The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

Because the story of your life never starts at the beginning. Don’t they teach you anything in school?

The boy was gone: clean gone. But Quinn couldn’t bring himself to say it.

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

playing guitar was the single occasion in his slight and baffling life when he had the power to deliver exactly the thing another human being wanted.

sheening

She felt suddenly fond of her unremarkable life, that humdrum necklace of imitation pearls with the occasional glint of the real thing.

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.

“People don’t like you unless you do sports.

She spent the remains of that day scouring the house for her birth certificate until she remembered what had happened to it. She intended to tell the boy, but on the tenth Saturday he did not appear. Nor did he appear on the Saturday following, when her bushes suddenly quavered with a mixed flock of jewel-colored birds that Ona could not hear. On the Saturday after that, his father came.

John Minnoch.

Of course it doesn’t work. Nothing works. There isn’t a magic trick on earth that could restore my youth and beauty.

When he sauntered into the house and took a brownie without asking, she realized how long it had been since someone paid her the compliment of presumption.

Parents outlived their children sometimes; this was a fact.

She’d entered her second century believing she was through with death, not counting her own.

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.

maybe Howard had stashed it there in the hope she’d come across it one day and miss him. She did miss him, oddly enough, in the generalized way she missed her whole life.

Travel agreed with him, and she might have known: people like Quinn, always running from themselves, loved the road.

Because a lot of people think I’m a piece of statuary with no past, that’s why. And here you are in my kitchen, reminding me that I’m me.

A newsman, back when newsmen had to know things.

How women cemented alliances over less than nothing impressed him anew.

friable,

tenebrous

“Twenty years old and his paid employment for the United States Navy was to wrap other mothers’ sons in chains. How did my son manage a job like that? How does any son?”

“People don’t write their own endings,”

“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.”

plangent

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?

Can memory be revisited to allow us to see now what we didn’t see then?

Long QT Syndrome,

GUMS

disquisition

card sharp.

targer!”

Disquieted