Los Angeles Noir - Denise Hamilton [110]
I was surprised when she married Manny. He’d gone to UCLA and worked as a youth counselor while majoring in Social Work. The idea that an awkward man like him could help “at-risk youth” was a joke, I can tell you from my vantage point—they needed the mentoring of someone they could relate to, someone who had gone down that road and been pulled back by a guiding hand. It didn’t seem to work out, because not long after they had Emerson, he quit—or lost?—his job to become a stay-at-home dad.
We’re keeping Emerson at home for a while, Veronica told me when he was old enough to enter kindergarten; she worked as the manager of a popular Mexican chain restaurant. We’re a bit worried about the other kids, she said.
He’s going to have to deal with school sometime, I said.
I know, she said, But he’s still a bit behind.
As if he’ll ever fully catch up, I thought. But every time I came over, the kid laughed at my face, grabbed his walker, and hurried my way, clattering that metal contraption across the floor and slamming against banged-up furniture and walls in the process.
Tito Tomas! he’d scream, laughing.
Hey, sunshine, let’s go out for a walk, I’d say, grabbing him and lifting him into a bear hug.
Veronica had stopped taking Emerson out to the playground, because he couldn’t keep up with the energetic activities and ended up alone. And she resented the stares of the mothers and nannies, the other children especially. Manny, to his credit, believed this to be wrong. He insisted on dragging Emerson out to the parks and malls. He insisted that other people were fucked up to stare. They argued over it. She’d search the neighborhood to find him. They screamed at each other in public.
Manny tried to make Emerson use his walker everywhere. The neurologists and PTs told them it would keep his muscles stretched. But Emerson refused. He threw tantrums at malls, dropped down to his knees and cried, drawing the stares of passersby who looked at Veronica as if she were abusing her disabled child.
Go on, leave us, I would tell her. Go shopping.
She’d hesitate but walk away, letting me kneel down beside her boy. I’d smell his sweaty, musty hair. I cherished his boy-smell, these sweet moments, the joy and sorrow I drew from these fleeting seconds of male bonding of which I wanted more. I would whisper in his ear, make him laugh, coax him with promises of ice cream—and have him using his walker in no time.
He let me take him to Douglas Park, played on the slides and swings, tossed bread at the ducks in the pond, walked over grass. The park had changed since I was a kid. Gabe and Veronica and I used to wade through dirty pond water, catching tiny frogs and tadpoles in the reeds. Now the pond had been converted into a fancy Japanese water garden, complete with babbling streams, wooden benches, landscaped boulders. Even the ducks looked cleaner. The kid’s play area had new bright play equipment, handicap accessible, and the mothers seemed different now, too. Thinner, more stylish.
Manny resented my ease with Emerson. The boy let me take him to the basketball court across the street from St. Dominic’s after Sunday mass. Manny watched with jealousy as Emerson used his walker on the crowded court, without shame or self-consciousness, and let the black teenagers lift him up to dunk the ball.
Nothing I did was good enough for that chump. After I got saved and became a youth minister at an evangelical strip-mall church in Culver City—where I ran the boys’ club, as well as addiction recovery groups—you’d have thought he’d come round to me. But he never did.
I drove my truck up to their apartment complex and started circling the block, looking for a parking