know about, right?

Vince breathed a pause into the phone, and Dan felt the veins in his neck pulse under his ears.
Say no
, he thought.
Please.

“He could take you to court to sue for custody. Stranger things have happened. But with his background, it’s unlikely. From what you’ve told me, I’m sure he’s not interested in bringing up the past.”

“He doesn’t have right to him or anything? I am the father.”

“Oh, God, no,” Vince said. “You’re the father. Everyone who is important—the court, the doctors, social services—acknowledges that. Don’t even think about that.”

“You don’t think he’s going to snatch him, do you?”

Vince was silent for a moment, and Dan thought of all the parents whose children disappeared, taken mostly by strangers who did terrible things to them, but sometimes by estranged mothers or fathers or righteous, insane, or confused grandparents. He would have to teach his son to be careful. He would have to alert Flora—maybe he could dig up an old photo of Randi and her family and point Galvin out. “
Peligro
,” Dan would warn her of the danger in his high school Spanish. “
Este hombre es muy peligroso
.”

“He wants what he can get out of you, but Daniel would probably be an annoyance to him. From what you’ve told me, he wasn’t such a great father to Randi. Maybe he thinks you’ll pay him off to leave you alone. But don’t be tempted. People like that always come back for more.”

“All right.”

“Just keep taking notes if he calls before your number gets changed. Same thing at work. Hopefully, he’ll give up.”

Dan closed his eyes and heard the sound of a beer can hitting Randi’s closed bedroom door, a cackle of laughter, the television blaring, and then lumbering steps to the kitchen and the slamming of cupboards. When Galvin was around, he was all there, heavy and loud and annoying—but, he’d disappeared, too, leaving Randi to waste away on her own. To die. Maybe he would go away again.

“Thanks Vince,” Dan said, looking into the house. Daniel stood at the French doors watching him. “I’ve got to go get Daniel dinner.”

“Right,” said Vince. “That’s exactly what you should do.”



“So my parents are coming to visit tomorrow,” Dan said as he waited for his plate to cool a bit, the noodles, meat, and sauce steaming. “They want to meet you.”

“What are their names again?” Daniel asked. He picked a baby carrot out of his salad and popped it in his mouth. Dan had discovered that the only vegetables his son liked were raw carrots, iceberg lettuce, and cucumbers drenched in Good Seasons dressing, so they had all three in a tossed salad almost every evening.

“Well,” Dan said. “Their names are Bill and Marian. You can call them Grandma and Grandpa, though.”

“I don’t even know them.” Daniel blew on a forkful of goulash. “They don’t even know me.”

“You’re right. What do you want to call them?” He began to eat, crunching the noodles that had begun to crisp and brown while he talked with Vince. Daniel seemed to think about what names to call them, and Dan thought that his son had the right to yell out, “jerks” or “losers” or maybe something more Randi-like, such as “dip shits” as Marian and Bill walked up to the front door.

That would get them all out of this visit, his parents turning in a huff and driving home at 55 miles-per-hour despite the fact that the speed limit had changed to 65 during the Clinton era. But he had no idea how his parents would act, especially if Daniel came at them with the potentially worse “Grandma” and “Grandpa.” Calling them Bill and Marian, or Mr. and Mrs. Tacconi, was probably the way to go. But he didn’t care at this point how they felt about Daniel or the name he called them. Dan was worried about Avery in the bedroom sleeping so heavily, he could hear her breathing from the hallway. He was worried about Galvin Gold out in the world hatching an evil plan; and worried about his boy, in front of him, fearing that someone else would take him away.

“What do you think?” Dan wiped his mouth.

“I’ll just call them their names. Like Avery.”

“Sounds like a plan. So, what about this phone call?” Dan began, putting his fork down. “Tell me about it.”

Daniel nodded. “Avery got really mad.”

“What do you mean?”

“She was like hecka yelling at him and told him that I needed to stay here, with you. She said that I live here, with you guys.” Daniel put down his fork and pulled on the lock of hair behind his ear. “And then she hung up the phone and started crying. She said he was asking for things in the wrong way.”

“And how did you feel about that?” Dan said, feeling the shadow of Bret Parish behind him.

“I don’t know.” Daniel let go of his hair and looked down at his plate.

“I mean, it must have been weird to hear that and then see Avery crying.” Dan was leaning forward, almost touching his plate with his chest. He caught himself and pushed back, trying to look unconcerned.

“Well. It was weird when she sat on the floor, but then Flora got me my snack.”