The Summer of Owen Todd Read online

  “I’ll take his spot,” I call. “Shay, I’ll be right back.”

  He looks up. “Don’t tell anybody what I told you. It was probably a mistake.”

  “You could skip a day with the sitter.” I take a bat from the bag next to the bench, swing it around. “Stay with us next time.”

  “Owen, batter up!”

  “Yeah? Tomorrow?” he says. “We could do stuff together. Whatever you want.”

  “Tomorrow? You’re going to visit your dad, aren’t you?”

  “No, that’s Friday. Tomorrow Paul’s supposed to come again.”

  My knees feel like buckling in half. “I really have to help my dad at the track. Will your mom let you come to the track with me?”

  He shakes his head. “No. I’m a sick kid, and they steal stuff, remember?”

  “Owen Todd, get over here!”

  “I gotta go.”

  “And that’s why I need a sitter,” he says. “Never mind. Go. I’m fine.”

  EIGHT

  We lose Saturday’s game. How could we not? While Kyle’s lolling on a foreign beach, we’re busy not hitting, dropping balls, and stumbling our way to another loss.

  Sean isn’t there, either. He stays with his sitter on Thursday and on Friday his mother drives him to visit his father in Connecticut.

  He isn’t due back until Wednesday at the earliest. I decide not to ask my dad about it until after Shay comes back, because if Shay talks with his own dad about the sitter’s smartphone picture, maybe that’ll end it.

  I formally meet Paul Landis on Sunday. I decide to stay for coffee hour to check him out for real. Mom promises to drive me to the track later.

  In the hall after the service, she introduces Paul to me and Ginny, then goes to get half a bagel and some fruit in a plastic cup. That’s always her Sunday breakfast.

  After nodding at Ginny, who’s not interested and goes after my mom, Paul turns to me, “I’ve seen you around, Mr. Owen Todd! You’re a friend of Sean Huff’s, are you not? I’m sitting for him, but you know that.”

  Are you not? Weird wording.

  I read his name from his badge and try not to catch him in the eye. Sean’s description wasn’t great. The guy’s a few years older than just out of college. He’s tan, with a round face, sandy hair that needs a comb. He wears chino shorts and boat sneakers and a polo shirt with the church logo on the chest.

  “Yes, Mr. Landis,” I say.

  “Nahhh, none of that Mr. Landis.” He draws out the first word like he’s a goat. “Call me Paul. I’m not all that old.” He laughs and shuffles his sneakers to prove he can dance or something. He’s very comfortable with himself, moving and chatting while his eyes flick over the tables, motioning his helpers to tighten up the cookie trays, refill the cream pitchers.

  His voice is a casual kind of sound, like leaves in a breeze. I see now he is a little pudgy around the middle, but since he’s wearing shorts I notice he has hard biker’s calves, which makes me think he’s sort of athletic. I remember about the leg Sean told me was almost cut off and wonder which one it was. They both look strong. I don’t see a scar. All in all, it takes me a few seconds to remember something else about him.

  I said before that we don’t go to church every week, but his tooth-filled grin this morning reminds me of the pancake breakfast Old Sailors sponsors at the parade every Memorial Day.

  There he was, four weekends ago, in his church polo with one cuff rolled up over the shoulder, wearing sunglasses and a goofy Cat in the Hat hat, flipping pancakes at the griddles set up on the church lawn the morning of the parade. He was grinning a grin that wouldn’t quit. His leafy, breezy voice was booming and laughy, and you could hear him practically over the blare of the marching bands.

  “Two plates pronto for Master Mahoney!” “I think you would like some extra bacon, wouldn’t you, Miss?” “More syrup for this youngster! He drowns his pancakes in syrup, this youngster does, ha-ha!”

  The other men seemed to think their leader was awesome. In my memory, he was almost too happy, doing these extra-high flips of the pancakes, catching them on plates, but whatever. Church is like that, ultrahappy sometimes.

  Paul Landis’s expression that day didn’t budge for over three hours. I know because I was helping my mom in a craft booth a little down the parade route. He never lost his smile except when he had to boss around some kids who helped with supplies. I watched him get mad at two of the high school girls who are in the choir, his cheeks red as a steamed lobster. I remember this because they’re pretty and hang out together all the time. But he never got mad at the boys. And the boys—I see John Pelosic and Adam Sisley in my mind, but there were others—barely helped at the breakfast at all. I never saw them bring out more batter from the kitchen or exchange full trays of bacon for the empties on the outside tables or clear or anything like the girls did.

  Recalling it now, a month later, I’m not sure what to make of this, only that I remember it.

  * * *

  Finally, people trickle away, and coffee hour ends. Mom drops me at the track.

  There are a few people in line, but they aren’t being let in yet. I wonder why until I get out of the car, when I’m surprised to hear the high-pitched whine of one particular engine. I run out through the garage, and there’s my dad watching my uncle, who’s alone on the track, taking the new machine through its paces.

  “Dad?”

  He turns, grins, and kisses Mom and Ginny, who’ve come in behind me. “We’re waiting for the line to build to a full track. In the meantime, the blue kart is done.”

  “This is what you bought?” Mom says. “Nice.”

  “More than nice,” I say. “A worthy competitor to number seventeen.” Which I’m not sure means anything to her, but I say it mostly to my dad.

  “When can I race?” Ginny asks.

  “Soon,” says Dad.

  “Not too soon,” Mom adds, putting her arm around Ginny.

  The kart has been washed and steam-cleaned of oil and grease, and it looks even faster than before, no slide at all in the corners, which my uncle is taking almost flat out. He slows when he sees us.

  “Great buy, Dale,” he says to my dad. He kisses my mom, too. “The other ones, well, they’ll take time to bring up to this one, but yeah, in time. Right now, this baby’s too fast for the other karts, even number seventeen, but maybe we can do something like a special race, the faster cars, the more experienced, older drivers. Charge extra?”

  “It’s probably faster than seventeen,” I say, “but I bet the two of them together would be a heck of a race.”

  Uncle Jimmy laughs. “Bring it out.”

  I turn. “Dad?”

  He grins, heads for the office with Mom and Ginny. “Go for it. Just a few laps. We’ll have to open up the gate soon.”

  I rush into the garage, start up seventeen, strap on a helmet, slip in, and drive onto the track. I take it around once before pulling alongside my uncle. We start moderately, and I can sense he’s holding off, toying with me, as we enter the first turn in the middle of the track, me on the outside. Then, as we pull onto the straight, I brake and drop behind him, then quickly steer to the inside. I block him. He has to take a wider line through the next corner. I’m firmly on the inside, and I know I have to jam my foot to the floor and pull out of the turn while still holding the inside line. I do. He’s speeding up to go around me on the straight, but I veer out just a little to gain a better position for the upcoming turn. We’re wheel to wheel for a half lap, when he outwits me at the next corner. I wiggle back and forth behind him. He turns his head to see which side I’m on, and I dart inside again. I’m about to overtake him when the whistle sounds from the garage, and we have to come in. The customers are filing out into the other cars. I find I’ve been laughing the whole time, and I realize that I don’t want to leave this kart, the track, or Cape Cod ever.

  This is me.

  The first drivers rush out and jump in the karts as the two of us putt i
nto the garage. Shaking as I always do after a ride, I take up my post on a stool in the shed and for the rest of the morning watch the races, my bottle of spray cleaner and paper towels ready. Today, I don’t even mind. That was real racing. Short, but fast, and a promise of more speed to come. I breathe in the exhaust. I love it.

  Around noon, after Mom and Ginny go home, I get a call on my dad’s phone. It’s Sean. “Hey, how’s it going?” I ask, hoping things are okay. “You’re still with your dad, right?”

  “Yeah. He’s actually pretty cool. I’m going on a private tour of his gun factory tomorrow morning. He runs a whole department there.”

  “Nice.”

  “Plus, he’s so laid back about the whole diabetes thing. Just, you know, like it’s no big thing. I mean, I guess I remember him and Mom shouting, but it’s sort of crazy how different they are. He cooks, too. Not a huge range of stuff, but decent. Later today we’re going to Mark Twain’s house.”

  “The steamboat guy? Maybe your dad’ll let you buy one.”

  “He would. He totally would.”

  Then I remember Paul Landis. “Hey, have you talked to him about … you know?”

  “Way to remind me, Owen. No. Not yet. Maybe later. On the steamboat.”

  There’s more, but he hangs up soon after, and I feel that weight lifting again, just a little. I think about my parents. My dad’s not fussy, either. Maybe no dads are. Mom is different. Maybe it’s the whole getting-taller thing, but I almost think she wants me not to grow. Ginny doesn’t mind all the hugging. It’s starting to bother me. I hope it doesn’t show, but I see Mom sometimes catch herself when she wants to get closer to me. With my dad it’s different. “Go for it,” he says. “Race!”

  After a while I walk over to the market for my and my dad’s lunch again, adding my uncle’s order, too. It’s sunny, hot, and noisy trekking across the big parking lot. I know where the deli and the water bottles are. When I get back I race two more times.

  It’s a go-kart track.

  It’s Cape Cod.

  What’s not to love?

  NINE

  Sean and I leave things like that for the next few days. He doesn’t call again. I don’t see or hear from him until Thursday night.

  It’s nearly nine. It’s been clear all day, and warm—it’s the first week of July now—and the sun’s just gone down behind the trees in my backyard. Our patio is green and blue in the twilight. Because the heavy dew soaks them, I’m pulling the cushions off the deck chairs and storing them in the shed when a pebble trills across the patio stones to my feet.

  At first, I look up. I don’t know why, it never rains rocks. I’m not thinking about Shay. Then another pebble clacks on the flagstones and I scan the hedge along the rear of the yard. Sean shuffles between the bushes and trots over to me.

  “Whoa. When did you get back?”

  “I have to talk to you,” he says.

  A cold finger touches my neck. “Yeah?” I don’t want this conversation to go sideways, so I come out with, “I raced against the new kart again today, just me and my dad this time. It’s fast, but I think number seventeen and me are organic. Ten laps. I won by nearly half a lap. Proving it’s totally the driver.”

  He’s not listening. “I have to talk to you.”

  He’s not looking at me, either, but up at my house.

  I glance around. The kitchen window is lit; my dad is standing at the sink. I think at first he’s alone, and that my mom is upstairs, reading to Ginny, who can’t sleep and has a wicked cold I’m trying not to catch. Then Dad turns his head, and I see his lips move. Mom must be in the kitchen with him, sitting at the table. I look up. Ginny’s window is dark.

  I turn back to see Sean’s sidestepped behind the shed and out of the light. I know you can’t see well out a lit window at night, but I guess he doesn’t want to take the chance that my dad might see him. I don’t want to know why.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Around the garage,” he says.

  We dodge along the side of the garage and stop. I look toward the street. It’s in a kind of deep green shadow. Under the streetlight, the crushed shells covering our driveway are yellow with blue shadows.

  “I couldn’t look at my mom’s face,” he says. He’s blue in the shadows too, with the light behind him.

  “What do you mean? When?”

  “When she came home from work today. I couldn’t look at her.”

  “What are you talking about? I thought you were with your dad.”

  “That ended yesterday when something happened to a machine and he had to go back to work.”

  “You were back all day today?” I ask.

  He shifts from foot to foot nervously. “Remember how I told you when Paul first came to my house he asked me about my room, about if my mother cleans it or I clean it?”

  “You didn’t tell me that. And if you ask me, it looks like nobody cleans it—”

  “The reason he wanted to know if my mother cleans my room is because he said if she did then we’d have to pick a different place because maybe there’d be an accident. I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

  “A different place for what? What’s he doing? He’s not stealing from you?”

  He breathes out. “Nothing. He didn’t do anything. He drove us to the beach today.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I always call you!” His voice is low, sharp.

  “Okay. Sorry. I thought you were with your father, that’s all—”

  “At home after the beach Paul saw me changing. He watched me.”

  My stomach twists like a dishcloth being wrung out. “Sean, what?”

  His face is down. Maybe he’s looking at the shells in the driveway, or maybe his eyes are closed. I can’t tell. “I told him to go away, but he didn’t. I was in the middle of changing. I was naked. And he said, ‘I wanted to see your insulin pod. Wow, you’re white down there,’ he said in a weird voice, like whispering. He kept looking at me, even when I turned my back. I told him to get out. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I have a brother. It’s how you grow up.’”

  “What’s how you grow up?” I ask. “What’s with him and growing up? Is he trying to be your dad?”

  Sean’s voice is nearly not there. “He touched me. I had nothing on. He made me do it. I almost threw up right on the floor.”

  “What are you talking about? Made you do what?” I’m shaking now. “My God, Sean, you have to tell. I’m telling!”

  Sean grabs my arm tight, stares right into my face for what seems like minutes. Then he suddenly breaks into a laugh. But it’s a high laugh, hoarse and shrill, not the way anyone really laughs. There’s a sharp edge to it. “Got you!” he says. “Ha!”

  “What?”

  “I’m joking! Just to see if you’d believe me. And you did. You did!”

  “Are you serious, this is all a joke?” I nearly cry from relief, but I’m angry. “Sean, you’re such a jerk! What if I told somebody? I could have. I actually almost did.” I feel heavy weights sliding off my back, even as my blood pumps like crazy.

  “Got you, Owen Todd. Got you!”

  I almost want to punch him, but what I do is growl. “You’re such an idiot! I was so ready to tell. You mean everything’s okay at home? He didn’t do any of this?”

  Sean lets go of my arm and starts bouncing on his toes, nodding.

  “That’s what you’re saying, right? Powwl Landisss is okay after all? You made it all up? You made it up. The naked picture. All of it? You invented it?”

  He laughs to himself and does a little tap dance on the shells, kicking them around with his toes. It’s dark now, and the yards across the street are blackening.

  “My dad will drive you home,” I say.

  “Nah.” The way he says it reminds me of Paul Landis when I met him, just like his dance does. “Nah,” he repeats and creeps back along the garage and around to the patio, peering at the window, where no one is standing now. “I can ma
ke it.”

  My heart is still hammering. “It’s pretty dark.”

  He shrugs and heads backward across the patio to the hedge he came through. “Seriously, O, what’s the worst that can happen?”

  Chuckling so softly that I almost can’t hear him, he fumbles through the bushes for an opening and is gone.

  TEN

  Got you. Ha!

  Except it’s not that easy. Sean’s stung me, jerked me around, and I’m mad. As I stand on the dark patio, quivering, I run the whole thing over from the beginning and try to file it away, but something stinks like an old fish. You know what a fish story is. A story that gets more unbelievable each time you tell it. Like this:

  Sean: “I caught a big fish today. It’s ten pounds.”

  Owen: “That’s not so big.”

  Sean: “You didn’t let me finish. It’s ten pounds on each side. It’s twenty pounds, altogether.”

  Owen: “Twenty pounds still isn’t that big.”

  Sean: “I mean just the head. If you count the tail, it’s thirty pounds.”

  Owen: “It’s thirty pounds now?”

  Sean: “If you don’t include the fins. They’re forty pounds each.”

  Owen: “How many fins does it have?”

  Sean: “How high can you count?”

  So, is this what he did? I don’t even know. I don’t know whether to believe him or not. Why would he lie? And which part is a lie? That his babysitter tried this stuff, or that he didn’t do anything except annoy Sean because Sean’s got to have a babysitter and he’s eleven? Either my best friend in the world has suddenly played a nasty trick on me—and on Paul—or it really is happening, and Sean can’t tell me straight because it’s too gross. He touched me. I had nothing on.

  Either way, I feel dirty.

  * * *

  The next morning, I wake up twisted in my sheets and sweating, and I jump into the shower first thing. I’m finally ready to tell my parents or at least my dad what Sean told me, and let him decide what’s real and what’s a lie.

  Until I’m walking downstairs to the kitchen and I hit the dining room.