The Joyce Maynard Collection by Joyce Maynard Page A

single, he said. No ring.
    I was in the kitchen doing my homework when he said this, but he didn’t seem to mind that I was there.
    It can get pretty lonesome, he said. Winter especially.
    I have my son, she said. She asked if he had children.
    I always wanted to, he said. Then my wife left me. Now she’s having someone else’s kid.
    I remember thinking, when he said this, how odd that sounded. It seemed like who a person had would be their own child, not anybody else’s. I was my mother’s, but now I was wondering: Did the baby Marjorie had belong to my father?
    You like dancing? he asked her. Because there’s a function coming up at the Moose Lodge this Saturday. If you aren’t busy.
    Did she like dancing? There was the question. My mother couldn’t lie.
    He brought flowers when he came to pick her up. She wore one of her dancing skirts that swirled out when she turned, not like how she had dressed that time long ago, when she met my father, and her underwear showed, but this time just enough to accentuate the moves and show off her legs.
    Her date had also dressed up. When we’d met him, he’d been wearing his heating company uniform, with his name—Keith—over the left side of his chest, but tonight he was wearing a shirt made out of some kind of synthetic fabric that stuck to his body, which was very thin, and this shirt had been unbuttoned enough that you could see a little chest hair, which gave the impression that he’d thought about how this would look and possibly even arranged the hair to stick out at the top. Because I had seen my mother getting ready, and how she’d changed her outfit three times before deciding on this one, and standing in front of the mirror arranging her hair, now I pictured him, fluffing that chest hair so it stuck out the top of the shirt.
    I had no chest hair. My father had a lot of it, but nothing about me resembled him. Sometimes I wondered if maybe I wasn’t even his real son, and if maybe his real kid had always been Richard. That I was just some kind of mistake.
    She did not hire babysitters, my mother. She didn’t know any, considering the fact that she’d almost never gone anyplace I didn’t accompany her. And anyway, she said, leaving me alone with a sitter was more dangerous than just leaving me alone. There were all kinds of people around who might seem like nice people but how could you be sure?
    I set out a snack, she said. She had also left me an issue of National Geographic about life in ancient Greece, and a book on tape she’d sent away for about a boy who’d been shipwrecked on an island in the South Pacific where he lived on his own for three years until someone on a passing freighter had rescued him, and a project she thought I might enjoy, which was putting her penny collection into wrappers, with the promise that when we turned them in at the bank (we meaning me; she’d be out in the car) I’d get 10 percent, meaning maybe thirty-five cents if I was lucky.
    You look like a princess, Keith told her. I know this will sound stupid, he said, but I don’t actually know your first name. On your records down at the office we just have your last name and your account number.
    He looked young, Keith. I was too young myself for the difference to seem that dramatic, between twenty-five and thirty-five, but he might not even have been twenty-five. Seeing my binder that I had out on the table again, he said, Oh, you go to Pheasant Ridge. That’s where I graduated. He named a teacher he had, like I might know her.
    Less than an hour after the two of them took off for the dance, my mother was home. If Keith walked her to the door, I didn’t see. He didn’t come in.
    You can tell a lot about someone from how they dance, she said. This was a person with no sense of rhythm.
    His idea of a slow dance, she said, was rocking back and forth in one spot on the floor, rubbing his hand up and