C HAPTER T WENTY-FOUR

It was a regular morning at the playground, a morning like all others. Jake was barely four years old, an adorable kid in blue-and-white-striped OshKosh overalls and red sneakers, racing around from the sandbox to the swings to the monkey bars. Winter was just losing its grip, and the warmth of the sun had him prancing around like a pony in a field of clover.

The world was all his, and rightfully so. If you can’t be king when you’re four years old, when can you be king?

I was having a hell of a time keeping an eye on him, but it was a delightful task. My boy just couldn’t stop laughing. If there was any such thing as pure happiness, I was looking at it.

The place was crowded, as it always was on sunny days. Suddenly a well-dressed thirty-something man clutching a clipboard rushed into the playground, a man who was clearly on a mission.

Any adult who enters a New York City playground without a child immediately sets off a pervert alert, and there was nothing subtle about this guy. He was actually inspecting the male children, one by one. He’d crouch down in front of each boy, study his face, and quickly move on to the next.

Suddenly he was looking right into the face of my son, who was busy filling a pail with sand. The potential pervert lingered there, instead of moving away. I got to my feet and hurried over, ready to kill the man if necessary, but before I could say a word he turned to me and said, “Is this your son?”

Sweat was dripping from the guy’s sideburns. He did nothing to hide his desperation.

“Yes, he’s my son. What’s it to you?”

“We’d like to hire him.”

“Hire him?”

The guy pointed to a grassy field beyond the playground, where a cluster of people stood amid reflectors and light stands.

“We’re shooting a print ad for Wilson’s Grape Juice. I’m the art director, and our model just called in sick, so if I seem desperate, please forgive me.”

“You want my son to be in the ad?”

“Yeah. He’s got the look.”

“What’s the look?”

“It’s in his eyes. Bright and cheerful, plus he’s handsome. It’ll take about an hour and it pays five hundred bucks.” He glanced at his watch. “Say yes or no, please, because the clock is running and I’m trying not to go into overtime.”

My instinct was to turn him down. I didn’t want to turn Jake into a trick pony. I wanted him to be a kid for as long as possible.

“I’ll pass,” I said.

“A thousand,” the art director said.

I was still reading the contract while the makeup lady was touching up Jake’s cheeks. He was delighted to be in the midst of whatever this adventure was, charming and cheerful to the staff. His partner in the ad was an adorable red-haired girl with pigtails. They each had to hold up boxes of fruit juice while posing cheek to cheek and smiling from ear to ear. Jake took it upon himself to put his arm across the little girl’s shoulders, delighting the art director, who was good to his word. The shoot took less than an hour, and right there on the spot he wrote out a check for a thousand dollars to Jacob Perez-Sullivan.

“Your kid saved my ass today,” he said, handing over the check. “Ever think of making the rounds with him?”

“Never.”

“Think about it,” he said, shaking my hand. “I wasn’t bullshitting you before. He’d get work. He’s got the look. Not many kids have it.”

When we got home Jake excitedly told his mother all about the man who’d taken his picture in the park. Puzzled, Doris turned to me for an explanation. I knew from her face that there could be trouble, and when I told her Jake was going to be in a grape juice ad, Doris flew into a tirade. How dare I do this without discussing it with her? I told her there hadn’t been any time to discuss it, that the whole thing had happened abruptly and was all over before I’d even had a chance to phone her.

I pointed at the notebooks on her desk. “Besides, you were translating poetry. Even if I’d called, you never answer the phone when you’re translating poetry.” She knew I was right. When Doris was in her Ivory Tower, the world outside did not exist. Still, she remained righteous.

“There is no excuse for what happened.”

“Oh, Doris, just this once, please, give me a break.”

“We both know you’ve done the wrong thing.”

“Here,” I said, slapping the check down on her desk. “Is this so wrong? Want me to tear it up?”

Her eyes widened at the sight of the sum. Doris was paid something like twenty-five dollars a month by a Spanish-language magazine for her poetry translations, which never took less than three days to complete. She inspected her four-year-old son’s check and was unusually quiet for a few minutes. “What is this product our son is selling?”

“Grape juice. Not liquor, not booze, not drugs, just grape juice. Unless you’ve got a problem with Cesar Chavez and the migrant farm workers, I really don’t see what’s so sinful about this money.”

“Well. We could start a college fund.”

“Exactly. My God, Doris, don’t tell me that you and I are about to agree on something!”

She called for Jake to come to her, and enfolded him in an embrace. “I’m sure the juice is full of sugar,” she said. “But I think I can live with that.”

“Hallelujah.”

“But don’t ever do anything like this again without consulting with me.”

“I won’t,” I promised. “We’re arguing about nothing. This was probably a one-shot deal.”

I was a little bit wrong about that.

The print ad came out and was a huge success. Jake literally looked like the happiest kid in the world, and the grape juice company got in touch with us about having Jake audition for a TV commercial.

Doris green-lighted the project, and Jake blew them away at the audition. He starred in grape juice commercials with talking parts that made him a mini-celebrity. People magazine included him on their Kids To Watch list, speculating that one day Jacob Perez-Sullivan might branch over to acting in TV sitcoms, and maybe even feature films.

Success has its price. I had to burn a lot of my vacation days to take Jake to work. Doris rarely had the time or the inclination to take part in this side of Jake’s career, the hauling and fetching, though she did write elaborate excuse notes for the days he had to miss school (“Please excuse Jacob Perez-Sullivan from school today. He has a rare opportunity to take part in an advertising campaign for a fruit beverage that has been getting glowing evaluations from the Department of Consumer Affairs…”).

Kids can get cranky with all those hours under the hot lights, waiting for art directors to make up their minds about lighting and camera angles, but Jake was usually pretty good about it. I actually loved being there with him because I wasn’t at work and I wasn’t at home. Work had always been stressful, and now home was just as bad. The clock was ticking for Doris and me. We were trying to keep up appearances for Jake’s sake, but it was only a matter of time before we split.

I was sleeping on the couch and getting up before Jake did each morning so he wouldn’t know about it. I was an early riser, but still I lived in fear that one morning Jake would wake up before me, find me sprawled on the couch, and demand to know what was going on.

I was ready with a string of lies: I was coughing all night, and didn’t want to wake your mother…I wanted to read for a while last night, and I didn’t want the light to keep your mother awake…. Your mother and I have absolutely nothing in common and nothing to share, so we don’t wish to participate in the most intimate and trusting thing two people can do, which is to fall asleep side by side….

Oh, buddy boy, what can I tell you? The sperm cell swims eagerly toward the egg, totally oblivious of the way the shooter and the catcher truly feel about each other, or don’t feel about each other. You got your start in a climate rich in health and vigor and everything else you need but not love, buddy boy, not love, and I’d apologize for that if I thought it’d do any good, but it wouldn’t….

An argument on the shooting set snapped me out of my daydream. We were in a studio on West Forty-eighth Street, the set for a print ad. Jake was seated at a kitchen counter, between a bottle of Wilson’s Grape Juice and a big bowl of grapes that the art director was not happy about. It seems that these grapes had a grayish pall to them, and were not nearly “robust” enough to suit his artistic eye.

The photographer wanted to get on with the shoot, saying what do you expect, it’s the middle of February, this is out-of-season fruit so it’s going to have an out-of-season dullness to it. The art director said it’s not an out-of-season ad, it’s got to look right, goddamnit, and in the midst of what was about to turn into a shouting match the makeup man—a maniacally energetic gay guy who’d dusted a springtime rosiness onto Jake’s cheeks—came up with a solution.

He mixed some sort of purple makeup powder with vegetable oil, poured the resulting fluid into an empty spray bottle, put the grapes on a sheet of newspaper and spritzed them. The result was startling. The grapes were not only purple, they shone with the kind of sunny goodness the fruit juice label promised to anybody smart enough to drink the stuff.

Using a pair of tongs, the makeup man put the grapes back into the bowl. The photographer applauded, and the art director called the makeup man a genius.

“Hey, it’s just a paint job,” the makeup man said, and then he turned to Jake. “Do not touch these grapes, young man, and for heaven’s sake don’t even dream of eating them, or you’ll wind up in the emergency room.”

Jake grinned. “How’m I supposed to eat them if I can’t even touch them?”

“Wise guy.” He winked at Jake, turned to the crew, strutted off like the hero he was. “All right, people! Problem solved!”

The shoot went well, and when it was over the grapes—still wet and reeking of whatever that purple stuff was—were thrown straight into the trash barrel. Jake and I headed for the subway, trudging through the winter slush.

“Dad.”

“I’m listening.”

“It’s wrong to waste, isn’t it?”

“It sure is.”

“They wasted those grapes, didn’t they?”

“Well, yeah, in a way they did, because nobody ate them. But on the other hand, the painted grapes made the picture look better than it would have if they hadn’t painted the grapes. See what I mean?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Don’t feel bad about those grapes. They served a purpose, even though they went in the garbage.”

“Dad?”

“Yeah?”

“How come Mom never comes with us to the studio?”

The hairs at the back of my neck prickled. I took a deep breath, the giveaway that I was about to tell a lie. “Your mother’s got a busy schedule these days.”

“She doesn’t have any classes today. It’s Friday.”

“Well, she’s grading papers.”

“She never grades papers until Sunday.”

“Jake. She has things to do. She just couldn’t come with us today.”

“She never comes with us anywhere anymore.”

“That’s not true! And remember, she takes you to your cello lessons.”

“You never come to my cello lessons.”

“Buddy boy, I do have a job. If I don’t show up once in a while, my boss tends to get upset.”

Jake ignored what I’d just said. “Doesn’t Mom like us?”

I stumbled on the slippery subway steps, grabbed the handrail to keep from falling. “Jake. What a question!”

“Doesn’t she?”

“Your mother loves you, Jake. You know that.”

“Does she love you?”

We’d reached the subway platform. The uptown Number 1 train roared into the station just then, giving me time to compose myself in the wake of this dreadful question. We got on the train and settled into our seats. Jake was all earnest-looking in his thick winter coat and hat, staring at me as he waited for his answer.

“Of course your mother loves me, Jake. And I love her.”

There was no strength in my words, absolutely none. My heart was colder than my slush-numb feet.

“You never kiss her,” Jake said.

I forced a chuckle. It had a horrible sound, like laughter in a funeral parlor. “Sure I do!”

“I’ve never seen you kiss her.”

“We kiss in private, in our bedroom.”

“You don’t sleep in the bedroom.”

How long had he been holding this in? How the hell did he know? I didn’t have to ask.

“I was thirsty one night and I got up to get a drink and I saw you on the couch.”

He’d gotten himself a drink of Wilson’s Grape Juice, packed with Vitamin C and fortified with essential nutrients. We always had plenty of that stuff around, free of charge.

I swallowed, long and hard. Jake’s gaze was steady, relentless. Did he want the truth, or did he want comfort? I opted for comfort. It would be easier on both of us. “Sometimes I can’t sleep, so I get up to read, but I don’t want to wake your mother. So I go to the couch with my book, and sometimes I fall asleep reading.”

“The light wasn’t on, Dad.”

“What light?”

“The reading light by the couch. You were just asleep there, in the dark.”

Jesus Christ. “I didn’t want to wake up your mother by going back to bed in the middle of the night, so I just stayed on the couch. It’s no big deal, Jake.”

He stared at me like a trial lawyer who knows the witness is lying, and can do nothing about it. I had to say something to break that terrible stare. “We usually eat dinner together, don’t we?”

This gave him something to think about. “Yeah….”

“When you’re in a play, we always go together, and what about when we take weekend trips upstate? Aren’t we all together then?”

It had been a long time since we’d taken a weekend trip, but he seemed to be buying it.

“Yeah.” A tickle of a smile appeared on his face. “I guess we are.”

“Sure we are!” I was encouraged by my own false enthusiasm. “Listen, when we get home, we’ll all have dinner together, and maybe there’ll be a good movie on TV that we can watch.”

“Mom doesn’t like the movies we like.”

“Well, that’s all right. The main thing is we’ll eat together, and we can tell her all about the painted grapes.”

His face lit up. “Can I tell her?”

“Sure. It’s all yours, champ. You tell her.”

We came home to an empty house. It was nearly eight o’clock when Doris trudged in with a shoulder bag full of books. The sight of this was supposed to tell us she’d spent the day at the library. Maybe she had, or maybe she’d spent the afternoon humping one of her colleagues. I didn’t really care, either way.

By this time I’d begun a stupid fling with a copygirl from Hoboken that took place one night a week, during Jake’s cello lesson. Her youthful enthusiasm soon gave way to whiny complaints about the limits of our relationship, to which I could only reply: “What relationship?” She knew my situation, knew I wasn’t about to make any kind of move that would jolt my son. She “wanted to write” and heard I was a good person to learn from, and that’s how it started—the crusty old rewrite man with the heart of gold, showing the budding journalist the way.

But my heart wasn’t gold, and her dreams of a journalism career were tarnished by a nightmarish lack of talent. She could not put a sentence together. If the English language could speak for itself, she’d have found herself facing assault charges.

I was always eager to catch that train out of Hoboken, to get home in time to tuck my son into bed. The fling only lasted a few weeks, and when I broke it off in a coffee shop near the Star she was as relieved as I was. She stared at me long and hard before saying, “You think you’re doing your son a favor, but the price he’ll pay goes up every day.”

I was stunned by her words. For one thing, it was a startling perception. For another, it was the most coherent sentence she’d ever come up with. Maybe I was a better mentor than I’d thought….

Anyway, Doris entered the house after a day of reading and/ or fucking, and luckily Jake was taking his bath, so I had a chance to fill her in as she poured herself a glass of white wine.

“Doris. He’s asking all kinds of questions.”

“He has an inquisitive mind.”

“He was asking why we never kiss, and why I was sleeping on the couch.”

Now I had her attention. “What did you say?”

“I told him we kiss in private, and I like to get up and read at night so I won’t disturb you.”

Doris nodded approvingly, one conniver to another. “Not bad.”

“I also reminded him that we eat dinner together.”

“Except on the night he has his cello lesson.” She had a catlike grin she saved for times like this. “Where is it you go on cello nights, Samuel?”

“The library, just like you. Now listen. We’ve got to jolly it up a little bit tonight, you hear me? I’ll order in Chinese. That always puts him in a good mood.”

Fifteen minutes later we were seated at the table, passing around Chinese food cartons. In the midst of it all was our son, clean and chirpy from his bath, his wet hair slicked back so that his ears protruded in a way that was almost unbearably adorable. He was happily chattering away about his day, but when he got to the story of the painted grapes Doris put her chopsticks down and looked accusingly at me.

“What a horrible thing to do. That’s false advertising!”

“No, it isn’t, Doris. The grapes were out of season. They just needed a little sprucing up.”

“It seems very wrong to me.”

You’d have thought that the paint job was my idea. Jake looked from his mother to me. His ears seemed to be trembling. I struggled to remain calm.

“Doris,” I said, “they aren’t advertising the grapes, they’re advertising the juice.”

“Nonetheless, it’s a canard.”

“Ooh, a canard. Is that the big word of the night? Let me look it up so I can think of something snappy to say.”

“You needn’t look it up, it simply means—”

Every Chinese food carton jumped as Jake’s small fist slammed down on the table.

We looked at him in shock. His lips were quivering, and his eyes were blurred with tears of fury.

“Can’t you two ever stop fighting?”

It was a question, a plea, a cry for decency. Doris and I looked at each other, two reasonably intelligent people who’d greatly underestimated the perceptivity of this human being we’d come together to create. What a strategy we’d lived by. Feed him, clothe him, send him to school, keep him busy, and he’ll never detect the underlying tension in this home, will he?

Not much he wouldn’t. And even if he weren’t a bright boy, he would have known. Kids detect marital misery through their skins, not their brains, the way animals know when to run from an earthquake before the seismograph even detects the tremors.

But when you’re a five-year-old boy living in the midst of marital turmoil, there’s no place to run. All you can do is sit there in your Spider-Man pajamas and listen to your parents go after each other in an argument over a bowl of painted grapes that has absolutely nothing to do with a bowl of painted grapes.

The sudden silence was excruciating. Jake’s words struck like meteors, and it’s as if Doris and I were waiting for the dust cloud to settle, but that could take years, so I blustered my way through the dust, flying blind as I said, “We’re just having a little disagreement, Jake.”

He gave me a withering look. “Bullshit,” he replied, and it was the first time we’d ever heard him use a vulgar word.

Doris gasped as if she’d just been knifed in the chest. “That was uncalled for, Jacob!”

He ignored her. “It’s not just a little disagreement. You guys fight all the time.”

“Not all the time,” I said, but there was no strength in my words, none at all. I was just throwing them up the way an overmatched boxer throws up his arms to block a barrage of punches.

But there were no more punches. Jake’s attack was over. The anger was gone from his tears. Now his eyes were wet with sorrow and his face was pale. Smudges of that rosy makeup stood out on Jake’s white cheeks. It took a lot of washing to get them off, and Jake had failed to do it in the bath. He looked like a heartbroken clown.

Shouldn’t one of us have gotten up to hug the boy? Doris and I just sat there, staring down at our plates. We had been outed. The fraud of our lives was no longer a secret. Jake understood the situation, maybe even better than Doris and I understood it. His childhood had just come to an abrupt end on that miserable winter night, and even Chinese food couldn’t fix that.

He didn’t want the rest of his chicken lo mein and pork fried dumplings. He picked up his plate and set it on the floor, where the cats appeared out of nowhere to devour the food.

This was strictly forbidden by Doris, but she realized this was not a night to enforce the house rules. If Jake were to have pulled a pack of Marlboros out of his pajama pocket and lit up, Doris probably wouldn’t have objected.

Me, I’d have asked him to give me a cigarette. And a blindfold. For the first time in my life I actually wished I were dead, and even that wouldn’t have been quite enough. Lousy as I’d been as a husband and a father, my death would have traumatized Jake and made things worse for Doris.

No, I didn’t wish that I were dead. What I wished was that I’d never been born.

But I was, and so was Doris, and somehow we got together and because of that Jake was born, this sweet, bright five-year-old who got up from the table to kiss first his father and then his mother on the cheek, politely, like a child from an upper-class British family bidding his parents good night before the governess takes him up to bed. Doris tried to hug him, but he kept his arms tight to his sides and tensed up, like someone trying to break a wrestling hold. He took a few steps toward his room and then whirled around to face us, like a gunslinger expecting an ambush.

“You’re going to get a divorce, aren’t you?”

There was no place to run, no place to hide, no place to die. I tried to speak, but my words, whatever they might have been, perished in my throat. Doris wasn’t doing much better. She took off her glasses, rubbed her eyes, squeezed the bridge of her nose, and put the glasses back on before speaking just one word:

“Eventually.”

What a way to put it. Yes, my boy, your parents’ marriage is a dead thing, but there’s no rush to bury it. The divorce is just something we’ll get around to, like new carpeting in your room.

I was ready for Jake to throw a tantrum, burst out crying, but he didn’t. This was no shock to him. He’d absorbed the shock of it bit by bit over the years, all on his own, piecing together the all too obvious puzzle of his parents’ collapsed marriage (collapsed? Had the structure actually ever stood in the first place?) without letting on to either of us. This is something unhappily married parents just don’t get. They’re not the only ones keeping up a facade. The kids do it, too, and it’s absolutely exhausting.

No wonder Jake looked tired. His eyes seemed as flat and cold as the eyes of a shark. No light. No hope. Nothing.

“I’m going to bed now,” he said to both of us, or maybe to neither of us.

“We’ll tuck you in,” I said.

Jake chuckled, and he was right. What a ridiculous offer, like offering a Band-Aid to a man whose throat has been slashed. He held up a hand to keep us both at bay. “I’ll tuck myself in,” he said, turning to go once again.

Suddenly, he turned to face us one more time, arms folded across his chest. He looked like the world’s youngest lawyer.

“You guys,” he said, “are like the grapes.”

Doris looked at him in wonder. “Baby?”

“Your marriage,” Jake said, almost impatiently. “It’s like the grapes. Just a paint job.”

He went straight to bed.

I really don’t know why I didn’t die that night. Doris and I couldn’t even talk about it. We cleared away the food and went to Jake’s room to find him sound asleep, stretched out on his back as if he were on a beach somewhere. He wasn’t faking sleep. He was dead to the world. He’d just put down the burden he’d been carrying for so long, and now at last it was time to rest. There were heartaches and traumas to come, but not tonight. Tonight there was only the oblivion of sleep.

But not for his parents. I went to bed with Doris for the very last time that night. We lay on opposite edges of the bed like castaway enemies forced to share a life raft, sighing and crying over this monumental mess.

Toward dawn Doris passed out, but I didn’t, and at first light I moved to the couch. I didn’t want Jake to catch me in bed with his mother. On top of everything else that had happened, the last thing he needed was false hope.

There was remarkably little to say about it in the weeks that followed—Jake had pretty much said it all that night. He’d actually accelerated the divorce process. Doris and I probably would have stewed and simmered and grumbled at each other until Jake went off to college, and who knows? By that time, we could have been too old and weary to split. Jake had fanned the spark of truth into a flame that burned down the facade, once and for all.

I started looking for an apartment, and two months later I was out of there. It was a relief to me, and a relief to Doris, and probably to Jake as well. We’d all be better off than we’d been before, except for one thing.

That special light was gone from Jake’s eyes. He could still laugh and kid around the way he used to, but there was usually an underlying sarcasm to it, biting and bitter. And it wasn’t until the light was gone that I was able to figure out what it had been.

It was the one emotion that was simply unteachable, and totally undefinable until it was gone.

Joy.

Without that special light, Jake had lost “the look” that got him noticed in the first place. His career began and ended with the grape juice campaign. I took him on some more auditions, but nothing panned out. He was all washed up at age five. He inevitably retreated into himself, having learned that the world is not such a magical place, after all.

But those commercials Jake had already starred in ran and ran and ran, long after the divorce was finalized, long after the light was gone. When the residual checks finally stopped rolling in there was more than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in the bank account of Jacob Perez-Sullivan, to be held in trust for him until either his eighteenth or twenty-first birthday, a date to be determined by both his parents—or, in the event of the death of one parent, by the surviving parent. I don’t know what the ruling was if we were both dead.

Doris took care of the trust fund. I had no idea of what it could be worth by now, with more than a decade’s worth of interest. Jake had never once mentioned the money to me in all those years since his career had crashed and burned. I figured he didn’t know about it.

But he knew, all right. Maybe he came across the trust fund paperwork the day he dug around in his mother’s drawers to find our wedding license. He’d bided his time until the day his English teacher gave that impromptu writing assignment.

In a flash, Jake saw the stars align in his favor—the controversial writing assignment, his mother’s absence—and poked at the little pinhole of light until it was now the big, wide-open gate to what he wanted. Total, absolute freedom from everything and everyone he’s ever known.

Quite a plan. A hell of a plan. Son of a bitch.

Doris and I can’t even say anything for a minute or so. We just look at our son standing there facing us, confronting us, breathing hard but evenly, arms folded across his chest and one booted foot placed defiantly ahead of the other.

Doris clears her throat. “That money is supposed to be for your college education.”

“Aren’t you getting the picture, Mom? I’m not going to college. I’m not even going to finish high school.”

“Ever?”

“I don’t know yet. But for now, this is what I’m doing with that money. And believe me, it’ll be more of an education than any college could offer.”

“Sarah won’t like this. Have you thought of that?”

“We broke up, Mom. And anyway she’s too busy humping Pete Hogan to care about anything else.”

“Oh, Jacob!”

“It’s true. Don’t ever mention her name to me again.”

Doris’s face softens. “Is that what this is all about? You’ve been betrayed, and your heart is broken, so you want to run far, far away?”

“Oh, come on, Mom. That’s not it, and you know it.”

Doris is literally quivering. “You’re frightening me, Jacob.”

It’s the first time I’ve ever heard my ex admit to being scared about something. She’s got a powerful personality, and some might even consider her to be a bit of a bully, but right now she’s totally intimidated by her own son. In a way, I guess it makes sense that the only person who can make her feel this way is the person who came out of her.

“I’d hate to think that I frighten anyone,” Jake says. “I’m just telling you how I feel. Remember, you two are the ones who got that whole thing started with the TV commercials. That wasn’t my idea, was it?”

He taps himself on the chest. “But I’m the one who made those commercials. I’m the one who got teased in the school yard for three years, because those fucking commercials kept running. Think that was fun? Do you think I enjoyed that?”

Doris and I are silent. He’d never complained about being teased, at least not to me. And then it hits me that until now, my son has never really complained about anything, despite all the bad things that have happened to him.

“I did the work,” Jake continues, “and I suffered, and I’ve waited thirteen years to get what I’ve got coming, and I can’t imagine any reason in the world why I shouldn’t have it. It’s my money. It isn’t anybody else’s.”

“College,” Doris all but whispers.

Jake sighs, shakes his head. “I could never go to college the way you’d want me to, Mom. I never liked school very much.”

“But you love to read! You love books!”

“Yeah, I do. That won’t change. You don’t have to go to school to read books. I’ll take a bunch with me. You and Dad can each make a list of what you think I should be reading.”

“Won’t be much overlap on those lists,” I can’t resist saying. Jake smiles. Doris ignores me and plows ahead.

“You’re an honor student!” she sputters.

“Yeah, I was an honor student. That was just to keep you off my back, Mom.”

He sighs, weary with it all. “And now I say—enough, already. All the guys in my class kept talking about where they wanted to go to college, and it was driving me crazy. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown. Blah, blah, blah.” He shakes his head. “The last thing I’d ever want to do is go and live at a school. Jesus! There’d be no relief from it! I’d feel like I was in class twenty-four/seven! I’m not about to waste forty-five grand a year for something I don’t even want, especially when it’s my money!”

He’s shouting by the end of his statement. Doris literally puts her hands over her ears and tilts her face to the floor. I try to put a comforting hand on her shoulder, but she shrugs it away.

“How about if we pay for it?” Doris offers.

“How about if nobody pays for it, Mom?”

“Calm down, Jake,” I say.

He momentarily shuts his eyes, composes himself, resumes speaking. “I just want to do this thing, my thing,” he says softly. “I’ve never really been anywhere or done anything that wasn’t somehow connected to my formal education. Everything’s a part of the big plan…. Well, the hell with that. This is my plan, and I can only pull it off if I’m far, far away from everything and everyone I’ve ever known. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but it’s what I want.”

Doris lifts her head, her eyes red and teary. “Why?”

Jake shrugs. “Maybe I’m just tired of being a hothouse flower, Mom. I’d like to be a dandelion, you know? I want to see what it’s like out there in the weather, feel what it’s like to taste the rain.”

“For how long?”

“I don’t know. Six months, a year…the point is, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, and now I can do it without turning to anyone for help. It’s my money, and I…am…going.”

Doris dabs at her eyes with a handkerchief, shakes her hair, and juts her chin. Whenever she does this, she is braced for battle. “Actually, you will need our consent.”

“Excuse me?”

“The money. It’s yours when you turn twenty-one, not eighteen. Not unless your father and I give our consent.”

“You’ll do that,” Jake says. “I know Dad will.”

“Don’t be so sure,” I say. “I have to think about it.”

Jake goes to his mother, and dares to caress her cheek with a gentle hand.

“Mom,” Jake says, “I’m begging you. I’ve been an obedient son, even when I thought your demands were ridiculous, and I don’t think I’ve ever asked for much, or given you any real trouble.”

“Jacob. Need I remind you that you burned a two-thousand-dollar cello on the roof of this house?”

“Because you gave me no other choice. Please, please don’t put me in another corner. I’d hate to think of what I’d burn this time.”

Jake falls to his knees before his mother and clasps his hands together in what would appear to be prayer.

Doris lets her head fall and shuts her eyes. Again I go to her and place a comforting hand on her shoulder. This time, she does not shrug it off. The shoulder feels bony. Doris is tired. She is not a kid anymore, and can’t go fifteen rounds the way she used to.

“Please, Mom,” Jake all but whispers. “Please, please, please don’t fuck this thing up for me.”

Doris turns to me with imploring eyes. She wants to know what I think. She really wants to know what I think. Suddenly, this is my ball game.

I remember what my father had to say to me about being there for Jake. I am there, all right, with my son, at his side, not running off to the woods the way my father did, not failing him, not…bailing out. I take a deep breath, weigh it all up in my heart and my brain. They confer, and the decision, a unanimous one, comes straight from my soul.

“Doris,” I say, “we’ve got to let him do this thing.”