AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Let me explain,” said his mother.
“You said I didn’t have to go to Dad’s until August!” the boy cried. “Why is Reggie here?”
“There’s been a change of plans,” the mother said. Her facial expression was comforting, almost pitying, and he knew she was about to deliver bad news. Putting an arm around her son’s shoulder, she led him to the living room, where she sat down on the couch and gestured for him to sit beside her. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you sooner,” she said, “but I knew how upset you’d be, so I kept putting it off and putting it off and then suddenly I woke up and it was today...”
She trailed off. The boy had no idea what she was talking about, and frankly, he didn’t care. As long as one thing was clear.
“I’ll be back in time for the first football practice, right?” he asked.
“You’re going to have to stay at your dad’s until September. But you’ll be back in time for the first day of school.”
The boy had never been away from home for more than two weeks. And this was supposed to be the most important summer of his life, the one that would lead to his first kiss and being scouted by NFL teams from all over the country. Instead, he was going to be spending it at his neglectful father’s obnoxious Manhattan penthouse being inadequately parented by disinterested servants. Was this some kind of cruel joke?
“Mom,” the boy protested, his voice cracking, “don’t make me go. Please, please, please don’t make me go.”
“Believe me, I don’t want this any more than you do,” the mother said. “But it’s out of my control. I’m sorry.”
“Mom—”
She wrapped her arms around the boy before he could utter another word. “You’ll be back in time for school,” she said. “The summer will be over before you know it.”
“Why do I have to go?” the boy said, now full-out bawling.
She didn’t answer, just continued hugging him, rocking him in her arms like a four year old until he was all cried out. “We’ll be together soon,” the mother said. “I promise.”
It was the longest, most miserable two months of my life. The New York City summer was hot and disgusting and I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere by myself, not even the park. I had a dedicated nanny, but believe me, she was no Mary Poppins. She was eighty years old if she was a day, and the only song she ever sang was some tribute to Charles McCarthy in A-minor.
Every Tuesday and Friday at around nine p.m., my father would pop his head in my bedroom door and say, “How’s it going, son?” I would say, “Okay.” He would say, “Glad to hear it.” And then our biweekly father-son bonding ritual was mercifully over, not to be suffered again for three or four more days. But all that—the absent father, the ever-present helicopter nanny, the total lack of freedom—all that was bearable. Boring, embarrassing, and frustrating, but bearable.
What I couldn’t bear was the loneliness. I missed my friends. I missed my would-be first girlfriend. I missed my bedroom, and I missed being able to ride my bike down the block without a bodyguard. But mostly, I missed my mom. She was the antithesis of Dad. When she asked how I was doing, she actually wanted to hear details. There was no limit to how long she could sit at the kitchen table and listen to me rattle on about school and bikes and baseball and what my plans were for next Halloween.
In short, my thirteenth summer was the summer I realized I had it good. That was the summer when I finally understood why my mom chose to live in a fifteen-hundred-square-foot house in small town America when her portion of the divorce settlement could have easily bought her a million-dollar McMansion in Snobsville, USA. It was because she knew something that I was just beginning to understand: less is more. When it comes to the important things, anyway. My dad had anything and everything money could buy. Or should I say, anyone and everyone money could buy. He surrounded himself with obsequious employees and adoring lady friends, not a single one of whom could actually stand him. As far as I could tell, there were only three people on earth who had ever actually loved my father—his mom, my mom, and me. But he’d alienated his own mother to the point where she couldn’t stand him, dumped his wife the minute his net worth hit ten million, and spoke a sum total of about three hundred words a year to his son. He’d thrown away everything truly worth having, all in service of his voracious ego.
That whole summer, I longed to get back to less. I didn’t want any more behind-home-plate seats at Yankee Stadium. I just wanted to play catch in the middle of the street with my buddies. I didn’t want any more hundred-dollar entrees at restaurants whose names I couldn’t pronounce. I just wanted to barbeque hotdogs in the backyard and then feed them to the neighbor’s dog through the chain-link fence. But mostly, I didn’t want to listen to any more paid servants telling me what a smart and handsome boy I was. I just wanted to sit on the couch with my mom on a Friday night and eat gummy worms and watchSpongeBoband then make her promise not to tell anyone that my favorite thing to do on a Friday night was sit on the couch with my mom eating gummy worms and watchingSpongeBob.
I wanted to get back to less. But less was in a little red house on a cul-de-sac hundreds of miles away, and for reasons no one would explain, my mother was only calling once a week. And at completely random and unpredictable times. Seven o’clock on a Sunday morning. Then Friday night at nine. And even then, our calls only lasted about five minutes. And most of that time was just me begging her to come get me, and her replying,Soon, Ian, soon.
But soon never came.
It was a Tuesday in late August at about one o’clock in the morning when I felt a hand shaking my shoulder.
“Ian, wake up, we have to leave right now.”
I rolled over onto my back, squinting. “Dad?” It was the first time he’d ever stepped foot into my palatial bedroom. “What’s going on?”
“Just hurry up and get dressed. We’re leaving in five minutes.”
Sitting up, I rubbed my sleepy eyes. “Leaving for where?”
“I’ll explain in the car. Hurry, we don’t have much time.”
Five minutes later, Reggie was pulling up in the Mercedes. When he got out of the car, I presumed he was going to open the door for me. But instead, he hurriedly tossed the keys to my father, who took the driver’s seat.
Something was wrong. My father never drove himself anywhere. But as he cruised up the Henry Hudson Parkway at an unholy speed, I finally woke up enough to start processing other weirdnesses. Dad was wearing a pair of pajama pants, a T-shirt, and sneakers. His lower lip was quivering, his hands trembling on the wheel. For my all-about-image father to risk being seen driving his own car in pajamas, his perfect hair uncombed and his perfect feet un-Ferragamoed, it had to be really, really bad.
My first thought was that we were on the run. Every time my disgusted grandmother visited Dad’s penthouse, the first words out of her mouth were “It’s just a matter of time until they come and get you,” so I thought the FBI or IRS or some other scary three-letter federal agency had finally caught on to whatever Dad had done to make himself so rich. I truly believed that the SEC was swarming the front of his building with guns drawn saying, “Daniel Dunning, come out with your hands up!”
Yes, I thought Alan Greenspan had a gun.
