The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

“Can I see his room again? Just for a minute?” He hoped to return the diary before she missed it. He couldn’t imagine her not knowing of the diary’s existence, she who had observed the boy’s life as if in the belief he would need a biographer someday.

“Of course I’ve heard of the Internet. I went through the orientation at the public library in the spring of 2000. Big to-do about nothing. Worse than watching TV.” She looked him over: beneath the misdirection of his genteel conduct and crisp uniform, he was a boy of the twenty-first century after all. Since her birth she’d witnessed the advent of automobiles, airplanes, automatic washing machines, atomic bombs, space shuttles, disposable diapers, and Touch-Tone, had received them all as a matter of course, her capacity for wonder peaking around 1969 with the moon landing; but this old-timey boy who carried a phone the size of a baby’s rattle and plucked information from France out of a machine in his bedroom presented quite the conundrum. She smoothed her hands over her head, as if to tidy up the technology it had already absorbed.

The day’s chores finished, she poured his milk and offered him cookies. “The Meals on Wheels pulled a fast one,” she said. “I was just getting used to the animal crackers and they come up with these phony macaroons.” The boy chewed one up and made a face. “I know,” Ona said. “But I’m supposed to purr my head off nevertheless, like a tabby cat grabbing up table scraps.” It was the thing she liked least, so far, about her second century on earth—the presumption of neediness, the expectation of gratitude, the general public’s disappointment at her refusal to be fulsome. Since when was a simple thank-you not enough? She’d had every species of do-gooder in and out of here for the past twenty-five years, from the Daughters of Isabella to the county social services, and every one of them, excepting this little boy, had found her wanting in the appreciation department.

Howard asked me the same thing, so I told him: Eugene Debs. “A Socialist?” he said. He couldn’t believe it. Like this, all pop-eyed: “My wife voted for a Socialist?” . . . I know. My vote didn’t count. That’s how Howard looked at it. But secretly, I fancied that Mr. Debs might find out, through friends and associates of the Baxters, that an underage lady voter on Woodford Street wanted him to be president. . . . The next time? I had two babies by then and voted for Mr. Robert La Follette, and this time it counted. . . . Oh, goodness, Howard was beside himself. “Another Socialist?” he said. “He’s not a Socialist,” I told him right back, “he’s a Progressive.” Poor Howard was spitting out his oatmeal. “Why, Ona? For God’s sake, why?” . . . Because I could. That’s why. I was a married woman who owned nothing. Not even my clothes. But I owned my vote, didn’t I? Why wouldn’t I vote for the Socialist? Sometimes I can’t believe how long I lived with that stingy, suspicious, sad, sad man.

She tried to swallow her consternation. She did not want to be one of those old people who detest change—Louise had warned her against this very thing. But she couldn’t help reeling with disappointment. Last night she’d worked her balky faucets to fill the tub high and spritzed the water with almond oil. This morning she’d dabbed perfume behind her ears. She hadn’t counted on being the third wheel. Already too hot in her long-sleeved blouse, she felt like a collapsed pudding, a leftover that someone had forgotten on the seat.

“We’re talking about people who kept their money in a FLOUR BIN,” she said to her son. “They owned an apartment building and later a grocery store, but they were afraid of everything. They couldn’t settle. That was their problem. They couldn’t settle into their own skin.” Her voice took on a different sheen, briefly. “Your mother was the opposite.” “I’m sorry. Come again?” “YOUR MOTHER. WAS THE OPPOSITE. That woman could settle anywhere. Not like these people nowadays. THESE PEOPLE,” she repeated, gesturing toward Quinn. “These people nowadays have no idea where they are. Wherever they are, it’s the WRONG PLACE.” Belle laughed softly; Quinn felt her cross over to somewhere he couldn’t grasp and the day went irreversibly awry. He was a team of one, facing three inscrutable people who appeared to have sudden, passionate, possibly conflicting blueprints for how the next few moments—or hours—would go.

Ona didn’t know what to do with fragile people; she’d spent so much of her life around bullies.

He said, softly enough that she might not catch it, “I was a rotten father.” Ona nodded, noncommittal. “There are worse things.” “Like what?” He really wanted to know. “Being an adequate mother.” She took a swig from her coffee mug. “Rotten fathers are a dime a dozen, who even notices? Whatever kind you were—and I’m sure you weren’t as bad as you think—you probably did the best you could, and nobody expects much more out of a man.”

SO MUCH THIS

thought we’d rise to the occasion a little better than we have,” she said. But of course Belle had risen to the occasion. If there were a theoretical maximum height to which a person could rise to an occasion, Belle had reached it; she had scaled the craggy summit of occasion through icy winds, in bare feet, pursued by wolves.

All week he has gone to bed practicing how to present to Miss Vitkus her finished tape, from which he will transcribe for Mr. Linkman the required three pages of not-secret things, in immaculate penmanship and flawless spelling, earning an easy A+ unless he accidentally does something B or C+.

kid-thoughts and logic