Michael R Collings (12 page)

And finally said simply, “I’m getting married tomorrow, Mom.”

Like all service organizations, the Helping-Hands Club was always on the lookout for volunteers. It had to be. Cash for paying a professional staff was scarce, especially here in the San Fernando Valley where even the most reasonable-seeming rent rates were punishingly high. Even though the Helping-Hands Club inhabited part of an antiquated school closed the year before when the new high school opened a couple of miles away, the marginal break on rent offered by the Sepulveda Basin School District did little to counter the fact that electric costs were high, heating costs were high, maintenance costs were high, everything was high…except the interest of most of the people in the area.

So when the well-dressed man appeared out of a cold, grey drizzle and walked into the office at Helping-Hands late one January afternoon and asked if the club needed volunteers, Marty Franco literally jumped at the chance.

“Sure thing, Mr...?” he said, out of his seat and hurrying around the cluttered desk before the man had stopped speaking.

“Warren, Daniel Warren,” the man answered curtly.

“Hello, Mr. Warren. Marty Franco.” Marty held out his hand. The other man’s grasp was firm and warm in spite of the chill outside. Marty could feel a comfortable strength in Warren’s wrist and fingers.

“Sit down,” Marty said, pointing to the other chair in the small room. The chair was almost hidden beneath a flurry of manila folders. Warren carefully stacked the folders on the floor and sat down.

“So,” Marty said after a short silence, “what do you know about the Helping Hands?”

“Not much,” Warren admitted. “I saw an ad in the GreenSheet at a grocery store the other day. It didn’t say much, just that you’re a service club and that you work with young people. Kind of like Big Brothers, I guess.”

Marty grinned. He’d written that ad himself. Nice to see that it was pulling in some responses. “That’s pretty close. We handle maybe forty kids at a time here, mostly kids with no fathers who need to be around a man some of the time. You know. Bonding. Role model. Like that.”

Warren nodded.

“We’re not a day-care center or anything. We run limited hours, but we do post a pretty good schedule of activities. Basketball, swimming, baseball. Some weekend hikes and camping trips. That sort of thing.”

Again Warren nodded.

“And of course we appreciate any help we can get. Most of our funding is through private donations. We know that our volunteers are doing a lot just by being here, but sometimes it helps if....”

“I understand. I have no family myself and I make a pretty good living. I’m willing to cover some costs where necessary.”

Marty broke out into an even wider grin, relieved that
that
hurdle had been successfully negotiated. “Well, Mr. Warren, then if you’ll fill out these forms, we can get started.”

He handed a sheaf of papers to Daniel, who skimmed through them before removing his pen from an inside jacket pocket. The form looked like fairly standard stuff. Name, address, age, marital status. Occupation. References. General backgrounds.

He began writing.

Three weeks later, Daniel Warren met Miles Stanton for the first time.

During an impromptu basketball game pitting four adult volunteers against half a dozen pre-teenagers (who severely and definitively trounced the old-timers), Daniel first noticed the skinny kid sitting alone on the sidelines, elbows propped on bony knees. Once or twice, he had even waved for the kid to come over and play, but the boy had just stared ahead as if the game, the other kids, Daniel himself simply didn’t exist. As if the wall opposite didn’t exist and he could see clear through it to the Santa Monica mountains and beyond.

After the game, while the others were heading sweating and laughing into the shower room to clean up and change, Marty entered the gym and, standing by the boy, motioned Daniel over.

“Daniel, I’d like you to meet a new fellow here at Helping Hands. Miles, this is Mr. Warren. Daniel, meet Miles Stanton.”

At a nudge from Marty, the boy stood. He seemed even skinnier standing up. His basketball jersey was at least two sizes too large for his shoulders and chest and threatened to engulf him. His baggy shorts hung well past his knees, as full as if the boy were wearing a skirt.

Daniel stifled a smile, leaned down stiffly, and solemnly shook hands with the boy. At least now the boy—
Miles
, Daniel reminded himself—was looking up at Daniel, but he still seemed no more interested in the man towering over him than he had been in the basketball game.

“This is Miles’ first evening here, Daniel,” Marty said by means of explanation.

Daniel noted that the man spoke about the boy as if the kid were not present. The fact grated on him. He squatted down until his eyes were level with the kid’s. He heard his knees cracking; as always, he hated such physical reminders that his body was growing older.

“Hey, Miles,” he said, smiling and watching for any flicker of interest in the kid’s grey eyes. “You like basketball?”

Nothing.

“How about baseball?”

Still nothing.

Daniel glanced up at Marty. The other man shrugged, as if to say sometimes it takes a while, don’t give up, just keep trying and something will break.

Daniel pulled away a bit and examined the boy. He looked to be about ten, perhaps an inch or two taller than average, thin but certainly not malnourished. His light brown hair was unruly but had been recently trimmed. His eyes still seemed empty, though.

“How about swimming? Do you like swimming?”

There...finally, there was something.

The boy glanced up, for an instant his face a flash of eagerness. Then, as if afraid that he had given himself away, and that by doing so he had lost any chance of ever going swimming again, he looked down to the floor. His thin shoulders rose, lowered in a shrug.

But Daniel had caught the glimmer of interest. He swiveled around until he was sitting on the bench next to the boy. He was sweaty from the basketball game. His T-shirt clung clammily to his back and the nylon of his sweat-stained shorts felt sticky and uncomfortable. But he sat there for a few moments anyway.

Finally he glanced up at Marty and nodded. I’ll take it from here, the gesture said. Marty left.

“I liked swimming a lot when I was your age,” Daniel continued, as if there had been no break in the one-sided conversation. “But I didn’t get to go very much. We lived in Maine and it was pretty cold most of the year. And we didn’t have heated pools back then. My mother didn’t let me swimming out much—she was always afraid I’d get polio or something from the water.”

The boy looked at him questioningly.

“Polio,” Daniel said, “that was a real kid-killer when my Mom was younger. They had a vaccine for it by the time I was born, but Mom still worried. You know how Moms are.”

The boy nodded gravely.

“Anyway,” Daniel continued, “sometimes I would sneak away to a creek a couple of miles away and my buddies and me would strip down and go skinny-dipping. It was great.

“Now I can swim anytime I want, though. There’s a great pool back there.” He gestured to the doorway that led through the changing room and from there to an indoor pool.

The boy stared at the floor.

“Want to try it?”

Again, there was a slight movement.

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m going to go in for a swim. We just played a hot, tiring game, and a cool dip sounds perfect right now.” He stood and walked a few steps toward the changing room. “Come on if you want.”

Daniel didn’t bother to look back, but by the time he entered the changing room, he could hear the boy’s soft tread only a few steps behind him. Daniel reached into an open cabinet just inside the door and pulled out a suit. Boy’s medium. He tossed it to the kid. The kid caught it with one hand, his fingers snapping like small wires around the fabric.

“You guys change over there.” He pointed to a partitioned section of the changing room. “We older guys have to use that side. Meet you right here as soon as you’re dressed.” He grinned at Miles, and for the first time Miles grinned back. It was fleeting, but it was an authentic grin.

“Okay.” The kid’s voice was a little deeper than Daniel had expected. “Okay...Mr. Warren.” He disappeared around the partition, already tugging at his jersey top.

Daniel went to his locker on the adults-only side of the partition and changed into his trunks. He moved quickly, stuffing damp gym shorts, T-shirt, and socks into the basket at the bottom of the locker, then slamming the door and spinning the combination. He grabbed his towel from the bench and hurried back to the center of the room.

The boy was already there waiting. He looked even thinner in the trunks, which were large on him, barely hanging on his narrow hips, it seemed, and so full in the legs that they made Miles look as if he were perched on two knobby stilts instead of on legs. But the kid was still smiling, and in his eyes Daniel saw intelligence, eagerness, and interest.

“Come on, Miles. Last one in’s a rotten egg.”

They swam for nearly an hour, doing laps at first, then just horsing around in the water, ducking and splashing each other and playing a kind of two-man tag in which Daniel always seemed to be ‘it’, leaping in the water and trying to tackle Daniel, who would twist and spin and swivel away. To Miles, it seemed like only moments before Marty came in to yell at them through the noise that Miles’ mother was waiting in the foyer to pick him up.

3
.

By the end of February, Miles Stanton and Daniel Warren were officially partners at the Helping-Hands. They swam together for at least an hour two or three times a week. They played basketball and racquetball and handball. They went on an all-day field trip to the L.A. Zoo on one Saturday that was unseasonably warm and too perfectly glorious not to be doing something outside. They had shared hamburgers and fries at McDonalds and pizza with everything at Straw Hat.

And sometime during that interval, Daniel Warren had met Miles’ mother, Elayne.

Divorced for eight years, Elayne was bright, vivacious, intelligent, witty. And beautiful. Once free from a husband who had turned alcoholic and vicious at the same time, she had struggled hard to provide for her son and herself, and had done a remarkable job. She had waitressed at half a dozen restaurants, sometimes working two shifts to bring back enough money to keep their small household going. She had taught Miles self-reliance and responsibility—he had to have both in unusual concentrations, she knew from the beginning, because sometimes she had to be gone for hours at a time, even when he was only seven or eight years old.

He was self-reliant and responsible, all right. He also had no friends to speak of. He preferred staying in the apartment and reading or watching TV to rough-housing with other guys his age. Guys who had Dads that blustered through the door in the evenings and gave them hugs and tickles and took them neat places. Guys who had Moms that baked cakes and cookies and played games with them when it was too rainy to play outside or when they didn’t feel good.

In spite of Elayne’s best efforts to be both a Mom and a Dad, Miles effectively had neither
.
He was a true latchkey kid, and he responded to his enforced isolation by withdrawing into his own world of imagination. It was safer there than on the outside. No one could hurt you there.

For a long while, Elayne Stanton wasn’t particularly aware of how withdrawn her son was becoming. When she did finally notice, she didn’t know quite what to do. She was working double shifts again—the rent had spiraled another $75 a month, and the car was making funny noises that in her limited experience with mechanics usually translated into major bucks, and Miles was starting to outgrow his clothes almost before she could get them home from the store. He needed help, she realized, but she couldn’t give it to him.

Then, just after Christmas the previous year, she heard about Helping Hands. She checked it out, was pleased with what she saw, and decided that the Club might be just the thing for Miles. But it took a while for her to convince Miles to leave the apartment and try it out

When he went into the Helping-Hands building that first afternoon, his eyes were fixed on the ground and his shoulders were slumped so much that it looked like his raincoat would slide right off and lay in a bright orange puddle at his feet. To Elayne’s worried mother-eyes, he didn’t look like a little boy on his way to an exciting afternoon of male bonding; he looked like a condemned prisoner on his way to be involuntary guest of honor at an electrocution.

When he came out that night, though, everything had changed. His hair curled damp and tousled against his head. His cheeks flushed red with excitement. His eyes snapped with an electricity that she could not remember ever having seen before. And all he could talk about was Daniel Warren.

Daniel did this. Daniel did that. Daniel said this. And Daniel said that. Miles chattered so constantly about Daniel Warren that by the time they entered their tiny apartment that night, Elayne had both a headache and an frighteningly yearning desire to meet this man who had so abruptly become the solitary focus of her child’s universe.

Elayne met Daniel for the first time two weeks later. They had their first official date in the middle of March—they took Miles to a dollar-a-car drive-in to see
Home Alone
. Even though it was raining so hard that neither of them could see through the front window, and Miles fell asleep fifteen minutes into the film, they counted the date a huge success.

And a week after Daniel Warren’s thirty-second birthday, accompanied to the Chapel of the Roses in Las Vegas only by Miles and by a still stunned Amanda Warren, Daniel and Elayne were married.

The new family lived for another couple of weeks in Daniel’s apartment, but it had been clear from the beginning that that arrangement was only temporary. The apartment was spacious enough, but there was only one bedroom, and even though Miles insisted repeatedly that he thought sleeping in the living room on Daniel’s overstuffed sofa was “real cool,” both Daniel and Elayne realized that the boy needed a home, a
real
home.