Keller decided against unscrambling the syntax and regarded him. The tattoo seemed to depict a spike with something bulbous at the tip. A small skull, he decided, for no good reason except that these days skulls seemed to be a popular image. There was a pimple on Brad’s chin. Miraculously, even to a person who did not believe in miracles, Keller had gone through his own adolescence without ever having a pimple. His daughter had not had similar good luck. She had once refused to go to school because of her bad complexion, and he had made her cry when he’d tried to tease her out of being self-conscious. “Come on,” he’d said to her. “You’re not Dr. Johnson, with scrofula.” His wife, as well as his daughter, had then burst into tears. The following day, Sue Anne had made an appointment for Lynn with a dermatologist.
“Would this be kept secret from your mother?”
“Yeah,” the boy said. He wasn’t emphatic, though; he narrowed his eyes to see if Keller would agree.
He asked, “Where will you tell her you got the bike?”
“I’ll say from my dad.”
Keller nodded. “That’s not something she might ask him about?” he said.
The boy put his thumb to his mouth and bit the cuticle. “I don’t know,” he said.
“You wouldn’t want to tell her it was in exchange for doing yard work for me next summer?”
“Yeah,” the boy said, sitting up straighter. “Yeah, sure, I can do that. I
It occurred to Keller that Molly Bloom couldn’t have pronounced the word
“Say you ran into me at Scotty’s,” the boy said. It was an ice cream store. If that was what the boy wanted him to say, he would. He looked at the bag of doughnuts, expecting that in his newfound happiness the boy would soon reach in. He smiled. He waited for Brad to move toward the bag.
“I threw your trash can over,” Brad said.
Keller’s smile faded. “What?” he said.
“I was mad when I came here. I thought you were some nutcase friend of my dad’s. I know you’ve been dating my mom.”
Keller cocked his head. “So you knocked over my trash can, in preparation for asking me to give you money for a bike?”
“My dad said you were a sleazebag who was dating Mom. You and Mom went to Boston.”
Keller had been called many things. Many, many things. But sleazebag had not been among them. It was unexpected, but it stopped just short of amusing him. “And if I
“I never thought you’d lend me money,” Brad mumbled. His thumb was at his mouth again. “I didn’t . . . why would I think you’d give me that kind of money, just because you bought twelve bucks’ worth of raffle tickets?”
“I’m not following the logic here,” Keller said. “If I’m the enemy, why, exactly, did you come to see me?”
“Because I didn’t know. I don’t know what my father’s getting at half the time. My dad’s a major nutcase, in case you don’t know that. Somebody ought to round him up in one of his burlap bags and let him loose far away from here so he can go live with his precious turkeys.”
“I can understand your frustration,” Keller said. “I’m afraid that with all the world’s problems, setting turkeys free doesn’t seem an important priority to me.”
“Why? Because you had a dad that was a nutcase?”
“I’m not understanding,” Keller said.
“You said you understood the way I feel. Is it because you had a dad that was nuts, too?”
Keller thought about it. In retrospect, it was clear that his father’s withdrawal, the year preceding his death, had been because of depression, not old age. He said, “He was quite a nice man. Hardworking. Religious. Very generous, even though he didn’t have much money. He and my mother had a happy marriage.” To his surprise, that sounded right: for years, in revising his father’s history, he had assumed that everything had been a façade, but now that he, himself, was older, he tended to think that people’s unhappiness was rarely caused by anyone else, or alleviated by anyone else.
“I came here and threw over your trash and ripped up a bush you just planted,” Brad said.
The boy was full of surprises.
“I’ll replant it,” Brad said. He seemed, suddenly, to be on the verge of tears. “The bush by the side of the house,” he said tremulously. “There was new dirt around it.”
Indeed. Just the bush Keller thought. On a recent morning, after a rain, he had dug up the azalea and replanted it where it would get more sun. It was the first thing he could remember moving in years. He did almost nothing in the yard—had not worked in it, really, since Sue Anne left.
“Yes, I think you’ll need to do that,” he said.
“What if I don’t?” the boy said shrilly. His voice had changed entirely.
Keller frowned, taken aback at the sudden turnaround.
“What if I do like I came to do?” the boy said.
