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The other men did their best to engage him. “Hey, there, big fellow,” they’d offer, and “What you say, my man?” But Douglas only squinched himself up tighter against his father and stared. Lonesome didn’t try to ease the situation the way most fathers would have — answering on his child’s behalf or cajoling him into showing some ma
“Where’s his mom?” someone new might ask. “She sick today?”
“Traveling,” Lonesome would say, not bothering to raise his eyes.
The new man would send a questioning look toward the others, and they would glance off to the side in a way that meant “Tell you later.” Then later one of them would fill him in. (There was no lack of volunteers; construction workers are notorious gossips.) “The kid there, his mom ran off when he was just a baby. Left Lonesome holding the bag, can you believe it? But any time anyone wants to know, Lonesome says she’s just taking a trip. He acts like she’s coming back someday.”
Abby had heard about Douglas, of course. She pumped Red for his men’s stories every night; it was the social worker in her. And when she heard that Lonesome claimed Douglas’s mother was coming back, she said flatly, “Is that a fact.” She knew all about such mothers.
“Well, apparently she has come back at least twice that people know of,” Red said. “Stayed just a week or so each time, and Lonesome got all happy and fired the babysitter.”
Abby said, “Mm-hmm.”
In April of 1979, a crisp, early-spring afternoon, Red phoned Abby from his office and said, “You know Lonesome O’Brian? That guy who brings his kid in?”
“I remember.”
“Well, he brought him in again today and now he’s in the hospital.”
“The child’s in the hospital?”
“No, Lonesome is. He had some kind of collapse and they had to call an ambulance.”
“Oh, the poor—”
“So do you think you could come by my office and pick up the kid?”
“Oh!”
“I don’t know what else to do with him. One of the fellows brought him here and he’s sitting on a chair.”
“Well—”
“I can’t talk long; I’m supposed to be meeting with an inspector. Could you just come?”
“Okay.”
She hurried De
Douglas scrunched back in his seat and gazed down at his corduroy knees. De
“After my meeting I’m going to stop by Sinai,” Red said. “See what’s doing with Lonesome, and ask him how to get ahold of his sitter. So could you just — I appreciate this, Ab. I promise it won’t be for long.”
“Oh, we’ll have a good time. Won’t we?” Abby asked Douglas.
Douglas kept his eyes on his knees. Red shut the car door and stood back, holding one palm up in a motionless goodbye, and Abby drove off with the two little boys sitting silent in the rear.
At home, she freed Douglas from his jacket and fixed both boys a snack of sliced bananas and animal crackers. They sat at the child-size table she kept in one corner of the kitchen — De
She allowed both boys to watch the afternoon kiddie shows on TV, although ordinarily she would not have. Meanwhile, she let Clarence in from the yard — he was just a puppy at the time, not to be trusted alone in the house — and he raced to the sunroom and scrabbled up onto the couch to lick the boys’ faces. First Douglas shrank back, but he was clearly interested, in a guarded sort of way, and so Abby didn’t intervene.
When the girls came home from school, they made a big fuss over him. They dragged him upstairs to look through the toy chest, competing for his attention and asking him questions in honeyed voices. Douglas remained silent, eyes lowered. The puppy came along with them, and Douglas spent most of his time delivering small, awkward pats to the top of the puppy’s head.
Around suppertime, Red arrived with a paper grocery bag. “Some clothes and things for Douglas,” he told Abby, setting the bag on the kitchen counter. “I borrowed Lonesome’s apartment keys.”
“How is he?”
“Mighty uncomfortable when I saw him. Turns out it’s his appendix. While I was there they took him to surgery. He’ll need to stay over one night, they said; he can come home late tomorrow. I did ask about the sitter, but it seems she’s got some kind of leg trouble. Lonesome said he felt bad about saddling us with the boy.”
“Well, it’s not as if he’s a bother,” Abby said. “He might as well not be here.”
At supper, Douglas sat on an unabridged dictionary Red had placed on a chair. He ate seven peas, total, which he picked up one by one with his fingers. The table conversation went on around him and above him, but there was a sense among all of them that they had a watchful audience, that they were speaking for his benefit.
Abby got him ready for bed, making him pee and brush his teeth before she put him in a pair of many-times-washed seersucker pajamas that she found in the grocery bag. Seersucker seemed too lightweight for the season, but that was her only choice. She settled him in the other twin bed in De
Douglas still didn’t speak, he didn’t even change expression, but his face all at once seemed to open up and grow softer and less pinched. At that instant he was not so homely after all.
The next morning Abby had a neighbor drive carpool, because even back in those days, before the child-seat laws, she didn’t feel right letting such a small boy bounce around loose with the others. Once they were on their own, she settled Douglas on the floor in the sunroom with a jigsaw puzzle from De
When she heard a car at the rear of the house, she thought it was Peg Brown delivering De
“Lonesome died,” Red said.
“What?”
“Lawrence. He died.”
“But I thought it was just his appendix!”