The first chapter from the novel, Around the Block
By Susan Wilinski

CHAPTER 1

It was one of those spring evenings when it’s not quite dark yet. The daylight can’t fight its way through the gray sky because the clouds will unleash a torment of rain any second. The wind bites my skin, but the chill seeping through to my bones isn’t taking my mind off the emptiness in my stomach. To say my stomach is growling is an understatement. A fully-formed, guttural roar is much more accurate.

I haven’t eaten anything but bread and butter in three days, once a day. The loaf of bread my mother bought on Saturday has to last us all week. I’m tired, but my mother and I are making our third trip around the block. She tells me that if we keep walking, I’ll forget that I’m hungry. I’ve been through this drill before, and I know it doesn’t work. But it makes my mother feel like she’s helping me, so I try to keep up with her longer and faster strides through our neighborhood.

As we pass the coffee shop on the corner of Hillside and Main, I try not to look inside. But my eyes, tempted by my nose, have a will of their own. My mother and I round the corner on the start of our fourth lap of our “hunger hike”. I see the patrons at the counter, sipping hot beverages and enjoying an assortment of pies and cakes which no doubt is the finale to a hot supper of meatloaf or chicken pot pie.

I want to join them, but it’s impossible. My mother’s wallet is as empty as our stomachs. We’ll return to our tiny apartment. I’ll drink another glass of water to try to fill my empty belly before making my bed on the couch in the living room. As I fall asleep to the noises erupting from my stomach, I dream of the corner coffee shop. I see two people at the counter, their shoulders moving with the sound of their laughter between bites. One turns to look out the window after they finish their suppers and order dessert.

I’m looking at my father. He’s smiling until he sees me spying on his feast. He rises from the counter stool, grabs his coat and tells his friend he must go, that he has people waiting for him. I can’t keep the smile from forming on my face. This is it, I think. He’s going to come home and take care of us and we won’t be hungry anymore. My mother will fix a meal, a real meal, with a roasted chicken topped with gravy and filled with the best stuffing anyone has ever tasted. There will be mashed potatoes covered with melted butter and even the vegetables I hate, but will eat anyway. My father walks through the coffee shop’s door, and as the bell that hangs over the door rings, he reaches inside his wallet. I think he must be looking for his key to the apartment, forgetting that he left it on the kitchen table when he left three months ago. Instead, he removes a one dollar bill from the billfold and hands it to me.

“Give this to your mother, son,” he says as he steps onto the bus that has pulled up to the corner. “Go on home now, she must be waiting for you.”

The bus pulls away from the corner and heads to some town in New York state. He doesn’t look out the window for a last glimpse at his son standing in front of the coffee shop. He doesn’t know or care that it’s him she is waiting for, not me. That we’ve been waiting for his return for weeks.

When I get to school the next morning, the bell has rung and I see my friends entering the building. I run to catch up with them, stepping into stride as we walk to homeroom. They go in before me. My teacher, Mr. Umland, stops me just outside the door.

“Ron, you’re wanted in the guidance office,” Mr. Umland says, with a look of concern. I must be in trouble.

“What did I do?” I ask, my nerves tensing.

“Nothing that I know of,” Mr. Umland assures me. “I don’t know why Mrs. Dane wants to see you. Don’t worry, I’m sure everything’s fine.”

Everything is most certainly not fine. You’re never called to the guidance office unless something’s wrong. John Fischer was called down last week and was told he was failing two classes. Mrs. Dane said that if he didn’t pull up his grades to a D in the next two months, he wouldn’t be moving up with the rest of us to middle school.

Crap! What did I do? My grades are all A’s and B’s. I haven’t gotten into any trouble during recess. As I reach Mrs. Dane’s office, I realize my palms are sweaty.

I knock on the door very lightly.

“Come in,” Mrs. Dane calls in a bit of a sing-song tone.

I open the door, and there she is behind her desk. She’s ancient. My friends and I try to guess her age, but it’s impossible. Her gray hair is pretty short and always pushed behind her ears. Wrinkles line her face like a road map, and her black rimmed glasses hang at the end of her nose. The excess flesh of her arms swings back and forth anytime she moves to shake your hand. She looks like a grandmother.

“Ronald, please come in,” she says. Mrs. Dane has this annoying habit of calling every kid in school by his or her proper name. No one, not even my mother, calls me Ronald. The only person who doesn’t mind is the Spanish kid who lives down the street from me. We all call him Iggy, although his full name is Ignacio. When we were in the lower grades, the big kids would give him a knock on the side of the head and call him “Ignasty-o”. So, in his case, I can see why he prefers being called by his proper name.

“Please, sit down,” Mrs. Dane says. “I need to discuss something with you.”

“What did I do?” I ask her. I figure a preemptive attack is the way to go. At least this way, I can show her that I’m already sorry for whatever I did.

“Oh, nothing, dear. It’s just that Mrs. Langley, the cafeteria assistant, has brought something to my attention,” Mrs. Dane explains.

Great. I know where this is headed.

“She tells me that you have not been eating lunch at all for the past couple of weeks. When she asked you about it, you told her you were getting ready for basketball tryouts at the middle school,” she says.

“Yeah,” is all I can muster. My mind is not working fast enough to come up with something believable. Mrs. Dane has caught me by surprise this morning. I didn’t think anyone was paying any attention to my eating habits.

“Well, I happen to know that basketball tryouts don’t start until you get into school. It’s only the fall sports that hold tryouts before the year begins, and even those don’t start until the end of the summer,” Mrs. Dane tells me.

Crap! Why didn’t I think of that before giving old Mrs. Langley that excuse?

“Ronald, what is going on?” she finally asks.

What do I say? Do I tell her the humiliating truth, or do I make something up?

“It’s nothing, Mrs. Dane. See, I took in a stray cat a couple of weeks ago. Well, not took in exactly. More like adopted on the outside. He’s really nice, but really skinny. My mother said I couldn’t keep him, because she didn’t want the hair and the smell of a cat box in the apartment. But I couldn’t let him starve to death. So, when she makes my lunch, I leave it in a bowl at the back of the apartment building. My mother is big on making tuna sandwiches, so it’s working out for him,” I say.

Mrs. Dane stares at me for a moment, and I’m sure that I’ve been caught in my lies. But if I tell her the truth, it will lead to a whole mess of problems. She’ll want to call my mother. My mother would have to tell her that my father walked out on us over three months ago. She would have to tell Mrs. Dane that she wants to get a job of her own, but that she can’t even get out of bed most days because she’s so sad.

Then what? Maybe the school will want to take me away from my mother and put me in one of those foster homes. Jimmy Connell’s dad walked out on his family last year when he met a waitress at the bar he used to go to every night. The last place they could track the two of them down was in some small Florida town. He never sent his family any money, either. The school found out about it because Jimmy and his brother Bobby came to school one day with holes so big in their shoes they had to go to the nurse because they thought their toes had frostbite. The next thing we heard was that the school got someone to take Jimmy and Bobby away from their mother and now they live in Nutley in a house with two other foster kids. We haven’t seen them since.

Now I sit squared off with Mrs. Dane. It’s a fifty-fifty chance that she’ll buy my story, hook, line and sinker.

“Well, Ronald, I don’t know what to say,” Mrs. Dane looks at me over her glasses. “That’s quite a story.”

Uh-oh.

“May I suggest you leave only a portion of your lunch for this cat?” she asks.

Whew!

“That’s a good idea, Mrs. Dane. It’s just that I felt so sorry for him. He was just so skinny,” I offer.

“It’s very admirable, but you need your nutrition, too,” she says with a smile forming on her face. “I know it’s hard to see an animal suffering. I love cats myself. You can go back to class. And remember, no more feeding the cat your whole lunch! I am giving you 50 cents for a hot lunch today. I will let Mrs. Langley know that we have talked.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I answer, heading out her door.

That was a close one.

When I get home, the apartment smells like lemons, all the windows are open and music is coming from the radio in the kitchen. For a brief moment, I wonder if I’m in the right place.

Cleaning supplies sit in a bucket on the kitchen floor. I pass through the short hallway and find my mother in her room, actually making her bed. I don’t think I have seen a bedspread pulled up over the pillows since my father left.

“Mom?”

“Honey! You’re home! I am so glad!” she says, rushing at me with her arms wide open. She embraces me, squeezing hard, while my arms remain at my sides.

“Mom, what’s going on?” I ask, afraid of what she’ll say. For the past three months, my mother’s been like a zombie. Some mornings, she’d get up to see me off. Others, I would have to go into her room and tell her I was leaving for school. On those mornings, I was never sure if she heard me leave.

“Ronny! The most wonderful thing happened after you left this morning! Your father called!” she practically yells, her grip tightening on my shoulders.

“What?”

“He called! He said that he wanted to talk and that he would come over tonight at 5:00. He said he would take us to the coffee shop for supper! Isn’t this wonderful?” she asks me, her eyes searching mine for the same excitement she’s feeling.

I know I should be happy, but my stomach tightens along with my mother’s grip on my shoulders. Something is holding me back from feeling anything but nervous. After all, I have not so much as said one word to my father in twelve weeks, three days and seventeen and a half hours. He left before I woke up in the morning for school. He didn’t even say goodbye. I went to bed one night after saying goodnight to him and woke up the next morning to find all of his clothes gone from his bedroom and his shaving kit missing from the bathroom. Since that morning, my mother had tried to ease the shock by saying he didn’t want to upset me. That he thought it would be easier to slip out quietly without a scene, and it was easier. For him.

“Mom, what exactly did Dad say?” I ask, unsure that she has the information correct. Did he even call at all? Or has my mother finally cracked under the pressure?

“Ronny, I already told you. Your father called this morning and said to me that he really needed to talk to us both. He said that he would be here at dinnertime, 5:00, and would take us out to eat up at the corner.”

“Mom, maybe you should go to supper with him by yourself. You probably want to be alone with him and have time to talk,” I say, hoping to avoid the discomfort that a supper in a restaurant with a man I hardly know and haven’t seen in months would surely cause.

“No, Ronny, you should come, too. After all, he is your father, and you haven’t seen him in so long,” my mother replies.

“But, don’t you want to go out, just the two of you?” I try again.

“There will be plenty of time for that when he moves back in. No, you should definitely come. Please put on some clean clothes and wash up when I am done in the bathroom, okay? I want you to look your best for him,” my mother insists.

“Why? It’s just the coffee shop. No need to get all fancy,” I say to her back as she heads to the bathroom.

“Please, Ronny, just do as I ask,” she says as she closes the door.

I wait for my turn to use the bathroom.

Three hours later, at 6:00, we are both waiting for the doorbell to ring.

My father is now an hour late, and I am beginning to wonder if he will show up at all. My mother alternates between sitting next to me on the couch and getting up to tidy the already tidied apartment. She’s nervous and so am I.

Just as I am about to suggest that my mother make some tea to keep her busy, the doorbell sounds. This is it. She looks at me, then at the door, then back at me. My eyebrows lift with the shrug of my shoulders. What have we got left to lose? My mother, who I thought would have pounced on the door by now, only tentatively makes her way through the hallway and opens the door.

“Hello, Marie,” he says in his usual stern voice. “How are you?” he asks as he brushes past her and walks into the living room.

My mother looks after him before realizing she needs to shut the door. She turns around and says, “I am just fine now,” with a huge smile on her face.

“Ronny,” is all he says to me, as he extends his hand for me to shake. This is new. We barely touched at all before. Never a hug or even a clap on the shoulder. I look at his hand for a moment almost as if I’ve never seen one before. Finally, I take it. He gives it a hard shake.

“Hi, Dad. Welcome home,” I muster. It’s important to make him feel welcome. I don’t want to be the reason he doesn’t want to stay this time. I must have done something pretty bad last time because he didn’t even say goodbye to me. I have to make him want to stay.

“Uh, thanks,” he says, turning to face my mother. “Marie, shall we go?”

“That sounds like a grand idea. Come on, Ronny, let’s not keep your father waiting. He must be hungry,” she says to me.

“Marie, I thought we could go alone this time. You don’t mind, do you, son?” he asks me.

I’m used to not eating anything for supper by now. “No, Dad, that’s fine,” I tell him.

“Martin, don’t be silly. Ronny has to eat, too,” my mother protests. At this point, I’m sure that she wants me there to act as a buffer.

“Marie, please. I really need to talk to you and I would like to do it without an audience. The coffee shop has takeout,” he says.

“Of course they do, darling. I’m sorry. Ronny, we’ll bring back a cheeseburger with some French fried potatoes, okay?” she asks me, clearly worried that she has upset my father.

“Sure, Mom, that’s fine,” I say to ease her anxiety.

My father moves toward me again, and instinctively, I move back a little bit before realizing that he wants to shake my hand again.

“You’re a good boy, Ronny. Have you finished your homework?” he inquires.

He’s joking, right? After three months, he’s going to ask if my homework’s done? Shouldn’t he be asking me what I’ve been eating?

“It’s done,” I say without much enthusiasm.

“Good job, son. Now don’t cause any trouble here, all right?”

“I won’t,” I assure them both.

Turning around once more before walking out the door, my mother looks into my eyes and shrugs her shoulders as if to say, “Here goes nothing.” I smile at her and hope that it gives her the encouragement she is seeking. After the door closes, I turn to the radio, switch it on and listen to “The Lone Ranger.” Although it’s my favorite, the irony of the name is not lost on me as I sit in this apartment alone with no supper. I am the Lone Ranger.

I’m startled out of sleep by the people next door. They’re forever slamming their apartment door shut both coming and going. It’s very annoying.

I look around, momentarily disoriented, before realizing that I fell asleep listening to the radio. It’s already dark outside, so it must be at least 9:00.

Where are my parents? If they just went up to the corner for something to eat, they should’ve been back. I fully expected my mother to be back here making tea for him by now. I get up to turn on the lights in the living room, still a little groggy. I feel queasy. My father left us once and I suppose it’s in him to do it again. Only this time, what if my mother decided that she can’t live without him and left also?

I run to the door and don’t even realize that I’ve left it wide open as I practically slide down the apartment building’s staircase. I need to get to the coffee shop as soon as possible to see what’s going on.

At the bottom of the stairs, I trip over my mother who’s sitting on the small stoop outside the building.

“Mom! Are you okay?” I ask, getting up from the ground and squatting down in front of her. She doesn’t look so good. She has that faraway look in her eyes, and they are all puffy and swollen. She’s been crying. This is not a good sign.

“Ronny?” is all she says in reply.

“Mom! What’s wrong? What happened? Where’s Dad?” I bombard her with questions, shaking her shoulders ever so lightly. I need to know what’s going on.

“Ronny. I’m sorry I didn’t bring this to you,” she says, handing me a brown paper bag that I can tell has my cheeseburger in it from the smell. “You must be hungry,” she adds, rising, turning her back to me and heading for our apartment.

I stand there for a minute unsure of what to do. Do I follow her? Or do I go to the coffee shop and see what’s going on with my father?

My mother is on the top step and heads for our open apartment when I snap to and follow her.

“Mom! Are you all right?” I call to her as I take the steps two at a time.

I close the door behind me and continue following my mother into her bedroom. She is taking off the clip-on earrings she wore tonight. My father gave them to her for Christmas last year, a few months before he split.

“Mom?”

“Oh, Ronny. Are you going to eat your dinner? I can put it on a plate and warm it up in the oven for a few minutes if you like,” she offers.

“No, Mom, just tell me what’s going on. Where is Dad? When will he be home?” I persist.

“Well, it would seem that your father has decided to move to New York state permanently,” she says with a little bit of huff in her tone of voice.

“What do you mean, permanently?”

“He has decided to start over with Lee, a woman who works at the reception desk at the phone company. Apparently, now that she has your father to support her, she has quit her job and they are moving in with her parents until your father finds a new job in New York,” my mother explains, the anger now replacing the tears. And she should be angry. I met this woman, this Lee. My father took me to the office one afternoon last year as part of a school project. We had to write about our fathers’ careers, so he actually agreed to take me to his Newark office to show me around.

And there she was, the first thing you see as you walk through the doors. My mother, who just celebrated her 41st birthday, was obviously older than this lady. She had red hair that was pulled back with a green scarf, and had very long nails that were painted red. On the day that I showed up, she was wearing a very tight green sweater tucked into an equally tight green skirt. When she came out from behind the reception desk to greet me, with entirely too much enthusiasm for someone I don’t know, I thought she would fall flat on her face because her heels looked like they could be a weapon.

She didn’t fall though, much to my disappointment. Instead, she threw her arms wide open and gave me such a tight hug I thought I would suffocate. Or was that from the strength of her perfume? Either way, it was weird. I mean, who was this woman and why was she treating me as if we were best friends?

Well, now it was obvious. She knew she would be taking my mother’s place in my father’s life, and now she was hoping to take her place in mine as well.

“Mom, I’m so sorry he’s doing this. He’ll regret it and move back,” I said, not really believing my own words, but trying to give my mother some hope.

“No, Ronny, he won’t,” she says as she turns from the mirror, looks me in the eyes and takes my hands in hers. “She’s having a baby.”

Ah, so that’s it, I think as I pull my hands from my mother’s and sit on her bed.

I’m the one being replaced.