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  “Fletcher?” she yelled at the bottom of the stairs. “Fletcher, you answer me this instant!”

  Olive climbed the stairs two at a time, ready to give her son a piece of her mind.

  Fletcher was bunched up under the chenille cowboy bedspread that his Aunt Florence had given him for Christmas.

  “Fletcher, honey, what is it?” Olive sat on the edge of the bed, patting the quivering bump. “What’s the matter? Were some of the Scouts mean to you?”

  The quivering revved up.

  “Fletcher, honey, is it your father? Where is your father?”

  Lately, WW had been dropping the boy off after Scouts with instructions to tell Olive he had gone out for a nightcap.

  “Be sure to tell her,” he had said last time, “that you boys would drive Carrie Nation to drink.” Then, leaning across the seat, he opened the door for Fletcher and practically pushed him out, the need for a nightcap apparently so pressing he didn’t have time to answer the boy’s question, “Who’s Carrie Nation?”

  Fletcher’s quivering was now at full throttle, and Olive swallowed a bubble of fear that fissured in her throat. With considerable effort—it was like trying to strip the peel off an unripe peach—she pulled the bedspread away from him and then spent several more minutes trying to turn over the hunched-up ball that was her son.

  “Fletcher,” she said, pulling the rigid boy into a sitting position. “Fletcher, you must tell me right now what’s going on.”

  The tight white line that was Fletcher’s mouth suddenly cracked open and he wailed.

  “For crying out loud, Fletcher, what’s the matter?” said Olive. Torn between fear for and of her son, she shook him, trying to dislodge the answer as if it were a half-swallowed mint.

  “He was in the car, Mom.” The boy sobbed and then spit out the words as if they were terrible to the taste. “He was in the car with Miss Shirley, the Brownie Mother, doing It! She was sitting on his lap, Mom, and neither one of them had their clothes on! At least not the bottom parts.”

  Fletcher would have gone on with his horrible story, but Olive had clamped her hand over his mouth, not wanting to hear anymore. She began keening and they both sat on the bed, making their own particular distress signals.

  Later that night, Olive received a phone call in which WW simply stated that he wouldn’t be coming home. A letter arrived several days later. It was three parts accusatory—Why did you always have to nag, nag, nag?—to one part vaguely apologetic—Sorry, Olive, but it just wasn’t working out for me—with a P.S. thrown in—Say, how’s about sending my good suit over to the office?

  Sitting in the bed she had taken to since WW’s departure, Olive cried over the letter until her tears rendered it a blue blur, but it didn’t matter—she had memorized it anyway. He was running away with Shirley, a woman who understands what a man needs. He was going way out west where a man has room to dream, and he wasn’t coming back. He’d send money when he could, and would Olive mind explaining things to the boy? He signed his whole name, Wendell Vernon Weschel, as if it were an official document, which, concurred Olive, a Dear Jane letter certainly was.

  When it was clear WW wasn’t coming back, Fletcher burned his Scout uniform out in the trash barrel, and it was both smoke and emotion that made his eyes water. Olive ranted about “that weasel Weschel” to God and anyone within earshot, and Fletcher knew instinctively that to defend his father was to strike a blow against his mother. Still, one afternoon when she sat in her bed littered with soggy tissues and Licorice Nibs wrappers, claiming what a bastard WW was, Fletcher said solemnly, “Yes, but he was our bastard.”

  He hardly recognized the woman who emerged from under the bed covers weeks later.

  “It’s a new day,” said Olive, brushing her hands together like a villain concocting an evil plot. “And time to figure out what to do with it.”

  The knot of prematurely graying hair she wore at the base of her neck was sacrificed to sable black dye and a bubble cut. She became the Avon Lady’s best customer and created a new face for herself featuring black silverfish eyebrows and coral lipstick that matched the ovals she rouged onto her cheeks.

  “If I’m going to be a career gal, I’ve got to look like one,” she told Fletcher. She enrolled in a real estate class, leaving Fletcher several times with Mrs. Pyle, the next-door neighbor who mounted competitive card games of War and Pinochle against him, all the while snapping the Beechnut gum she chewed by the packet and never thought to share. When Olive terminated the short-lived babysitting arrangement, Fletcher was thrilled; the card games were more a chore than an amusement, owing to Mrs. Pyle’s compulsion to cheat.

  “I’ve decided he’s old enough to stay at home by himself,” she told the neighbor. “He’s very mature for a nine-year-old.”

  Fletcher felt proud and grown up hearing this assessment and had no idea that his mother’s decision had anything to do with Mrs. Pyle’s request for payment.

  For nearly two years, WW sent checks totaling just under $3,000, which seemed to fulfill his sense of obligation, for they stopped with a postcard that read, This is the end of the line—you should be on your feet now! And Olive was. She was on her way to becoming if not a real estate dynamo then a woman licensed and capable of selling residential, farm, and commercial properties.

  “I’ve got a showing,” became Fletcher’s least favorite words, for they meant his mother was not going to be home—not when he came home from school hungry for a snack and a sympathetic ear; not at suppertime, when the note she left for the TV dinner’s heating instructions would be the only thing at his mother’s place setting; and sometimes not when he went to bed.

  If the bullies who already picked on him didn’t know of his loneliness, they sensed something was the matter with Fletcher and cranked up the teasing to a degree that would have sent weaker victims tattling to the principal’s office. Fletcher didn’t revel in mistreatment, but at least it was some kind of attention, some nod to his existence, and so he bore the slings and arrows like a good soldier who was technically 4-F but willing to go out on the battlefield anyway.

  2

  “That couple from Vermillion wants to see the house at night,” said Olive. “If they love it as much in the p.m. as they love it in the a.m., I’ve got a sale!” She dragged the coral lipstick around her mouth and pursed her lips at Fletcher. The air was charged with her peppery scent; she mixed Old Spice with Jean Naté to make what she called her Eau de Take Me Seriously cologne.

  “There’s a pot pie in the oven,” she said, patting her helmet of hair as she limboed slightly to check her reflection in the gilt-framed hall mirror. “I’ll be eating out later with the PLC.”

  The Professional Ladies Club was a group of modern working women who got together weekly to enjoy dinner and drinks at the Rumpus Room by the Capitol building. Olive Weschel claimed her fellow members gave her support and sanity, but all Fletcher knew was that she came home from these meetings reeking of gin and giggling as she apologized to the pieces of furniture she bumped into.

  Her standard phrase as she careened into his room after a PLC night was, “Fletchie, honey, wake up and unzip your old mother.”

  Fletcher would snore to buttress his sleep act, but his mother wasn’t worried about disturbing him, weaving her way to his narrow twin bed and sitting on it so heavily the springs squealed.

  “Come on, Fletchie—help me out of this thing!” she’d say, bouncing on the bed to further rouse him.

  Fletcher would groan as if he were being pulled from a deep sleep and reach out from under his cowboy bed covers to pull down his mother’s dress zipper.

  She would sit on his bed, the back of her dress sliced open like an outer crust, revealing the soft dough that spilled over the back of her slip and bra. Fletcher could hardly breathe, afraid of his gin-smelling mother and her opened dress and the long sighs that made her round shoulders rise.

  Her final decree was always, “Aw, Fletchie, life is hard,” before she w
ould lurch off the bed and stumble out the door, holding her arms in front of her as if she couldn’t see.

  For a long time, Olive’s social life orbited only around her PLC friends.

  “I don’t know,” she told her sister Florence during their weekly long-distance telephone call. “The idea of having another man around the house sort of sickens me.”

  Seeing the disheartened look on her son’s face as he overheard that particular remark, Olive decided it might be time to devote a little extra attention to Fletcher and, willing to make great sacrifice, designated Friday as their “date nights.”

  They sat next to each other on the nubbly beige nylon couch, Pyrex bowls of popcorn nestled on their laps. Olive was the type of disinterested cook for whom TV dinners were invented, yet her popcorn was blue-ribbon. There was rarely an old maid or burnt kernel in the batch, and she was liberal with the melted butter. That Fletcher was allowed to drink cream soda out of the bottle was one more bonus to these date nights, although the big attraction was the Hollywood Late Show, which wasn’t so late, starting as it did at 10:00 p.m.

  “You can’t tell me there’s a couple that had more chemistry than Myrna Loy and William Powell,” Olive would say, as they watched The Thin Man on the RCA console.

  “I don’t know,” said Fletcher, who loved the old movies as much as his mother. “What about Fred and Ginger? Bogie and Bacall?”

  “You got me there,” she said, clinking his pop bottle with her tumbler of gin and tonic. “Gad, why was there so much glamour back then, and how do we get it back?”

  Wrapped in a chenille robe so soft and old that its ribbing was worn off at the elbows, and with her face scrubbed of all its black and coral makeup, Olive was a different woman on their movie nights. Stripped of all the scary armor that made her a PLC member, she was just his mother, and it was the easiest, most comfortable time Fletcher spent with her. They were two movie fans, enjoying the luxury of bantering back and forth without anyone in surrounding rows shushing them.

  “I think Errol Flynn is a better actor than he’s given credit for.”

  “I think you’ve got a crush on him, Mom.”

  “Well, what woman in her right mind wouldn’t?”

  “Is that Rita Hayworth?”

  “No, that’s Ann Sheridan. They do look alike, though.”

  “Bette Davis is kind of scary.”

  “Oh, hon, that’s only because she doesn’t take anyone’s baloney.”

  Their date nights ended when Fletcher was eleven and the Hollywood Late Show was cancelled and replaced with World Wide Wrestling.

  “It’s the end of the world, Fletcher,” said Olive, snapping off the television dial after they’d tuned in out of curiosity, already knowing there was no way they could summon the same enthusiasm for the Manchurian Mauler and Clyde the Crowbar as they did for Nick and Nora Charles.

  It was just as well for Olive; Nanette Dickie, a dental hygienist and founding member of the PLC, had introduced her to her brother Alden, and the two had hit it off.

  “I’m not saying I’m going to marry the guy,” Olive told Florence, “but at least he doesn’t make me want to puke.”

  After his mother left with Mr. Dickie for their first Friday night date, Fletcher went to the hall closet and put on the old fedora and raincoat his father had left behind. His chin trembled as the weight of abandonment bore down on him, but catching a glimpse of himself in the gilt-framed mirror, he knew there was no way this guy could cry. He straightened the lapels of his coat and, tipping his hat to his reflection, said, “Deke Drake, ladies man.” He gave a rakish half-smile and a wink before ambling over to the kitchen, to see if Ava Gardner or Hedy Lamarr had stopped by to make him a sandwich.

  As the years passed, Olive filled her calendar with business and social dates and Fletcher accepted his loneliness in the same way he accepted his cowlick and double-jointed thumbs. On the nights his mother was at home, she was distant, having usually drunk herself into a state a few degrees from stupor. Most often she was out showing properties, or wining and dining with the PLC or one of her boyfriends, none of whom was around the house enough for Fletcher to get to know.

  Fletcher amused himself in the empty house by saving the world from communist, nuclear, or Mafioso threat as Vince Shark, world’s craftiest spy, or riding the range that rose up in between the living and dining rooms as Hip Galloway, Texan cowboy, or by entertaining ladies, stealing jewels, and winning high-stakes Monaco roulette games as his newest alter ego, international playboy Deke Drake.

  But it was being Fletcher Weschel in the real world, where there were no governments to overthrow, no shoot-outs in which to lend a deadly, accurate aim, no Miss Kuala Lumpur to escort to after-pageant parties, that was the real challenge.

  His misery in junior high school was somewhat tempered by seeing how miserable everyone else was; when he broke out in pimples, he felt less anguished than part of the acne-spotted majority; when another boy’s voice fluctuated between bass and soprano in the span of two syllables, Fletcher wasn’t so mortified by his own oral gymnastics.

  By high school, he’d lost his baby fat but not his lowly status. He joined the only organizations that he felt comfortable in, the Audio/Visual and Chess Clubs. Members were a small band unto themselves—boys with thick glasses and out-of-date crew cuts, boys who wore white socks and buttoned the top button of their short-sleeved shirts. These boys were usually ignored and sometimes picked on as they traversed the halls, shielding themselves with their stacks of books wrapped in homemade, brown grocery bag dustcovers.

  The girls that the group attracted, when they attracted them at all, were similarly ostracized by the popular kids for the same deeply shallow reasons: they were too fat or too skinny, too homely or speech-impedimented, too brainy or too seriously involved in a pursuit that didn’t qualify as cool. (Valerie Jerde, for instance, was doubly jeopardized by virtue of her 6'1" height and her passion for the bassoon.)

  Several times a week, as a release from the prison of his lonely self-consciousness, Fletcher would drive out of town, radio blasting, stopping to get out of the car and dance in a farm field. On weekend nights, while his classmates were drinking in basement parties or out on La Framboise Island, he earned money by sitting with the ninety-four-year-old father of a PLC member. It was an easy job; Ossie Swanson slept the entire time he was there, only waking twice, and on both occasions he called Fletcher “Billings” and reminisced about the time they took their girlfriends to the Chicago World’s Fair.

  “Remember that damn Ferris wheel, Billings? First Ferris wheel in the whole G.D. world! Remember how we were going to wait until we got all the way to the top with the girls and then kiss them good, only Maude got sick and poor Annabel”—

  Mr. Swanson died in the fall of Fletcher’s senior year, never revealing the fate of poor Annabel. He didn’t know Mr. Swanson enough to mourn him, but with his weekends now free he did miss having an excuse as to why he didn’t have a social life.

  Even within his own circle, Fletcher’s presence was noted with the same interest as his absence, and it was true—in many ways Fletcher felt invisible. He had personality, even a flair, but his shyness and self-censorship kept that a secret from everyone but himself. He could be suave and witty, flirting with the ’30s and ’40s movie stars of his black-and-white fantasies, but he could not even summon a “Hi” to the local girls of the Class of ’68 who were too real, too in color. He was resigned to be the Invisible Man as far as his female classmates went—until he was invited to the Sadie Hawkins Dance by Connie Yarborough.

  “What?” he asked dully after she approached him at his locker to ask him.

  “I want to know if you’ll go to Sadie Hawkins with me.”

  “With you?” Fletcher’s conversational skills were pre-remedial.

  “Yeah. With me.” Connie Yarborough smiled, her big rectangular teeth framed by a mouth that shimmered with lip gloss.

  “I guess,” said Fletcher, a w
atered-down version of what he wanted to say, wanted to shout: Of course! Are you crazy? To the top of the world, baby!

  Sadie Hawkins was a dance modeled after the event held in comic strip Dogpatch, everyone dressing like Pappy and Mammy Yokum or Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae. Taking the boys’ burden for the night, the girls paid for the tickets and provided transportation.

  Having been resigned to the idea that she might be the only one ever dating in the family, Olive Weschel was breathless with excitement as she waited with Fletcher for Connie’s arrival.

  “I hope you gave her good directions,” she said impatiently, the ice cubes clicking as she swirled her nearly empty glass of gin.

  “Ma, Pierre’s not exactly Hong Kong. I’m sure she’ll find her way.”

  “Well, you’d be surprised how dense people can be about directions—your father, for instance, couldn’t find his way out of the garage unless he had two maps and an atlas.” Olive surveyed her son, chuckling. “Oh, just look at you—your first date and you have to dress like a hillbilly.”

  Fletcher wore tattered jeans with two pairs of suspenders and a gingham shirt Olive had patched with calico squares.

  “Maybe this spring we’ll be able to get you into a formal tux for the Senior Prom, hmm? Maybe one of those fancy powder blue ones.”

  When the doorbell rang he and his mother froze, their eyes wide, as if they’d heard gunshot.

  Olive was the first to snap out of her trance, patting her sable hair and smoothing her skirt as she headed to the door. Fletcher stared after her, the tension in his stomach tightening into a knot.

  He heard their murmured greeting, then his mother’s loud voice.

  “Fletcher, honey, your date’s here!”

  Dragging Connie in from the front hallway, Olive planted her in front of Fletcher like a gardener proud of the exotic specimen she had cultivated in her hothouse.

  Hoping his ears weren’t as red as they felt, Fletcher swallowed hard and then pulled out a dazzling conversational nugget from his repertoire. “Connie?”