“Thanks,” I said and took the candy.
6
When I got home, I professed to not feeling well. Again, it was not a complete lie. I went upstairs to my room, but not before throwing the Tootsie Pop in the garbage pail in the kitchen. Minutes later my mother was in my room, shaking the thermometer. As she sat on my bed watching the second hand of her watch and holding the end of the thermometer under my tongue, I began to realize my mother was something special to look at. I believe kids have an innate sense about this but choose not to think about it.
My mother pulled the thermometer from under my tongue. “You don’t have a fever,” she said. She pressed the back of her hand to my forehead and my cheeks to confirm this. “Everything okay at school today?”
“Fine.” I rolled onto my side and shut my eyes.
After she’d left the room, I lay atop the covers, staring at the model airplane my father and I had built the past weekend and hung from the ceiling with fishing wire. I thought of the newsman smiling and kissing my mom and the times my mother and I would drive with the top down and cars would pull alongside us and the men would rev their engines. I’d thought they were admiring the Falcon.
“Ignore them, Samuel,” my mother would say, but I would sneak a peek anyway, and the men would smile and wink and otherwise try to get my mother’s attention.
“I think he knows you,” I said the first couple of times this happened.
“I’m most certain he does not,” my mother would say.
“Then why is he waving to you?”
“He wants to race,” she’d say.
“Can we?” I’d blurt out.
“Absolutely not. Racing is against the law and dangerous. A car is not a toy, Samuel.”
But I also couldn’t help noticing that when the light changed, the Falcon would usually surge through the intersection.
I thought about Fast Eddy and Gary and about what they’d said. I’m sure I didn’t understand the dipstick part, but I understood enough to know what they’d said was wrong. With all the problems I already had with David Bateman and Sister Beatrice, I didn’t need people complicating things by making nasty comments about my mother. And I never wanted her to go back to Fast Eddy’s again.
When my father came home, I heard my parents talking but didn’t bother to get off the bed to listen through the floor vent. I deduced enough to know my mother was telling my father I was upstairs and didn’t feel well. No, she didn’t think I was sick. And yes, she’d taken the car in for its oil change, but it had cost more because they had to replace a radiator hose. My father wasn’t happy about this, lamenting that he could have done it himself and saved the labor cost.
Minutes later, I heard his heavy footsteps bounding up the stairs. The door to my room crept open, and my father stepped into the striped shadows from the fading light through the wood shutters covering the window above my headboard. He touched my forehead. “Your mother says you don’t feel well.”
“I’m okay.”
“I hope so. I need my partner for Bonanza tonight.”
“I think I’ll be okay.”
“Something happen at school today? Something you want to talk about?”
“No, nothing.”
“Well, if I were a betting man, I’d bet something was bothering you.” He held up the Tootsie Pop, still wrapped.
I sat up. “Dad, what does it mean when someone says they’d like to bend someone over a bumper and use their dipstick to check the oil?”
My father straightened. “Where on earth did you hear . . . ?” Then before I could answer, he reconsidered the Tootsie Pop. “Oh.”