to agree.”
“She should agree.”
“It’ll happen just the same. Anyway, when marriages fall apart, some people sometimes get bitter, they get very angry.”
“Not my mom.”
“No, not her. But sometimes people can get so angry, they do foolish things. Sometimes the fight in court is about the children, one of them trying to punish the other by taking away the children.”
Alarmed, I halted. “But you said he doesn’t want me. And if he does, he can’t have me. I won’t go. Never.”
Grandpa Teddy put a hand on my shoulder. “Don’t worry, son. No judge in this city would take you away from a woman like Sylvia and give you to your father.”
“Really? You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. And he says he doesn’t want you, but he’s a man who says all kinds of things he doesn’t entirely mean. Sometimes people do reckless things, Jonah, they don’t want to leave it to a court, they take matters into their own hands.”
“Could he do that? How would he do that?”
We had walked almost to Saint Stanislaus, and Grandpa said, “Let’s rest a bit on the church steps there.”
We sat side by side on the steps, and he took a pack of Juicy Fruit gum from a pocket and offered me a stick, but I was too scared to want any. Maybe he was a little scared, too, because he didn’t want any chewing gum, either, and he returned the pack to his pocket.
“Let’s say you’re walking home from the community center one day, and your father pulls to the curb in a car and wants to take you somewhere. What should you do?”
“Where would he want to take me?”
“Let’s say it was somewhere you’d like to go, maybe to a movie or for a milk shake.”
“He wouldn’t take me anywhere like that. He never did before.”
“Well, maybe he wants to make things right with you, apologize for things he’s done by taking you out for some fun.”
“Would he? I don’t think he would.”
“He might. He might even have a present for you, wrapped and on the passenger seat. You’d just have to get in the car and unwrap it while you go to the movie or for that milk shake.”
The air was warm and the steps were warm from the sun, but I was cold. “I’ve got to walk the line you talked about, give him respect.”
“So what should you do?”
“Well … I’d have to ask Mom, was it all right to go with him.”
“But your mother isn’t there.”
“Then he’d have to come back later, after I talked to her, but even if Mom said it was all right, I wouldn’t want to go.”
Three crows landed on the sidewalk and hopped along, pecking at grains of rice from a wedding the day before, each of them studying us warily with glistening black eyes.
We watched them for a while, and then I said, “Would Tilton … would my father ever hurt me?”
“I don’t believe he would, Jonah. There’s an emptiness in him, a hollow place where there shouldn’t be, but I don’t think he’d hurt a child. It’s your mother he might hurt by taking you away from her.”
“I won’t let that happen. I just won’t.”
“That’s why I wanted us to talk, so you wouldn’t let it happen.”
I thought about the two trash-talking delinquents in Riverside Commons a few days earlier. “Boy, it’s always something, isn’t it?”
“That’s life. Always something, more good than bad, but always interesting if you’re paying attention.”
He offered me the gum again, and I took a stick, and so did he. He took the paper and foil from me, and he folded them with his paper and foil, and he put them in his shirt pocket.
After we chewed the Juicy Fruit for a minute or two and watched the crows at the rice, I thought of Mr. Gluck’s pendant and took it from my pocket and showed it to Grandpa.
“Isn’t that a marvelous piece of work.” He took the pendant and dangled it in the sunlight and asked where I’d gotten it. When I told him, he said, “Son, that is a classic story of the city if I ever heard one. Just classic. You’ve got a lasting conversation piece.”
“What kind of feather do you think it is, Grandpa?”
He gently twisted the chain between his fingers, so that the Lucite heart turned back and forth. “I’m no expert on feathers, but there’s one thing I can say with complete confidence.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s not an ordinary feather. It’s extraordinary. Otherwise no one would’ve gone to the trouble of sealing it in Lucite and shaping the Lucite into a heart.” He frowned at the pendant for a moment, then smiled. “I feel comfortable saying it’s not a bit of juju.”
“What’s juju?”
“A religion in West Africa, full of charms and curses and lots of gods, good ones and bad ones. In the Caribbean, they mix it up with some Catholic bits and call it voodoo.”
“I saw this old voodoo movie on TV. It scared me, so I had to turn it off.”
“Nothing to be scared about, because none of it’s true.”
“In the movie, the voodoo wasn’t on some island somewhere, it was right in the city.”
“Don’t give it a thought, Jonah. This piece the taxi driver gave you, it’s too well meant to be anything dark and dangerous. Whatever feather this might be, you should figure it was so important to someone that they preserved it. You should keep good care of it.”
“I will, Grandpa.”
Returning the pendant to me, he said, “I know you will.”
We got up, and the crows squawked into flight, and we walked back to the house, where lunch would soon be ready.
“The little talk we had about your father is just between you and me, Jonah.”
“Sure. We don’t want to worry Mom.”
“You’re a good boy.”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“I do. And if you stay humble about it and remember talent is a gift you didn’t earn, then you’re going to be a great piano man. If that’s what you want to be.”
“It’s all I want to be.”
Under the maples, the black-and-white patterns of leaf shadow and sunlight didn’t remind me of schooling fish in bright water, as before. They sort of looked like piano keys, not all lined up in the usual order but instead intersecting at crazy angles and shimmering with that kind of music that makes the air sparkle, what Malcolm calls banish-the-devil music.
During his off-the-rails period, when Malcolm was twenty-two, he lost his way in grief. He began secretly using drugs. He withdrew into himself and went away and didn’t tell anyone where he was going. Later, I learned that he had left the city, which was a mistake for a young man so suited to its streets. He had enough money for a year, and he rented a cabin by a lake upstate.
He smoked pot and did a little cocaine and sat on the porch to stare at the lake for hours at a time. He drank, too, whiskey and beer, and ate mostly junk food. He read books about revolutionary politics