Heft (31 page)

Dee told me she’d found Jesus, and sure enough there was a big cross around her neck, and when she told me to come in I saw a poster on the wall that said
Footprints.
It was about God carrying people around.

Dee’s not home from practice yet, she said, but he will be soon. Sit.

She gave me a turkey sandwich.

Thanks, I said. My mouth was full.

Then I spilled my guts for the third time that day, and Dee came home in the middle, and I just kept talking.

Dee’s mom was crying now, she was a mess, and Dee said Mom, Jesus, wipe your nose, and his mom said Don’t say
Jesus
, baby.

I said, In her note she told me that my father wasn’t my real father.

I expected her to cover her mouth in astonishment, but instead she nodded sadly and said, I know that. I knew that.

I sat. I felt betrayed. I put both of my elbows on my knees.

Kel Keller, she said, as if she were thinking about him.

I wanted to ask her the most important question I had but I felt like I was losing my breath. So instead I asked her a secondary question. How did you know? I said.

Well, said Rhonda. Right around the time she got pregnant, she called me up scared. She didn’t wanna tell your grandparents. I said, Is it Kel’s? And she said, No, I haven’t seen Kel in a year. They dated in high school but they broke up after that.

Rhonda was sitting on the sofa across the room from me. There was stuffing coming out of it. She was covering her belly with a cushion. She was still teary-eyed. Dee got up suddenly and went into the kitchen and came out with two Yoo-hoos, one of which he tossed to me.

Oh, Charlene, said Rhonda. We were just kids back then. I had already had this one, she said, jerking a thumb toward Dee, who smiled and shrugged.

—She called me and said, What do I do, Rhonda? I said, Whose is it? But she wouldn’t tell me.

You don’t know? I said. I was relieved and disappointed all at once.

—She would never tell me. Wouldn’t tell Kel Keller either. But he had always been in love with her so he took her back. It was a big secret that you weren’t his. I mean he must have known, but he acted like you were his son. She told her parents you were. He told his parents. They got married in Atlantic City. I was maid of honor. When he left your mother she was sad but not that sad. They weren’t right for each other. I always told her that.

OK, I said. OK.

Dee was looking down. He tossed his bottle of Yoo-hoo into the air and caught it out of the air. I was so angry with my mother suddenly that I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to yell at her the way I used to when she was alive. To be honest, that’s what I wanted to do. Or to grab her and shake her by the shoulders. Which I never did, never except for once, when she was passed out, when she was acting like a child. I shook her hard.

Have you heard of Arthur Opp? I said.

Arthur Opp, she said. She started to shake her head slowly but then clapped her hand to her mouth. Arthur Opp! she said. She laughed. That’s a name I haven’t heard in years.

You have? I said.

—Just after we graduated, she went to college for a semester. You know that?

—Yeah.

—Arthur Opp was one of her professors. She had a crush on him, said Rhonda, her face still lit up with the memory of what it was like to be young. She used to talk about him all the time. My God, Arthur Opp.

I paused. I did not want to say it yet. I wanted her to go on.

—We made up a song about him. We were being silly. I can’t remember how it went.

I thought of my mother at my age. It was hard.

—You know what? said Rhonda. They used to write to each other. They were like pen pals. After she dropped out of school she wrote to Arthur Opp to thank him for teaching her, and then he wrote back. She was real excited. She showed me the letter. They wrote to each other for a while.

—I know, I said. I used to see his letters.

I wanted to tell her the rest but I waited for a long time. Something about it felt so personal and strange that I didn’t even want to bring it up. I felt like I was opening my mother up for teasing.

Your mother was different than all of us, said Rhonda. She was always falling in love with these guys. God bless her.

I said, She told me.

Dee and his mother waited.

—That Arthur Opp was my father.

My face got hot and I looked away from everyone, out the window, into the dark street.

Rhonda sat in stunned silence for a minute and then did the worst thing she could possibly have done: she burst out laughing.

Mom,
said Dee. Jesus.

Good for her, Rhonda said. Sorry. But good for her.

She could have been lying, I said.

Maybe, said Rhonda.

I’m named after him though, I said.

Arthur?
said Dee. Your real name’s Arthur?

Yeah, I said, Arthur. At this point I was almost laughing too. I don’t know why but it felt good to almost laugh.

Arthur, said Dee again. And the laughter burst out of him too in a holler. He lowered his head over his knees to laugh.

And then we were all laughing, and Rhonda the hardest, patting her own cheeks, wiping her eyes, gazing off into the distance someplace, remembering things about my mother that I would never know.

Later she asked me did I want to stay there, and I said just for a couple nights, if she didn’t mind. But I have been there ever since. I’ve been sleeping on the couch, buying my own food with the hundred dollars that the other Kel Keller gave me.

Next I went back to school. Mr. Harper said he would talk to the principal and to my teachers, and I think he did a good job, because they have all been especially nice to me. Matt Barnaby still has a bruise on his cheek, still has a black eye. Trevor still won’t talk to me, but Kurt will. At lunch I sit with Kurt now, and with some people he is friends with.

Lindsay sits with me now too. Her friends, I think, are still mad at me. In my opinion this means they are good friends.

It’s nice in a way not to be going out with her. I miss her but it’s nice to have her as a friend, as a very good friend, it’s nice that for the first time she knows who I am and I know who she is. It’s important.

Pottsy made me stay after class and said Anything you need, Keller.

Thanks, I said.

Anything you need, he said again.

Thanks, I said again.

I’m not allowed to play basketball this winter.

I’m sorry, said Coach. It’s just not in my power to let you.

I imagine that Matt Barnaby’s parents had a hand in this. But I don’t particularly care. Dee and I play basketball together on the Warburton court when he gets home from practice. It’s usually dark already and it’s usually very cold. We play until our fingers freeze, until the inside of our ears burn from the panting. Only streetlamps light the court. Anyone else would be scared to play at night. But we’re not: we’re huge, we’re bigger than everyone else. We could kill anyone who tried to hurt us. We live here and this is our neighborhood. We play and play for hours. Sometimes he lets me make a shot.

I have been telling people. I have stopped lying or being very silent. I have been telling everyone the truth. I have been letting them help me. They all want to help me and so I am letting them.

Lindsay told me that when someone in your family dies you have to let people think they are helping. It is kind to. It helps
them,
she told me. It helps them to think they are helping.

So I’ve been trying. For Lindsay.

I have to do something about my mother. A woman from the hospital called and told me that she was sorry, but I was going to have to do something about her body immediately. Apparently they’ve been calling a lot.

I talked to Mr. Harper about it and he says I am the one that has to make the decision.

When we—he said. Have you thought about cremation? he said.

I never had. I always thought my mother would be buried. It’s what happened to people after they died. But something about cremation made sense to me. I feel as if my mother spent her whole life being buried. I feel as if she should be released somewhere.

Mr. Harper said he would call the woman and talk to her about it.

I have to sell the house. It isn’t mine, anyway. I’ll never go back into it. Only for my things. Only for her things. And I need the money. Mr. Harper says he can help me with that too. His sister is a real estate broker in Scarsdale. I imagine my mother’s will be the shittiest house she ever sold.

I wrote an obituary to put in the paper. I didn’t have to, but I wanted to. Pottsy helped me write it.

Yes. I keep letting people help me. I feel like I am opening, but also like I am dying.

I talked to Gerard Kane’s assistant on the phone. Sarah. She still sounded pretty. I put on a deep voice when I talked to her. I felt powerful for the first time in a very long time.

I said, Can Gerard still do Saturday the 10th?

I called him by his first name. Like a man.

She said, We’re on.

So that’s when it is. I don’t feel ready, but I have to be.

I looked up Arthur Opp on the computer at school. There is only one Arthur Opp in New York City, and he lives in Brooklyn. There was no information about him. It seems like he does not teach anymore. Just a phone number and address. I wrote down both on a little piece of paper and put it in my wallet alongside my mother’s letter.

Late at night, after Dee and his mother were both asleep, I called him. I let it ring once and then hung up.

In some ways I feel that I am everyone’s son. That I have many parents now.

Pottsy and I wrote this about my mother.

Charlene Louise Turner Keller of Yonkers died Monday, November 28, at the age of 38. She was the mother of Arthur “Kel” Turner Keller and the daughter of Paul and Barbara Turner (both deceased). She worked for five and a half years at Pells Landing High School. She was a good person and she loved to have a good time. She had a long struggle with a lot of different illnesses.

May she rest in peace.

I thought you just sent the obituary to the paper and they put it in, but Pottsy said no, you have to pay. I panicked a little but Pottsy said he wanted to pay for it. That he’d be in charge of it.

No, you don’t have to, I said. I don’t have to put one in for her.

But in my heart I felt she had spent her life not being noticed. So I wanted to tell someone—I wanted strangers to read it and to think, She was too young—and to shake their heads. And to say her name in their heads.

So I was relieved when Pottsy put a hand on my shoulder and said Keller. I want to.

• • •

“S
o many of them are young,” said Yolanda. It was her turn
to read the obituaries. She was leaning forward in her chair, her ankles hooked around its legs.

Just as I realized who it was Yolanda reminded me of, she read a name aloud: “Charlene Turner Keller.”

I said, “What did you say?”

“This woman,” said Yolanda. “She was young. She had a kid too.” She touched her own stomach.

• • •

B
efore a game, when I was young, my mother would say,
Don’t be nervous! and I would say, I’m not, and she would say, Me neither. Then she would say, You look nervous, and I would say, I’m
not
.

The thing is that she was right. I was nervous. I was always nervous and only she could see that. I was shaking in my cleats, I was fucking terrified. A little kid. But I’d walk onto the field like a pro, tossing the ball in the air, grinning at the other team if I wanted, chucking the ball hard back and forth with someone to warm up. A little sound like
hup, hup
would come out of me when I was really throwing well.

She took my hand in the car. When I let her. And I did let her, because I was nervous, and she was the only one who knew it.

I wake up dreaming of her and this. It’s the first nice dream I’ve had about her, and I take it as a good sign. I have slept in my lucky socks, the ones I’ve been wearing the night before games since I was about ten. I hit my first grand slam wearing them. No one is up in the house yet. It is my job to wake Dee up, and I shuffle down the hall and knock lightly on his door. No response.

Yo,
I whisper. I do not want to wake Rhonda up.

I knock again, louder, and then crack open the door to Dee’s room. He has heavy dark blinds that make the room black even though the sun is up. I see him in the light of the hallway, asleep in the same twin bed he’s always had, his feet hanging a foot off of it. When I used to sleep over when we were kids we had a rule: whoever woke up first would wake the other one up. I usually slept later than he did. I’d be in my sleeping bag on the floor and a basketball or a pillow or a sock would hit me in the face, and Dee would say, Get up.

Now I walk over to him and give the bed a shove with my foot.

He opens his eyes.

You up? I ask him.

I am now, he says.

He’s driving me to my workout with Gerard Kane. Just before we walk out the door, Rhonda comes flying down the hall. Good luck, she says, I prayed for you!

Thank you, I say, and we close the door.

Behind us, through the closed door, we can hear her talking. I’m still praying! I’m praying now, she is saying.

I could drive myself but Dee offered and I let him. It’s at a giant practice facility in Eastchester, and we take the parkway to get there, and on the way Dee puts on the radio. He doesn’t ask me if I’m nervous and I’m grateful.

Instead he tells me things about the girls we grew up with. Who is pregnant and who is in jail and who dropped out of school. All of the girls he tells me about are girls I hooked up with when I was younger, or smoked with, or drank with, or kissed on a cold park bench in a bad bad park. Remember Denise? he asks me, and I say I do. Dead, he says.