The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

Certain things, examined in the frozen light of retrospect, were simply unforgivable.

“I knew a man who juggled mice,” she told him. His eyes popped open, so she hauled out her midway story. “You ran away?” the boy said. She could feel herself being deliciously reassessed. “You left your mother?

“What kind of vegetables?” the boy asked. “I remember a lot of cabbage.” “Cabbage!” the boy said. Apparently it took nothing to astonish him.

“One, you mean boundaries. Two, Puerto Rico isn’t a country. It’s a territory of the United States.” “Thank you.” He flipped the pages of his notebook and made a brief entry on one list, then another. Ona read over the sheet of brief but vital statistics, trying not to care and failing utterly.

But at this point in their friendship she found it impossible to refuse him. She had believed herself through with friendship.

“So,” Ona said, “nobody’s keeping track of the hundred-to-hundred-ten crowd?” “There’s too many. Almost one-third of one million if you count the whole world. Which I do.” “Where in blazes are they hiding?” “I don’t know,” the boy said gloomily. “And here I thought I was two or three pneumonias away from a record. We got all hepped up over nothing.” He shook his head sadly. “It’s all right,” she said. “We’ll wait them out.”

“This Wong fellow mows his own lawn. He could be a problem.”

He turned off the recorder when she asked him to, or when she got to a stopping place that satisfied his Byzantine logic, or when the scoutmaster rang the bell. Only then, the tape gone mute between them, did she understand how far she—she, who never went anywhere—had been willing to travel.

Her voice took on an authority borrowed, to the subtlest inflection, from the boy. Her recitation seemed to calm the boy’s mother—Belle, this strange animal in her house—and she herself felt calmer. How tranquilizing it was to arm yourself with information, how consoling to unpack the facts and then plant them like fence pickets, building a sturdy pen in which you stood alone, cosseted against human fallibility. She missed him awfully.

there are certain times, certain people—

They take up room. So much room. I was married to Howard for twenty-eight years and yet he made only a piddling dent in my memory. A little nick. But certain others, they move in and make themselves at home and start flapping their arms in the story you make of your life. They have a wingspan.

Convince is for thought; persuade is for action. You couldn’t convince me that taping my horrible old-lady voice was a good idea, but you persuaded me to do it anyway, didn’t you, you little dickens?

Because he’s wondering if death, which is an undiscovered country, might be preferable to life, with its known drawbacks.

And she moved like warm water.

and this dreamy song comes on the radio, sung in this dreamy way, you cry. You just do.

Can memory be revisited to allow us to see now what we didn’t see then? Old Ona, exhausted from her trip and searching her cupboards for a vase, yearned to tell young Ona, Can you see the iceberg coming? No one will love you more than they love themselves. But the young Ona can’t see.

They said not to talk to you or your wife. But I can say it now, oh, my Christ, I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

Eight bars in, Quinn understood what he was hearing. Howard Stanhope’s unpublished song sluiced down the decades and landed in a flood of harmony, a hybrid of Tin Pan Alley and hallelujah that sounded freshly made, the lilting lament of an unworthy man begging the Lord for a break.