Is This Tomorrow: A Novel (17 page)

When he turned seventeen, he got a job as a stock boy at the Star Market on Lexington Street, saving half the money for himself, giving the other half to his mother. Every week, he counted his earnings, spreading the bills out on his bed. Inside, this feeling that he was bound for something new, something better, kicked against him like a can. His old life could be erased, just as easily as an Etch A Sketch drawing. He just needed to find the way.

One afternoon, he was at work, putting canned corn in a display, when the assistant manager, a guy named Robert, only five years older than Lewis and with an angry cluster of pimples on his chin, came by. “Do a good job,” he barked. Lewis knew better than to respond, but he watched Robert leaving and he suddenly thought about how awful it would be if this were your life. Assistant manager of canned goods at the Waltham Star Market.

He didn’t know what he wanted to do, but he did know that he wanted to do something. He didn’t want to wind up pumping gas or joining the army like half the guys did, especially with Vietnam heating up. He also didn’t want to grow old here, watching his life receding in the same place, like he was vanishing. Panic clenched his throat. Robert turned around. “Are you working or not?” he sniped. “Have some pride in what you’re doing.” Lewis picked up another can of corn and wedged it into the display.

Ava was always pushing Lewis about his future, nagging him about his grades. She left brochures around about scholarship applications and local colleges where he could save money by commuting, but he brushed them away because the schools were always right within the area, and what kind of a change was that, living at home? But maybe college wasn’t a bad idea. The more he worked as a stock boy, the more suffocated he felt. If he went to college, he’d have professors instead of the dopey teachers at school. Kids paid to go there so they would be smarter, more serious. It would be different from regular school, wouldn’t it? He felt a bright ray of hope.

He decided to talk to Mrs. Geary, the guidance counselor. Mrs. Geary, heavyset with a frosted blond fall anchored to her head with a bow, stared at him impassively. “What’s on your mind?” she said.

“I want to go to college. How do I get a scholarship?”

Mrs. Geary sighed. She got up and went to the big gray file cabinet and pulled out his file, sitting back down, riffling pages until she got to his report cards. “Oh you do, do you? Look at this, D, C, F, C, D. Those are not college grades. Your Scholastic Aptitude Test scores were rock bottom.”

Lewis had not taken the test very seriously. He had barely read the questions, let alone tried to do well. “I can turn things around,” he insisted.

“A little late for that now, isn’t it?” she said. “It’s nearly January.”

“I know I messed up.”

She adjusted her glasses, peering at him. “Who do you think will even give you a recommendation?”

He felt a pulse in his neck. He tried to think. Miss Koledo, his English teacher who spent most of every class talking about her skier boyfriend, wouldn’t. Mr. Rowan, his science teacher, was still angry with Lewis for insisting that it was scientifically possible that man could one day land on the moon. “It isn’t my fault,” Lewis said. “It’s just me and my mom at home.” He saw the way she was studying him, her eyes almost floating shut. She shuffled papers on her desk and then handed him a brochure for Mass Bay Community College, a joke school. A last resort. “Everyone gets in here,” she told him. “Even you might.”

He came home, panicked, not knowing what to do with himself. Maybe Mrs. Geary was wrong. He could still apply to schools. He didn’t need stupid Mrs. Geary.

He began to pay attention in class, to turn in papers, but his teachers didn’t believe it was his work, and his French teacher even accused him of cheating. He signed up to take the SATs again, studying a practice book over the weekends and at night, and he earned nearly perfect scores. When he showed his mom, he saw the tears pooling in her eyes. “I knew you could do it,” she said, throwing her arms about him. “This is who you are.”

He began to get excited, to imagine his new life. Elementary and high school had been a waste, but college was something different. And he could be different, too. He could be one of those boys on the cover of the college brochures, lolling on the grass with other kids, striding to a lab to do an experiment. Some schools even had independent study where he could learn whatever he wanted, and the professors would even help him.

One night, when he was trying to fill out a financial aid application, he went into his mother’s room to forage in her drawers for a good pen. He pulled open her desk drawer, where she kept rubber bands, thumbtacks, pennies, all manner of odd things she said it was important not to waste. His hands felt a fold of cardboard, and he pulled out a small folder, fastened with a rubber band. He opened it up and pulled out a letter. He didn’t think his mother had many friends and she certainly didn’t write to anyone that he knew. He opened the letter up, unfolding it like a fan, scanning the type, the official-looking page, the letterhead:
J. T. Smith, Attorney-at-Law.
The date was three years ago. He scanned the page, and then he saw the word custody and his hands began to shake. He turned a page.

It does indeed appear that Mr. Lark has given up all claims for Lewis.

Lewis reread the letter, over and over.

The print swam. He wanted to kick the chair in front of him, to break dishes in the kitchen. What did any of this mean? His mother had told him his father had left, that he didn’t want a family anymore, and that it wasn’t anyone’s fault. “If it’s anybody’s loss, it’s your father’s,” she had told him. Lewis hadn’t believed her. He had thought maybe his dad had developed amnesia and forgotten them. Or sometimes he blamed Ava for keeping his father away. But this letter seemed to mean that his father had fought for him.

When Ava came home from work an hour later, her veiled hat perched on her head, a bag of groceries in her arms, Lewis was still so angry he could barely think. He walked toward her, with the letter in his hand. “What’s that paper?” Ava said. “Is that from school? Something I need to sign? What’s the matter, honey?”

He handed her the letter. As soon as she saw it, her shoulders tightened. “Oh,” she said slowly.

“Were you ever going to tell me?” he said. He was taller than she was now, so she had to look up at him to meet his eyes. He felt like he might burst into flames. “What else didn’t you tell me?”

“Where did you find this?”

“How come I didn’t know there was a custody battle?”

She shook her head. “There wasn’t.”

“It says right here—”

“I’m telling you there wasn’t a battle. He threatened and I got a lawyer.”

“Threatened means a fight.”

Ava shook her head. “No baby, it doesn’t.”

“Why do you always lie when it comes to him? I’m not a kid anymore. Why can’t you just tell me the truth?” His voice scraped in his throat.

“Because the truth is complicated,” she said. “He did threaten, but that was all it was. Threats. No one even knows where he is now.”

“But he wanted custody. It says right here that he wanted custody. I’m not making that up! You’re lying to me.” Lewis insisted.

Ava drew herself up. “How many times has he called you?” she snapped. “Has he ever remembered a birthday or come to visit? Where has he been all these years? Are we that hard to find, Lewis?”

“Maybe he couldn’t come visit. Or maybe you wouldn’t let him.”

“You know that’s not true.”

“He hired a lawyer!”

“People hire lawyers for all kinds of reasons, and sometimes it’s just to make trouble.”

“I don’t believe you! Was he here? Did you get to see him? Where is he? You knew where he was and you didn’t tell me!”

“What good would it have done to know where he was when he was making no effort to come and see us? And I don’t know where he is anymore. He moved a few times and he hasn’t called for years.”

“Why couldn’t you have told me? It concerned me and I had a right to know. Who knows what you did to make him give up? Maybe he thought I didn’t want to be with him. What did you tell him?”

She took the paper, snatching it from his fingers and stuffed it in her pocket. “Whatever I tell you, you’re not going to believe,” she said quietly. “But you should know that I thought I was protecting you.” Then she took the groceries and went into the kitchen, where he could hear her banging things into the cabinets, and he knew enough to leave her alone. Lewis got his jacket and slammed out of the house, not coming back until long after the dinner she made was cold on his plate.

T
HE NEXT DAY,
as soon as he got home from school, hours before Ava got home from work, Lewis was on the phone. It had been a long time since he had tried to find his father, but now everything was different. There had been a custody battle. The operator in Houston had no Brian Lark listed. It was the same with Phoenix and San Francisco and every city Lewis remembered his father mentioning. His father could be anywhere. He could be a truck driver in Canada or a teacher in Santa Fe. He could be remarried with a whole new family, a whole new life, or God, he hoped not, his father could be dead. Lewis knew it was futile, but he still couldn’t keep himself from picking up the phone and trying again, and each time he did, he felt more defeated. He took his allowance money and put an ad in
the
Boston Globe
, imagining his father might still read it.
BRIAN LARK, CONTACT LEWIS
.
It was all he could afford.

No one answered the ad.

After that, he stopped imagining what it would be like to find his father, how the two of them, both now grown men, might sit and talk about their lives. He went into his drawer and dug out everything he had saved from his father. A peso his father had brought back from a business trip to Mexico that he told Lewis was enough to buy a stack of delicious tortillas. A tiny gold star his father had won for selling the most cars one year, with Brian’s name etched across it. It didn’t seem like very much to Lewis. He thought of all the things about him that his father had missed seeing. That Lewis had grown a foot taller. That he still couldn’t shoot a basket, but he could run really, really fast. That Lewis now shared his father’s strong, straight nose. That his dad might look at Lewis and actually see something of himself there.

Lewis never discussed his father with his mother again, but he could tell that she was trying to make amends. “Do you want to go bowling?” she asked one night.

He thought about being trapped with her, having to listen to her talk about her job, having to hear her talk about his life as if it still belonged to her.

“I have to study,” he said, which was his all-purpose response. “I want to do more college applications.” All he wanted to do now was get away from her.

She was quiet for a moment. “That’s what I like to hear,” she said.

He was a senior and it was March when the college letters began to come back and he was always the first to see them because Ava was at work. He didn’t get into Stanford or UCLA. The University of Michigan also said no thanks. He tore the letters up. It got so he could feel defeat just by the thinness of the envelopes. The only acceptance letter that came was for Mass Bay. The joke school. That was his road out of this, his only road. He thought of commuting from home, going to classes with all the kids who never read, who paid him to write their papers because they were too dumb to do it on their own. He crumpled the letter in his hand.

When he finally told Ava, she was quiet. “You can take a few classes at the community college,” she suggested. “You wouldn’t have to go there full-time. And you can apply to colleges again. People do that.” He knew she was trying to make him feel better, but instead, he felt worse.

“Maybe,” he said, and then left the room.

O
NE AFTERNOON, AT
the end of May, when he came home, Ava was primping. “I have a date,” she said. She carefully pursed her lips at herself in the mirror. “I want you to meet him, his name is Frank,” she said. “He sells bathtubs, but he seems awfully nice.”

When the doorbell rang, she flew to the door. She opened it and her voice chimed, “Oh Frank, come meet my Lewis.”

Frank’s hair was so shiny with oil, Lewis swore he could see his reflection in it, and he was wearing a dark suit like an undertaker. Frank looked at Lewis as if he were an affront. “He’s so big!” he said to Ava. “What is he, sixteen?”

“Eighteen,” Lewis said.

“What are you doing here home on a Saturday night?” Frank asked Lewis. “You should be stepping out yourself.” Ava adjusted the veil on her hat so that her eyes were hidden. “Don’t wait up,” Frank said, and winked at Lewis.

“I’ll see you later, darling,” his mother said to him. He saw the way her eyes darted to Frank and then back to her skirt, which she was smoothing, and Lewis walked over and hugged her. “Oh, this is nice,” she said, and Frank pulled her toward him, peeling her from Lewis.

Lewis watched Frank guiding his mother to the car, one arm about her waist, as if he owned her. He saw the careful way his mother was walking in her heels, as if she thought she might trip, how she dipped down into the car. She looked up and gave him a wave and he waved back.

He had the evening to himself, so he watched an old movie on TV. Then he made himself dinner, and went to bed to read because he didn’t want to wait up for his mother and hear her talk about the nice restaurant Frank took her to, or how Frank wanted to get to know him better. Plus, she kept asking him if he had made a decision about taking college classes, and he kept lying, saying, not yet. He knew she thought Mass Bay was his chance, just like she thought Frank was hers.

At midnight, he heard the key in the lock. Was that a good sign or bad? His door was closed, and he turned out his light, listening, hoping she hadn’t brought Frank back home with her. He didn’t want to have to feel trapped in his room.

He didn’t hear another voice. Instead, there was a bang, as if she had bumped into a table or dropped something heavily down. He heard her sigh and he didn’t move. He heard the radio click on and then he heard her crying, soft muffled sounds, her voice catching like a skip on his records. Stop, he wanted to tell her. Don’t do this.
Don’t be this person anymore. He might have been saying that to himself. He had cried for his father and for Rose and Jimmy, but look where that got him. He had thought his father had loved him. He had thought Rose had, too. Sometimes, to live your life, you had to protect yourself against what other people might take from you.