After the amnio came back “normal” times two (the air quotes now a mimed stand-in for the word itself), after the morning sickness (blessedly severe) had passed, they felt giddy, shamelessly smug. They had no intention of trying for more children, no intention of moving, no intention of changing their jobs. They referred to their imminent babies as the two great unknowns. When these invisible creatures began to exert their eight limbs inside the chamber of her body, Sandra called them the two rambunctious unknowns. “Except I know this much: they’re training for the frigging Tour de France.” During the last half of her pregnancy, Sandra reveled in baby books; Kit’s appointed challenge was to make giant strides on writing his own book, racing ahead of himself in an effort to outpace the time he would have to steal from his work life the minute he became a father.
The night of Kit’s graduation from eighth grade, Jasper and his mother took him out for dinner at a starched-linen restaurant. No
sooner had they placed their orders than Kit’s mother proposed an idea she was certain would, as she put it so cheerfully, so succinctly, “simplify everyone’s life.” She leaned toward Kit. “Next fall, suppose I could rent a tiny apartment near my school? Near Nana and Papa. You could go to school with me, and we’d stay there four nights a week. Fridays, we’d come back here.” Her smile swiveled toward Jasper.
Jasper gripped a roll in one hand, a knife in the other. He looked at Kit. “I’m not crazy about this notion your mother’s cooked up, but I said she could try it out on you.”
Kit said, “Well, no. No, I’d rather not.”
His mother frowned. “Rather not? Why not?”
“Come on, Mom. I mean, I have this life here, at school. My friends. My team. Like everything is here.” Kit ran cross-country. He liked hanging out with his teammates. He also liked a girl named Madeleine. At the big table in art class, they pulled their stools close, their bodies exchanging a mutual electricity. Madeleine admired the rickety cartoon strips he drew whenever the teacher let them indulge in “free drawing.” Except for science, Kit liked just about everything related to school.
“But Kyle’s leaving the high school here. It’ll just be you,” said his mother.
The regional high school would be a big change, he knew that, but this time he looked forward to the change. He and his local friends would travel together on the bus. They would still have one another.
“I vote no,” he said. “Sorry, Mom.”
She looked at Jasper. “Don’t you see how this makes sense?”
“Things that make sense don’t always make sense.” Jasper shrugged. “I’d rather have you both here as much as possible, you know that. Weekends, I’m working more often than not.”
“I can’t be here as much as even I would like!” Kit’s mother said, her sudden sorrow jarring.
Kit knew he was hurting her with his refusal, but she was the one who’d brought him to Jasper’s remote house and sparsely populated town, and now that he liked it, the life she had chosen for both of them, he had no desire to trade it for yet another.
“Daphne, darling.” Jasper cleared his throat. “I’d like to say you
could quit your job, and I reckon that if I get ahead on the boys’ college loans, then in two or three years—”
“Two or three years is all I have before Kit’s gone, too! And Jasper, I like my job. You know that. What would I do all winter here, all day long—or should I say all day
short
, considering how soon the sun sets behind that mountain?”
“Bake your splendid pies?”
Kit saw, as soon as his stepfather made light of her disappointment, what a mistake he’d made.
“Five months of the year I take my
life
in my
hands
on that drive—the mud and the sleet and the snow. I do that to make this family possible! I want this family to
stay
possible.” Was she threatening that somehow it wouldn’t?
Jasper and Kit looked at their plates; for the first time, with a stunning surge of guilty pleasure, Kit was aware of a distinct alliance between them.
Jasper reached toward Kit’s mother, laying a hand over hers. In the nicked, sun-spotted skin of his stepfather’s massive hand as it engulfed his mother’s fine fingers with their painted nails, Kit recognized something else: the acute difference between his mother and her husband—not just in age but in the habits and passions that had shaped those hands. “This family,” said Jasper, “wouldn’t be much of a family with you two gone half the time, now would it?”
Kit’s mother shook her head, though it wasn’t clear if she was disagreeing with Jasper or trying to shake free the delusion that her idea would “simplify” anything at all.
“I bet there’s a plum job for you somewhere in this neck of the woods,” suggested Jasper. “All your experience, that’s got to be golden.”
“All my experience is what gives me the seniority I have where I’m teaching now.
That
I am not giving up. And forget the problem of reciprocity between states. None of the schools here have the funding that makes my job what it is. You know that. The arts are diddly-squat out here in the boonies.”
Kit stared at her, but she was focused entirely on Jasper. She seemed to have forgotten Kit was there, too. Was she saying that his art classes, his art teacher, his drawings and cartoons, were “diddly-squat”?
They ate in silence for a time, until the hostess—yet another past pupil of Ski Bum Number One—stopped by to ask Jasper what brand of hiking boots she should buy as a birthday present for her son.
And so, over the next three years, their routines remained the same, though now, at least through the cooler seasons, only the three of them shared the house—which made it seem larger, colder, and more a place of separate privacies than open-aired, communal living. Over these years, Kit discovered sex (with the admiring Madeleine) and the pleasure of being just the right degree of drunk. In Jasper’s beat-up Rover, he learned to drive. He learned to paint with oils and sculpt wood. He made a few pieces of thick but useful furniture. In his sophomore year, he failed chemistry (retaking it over the following summer), but he won an award in a juried art show for students from all across the state. The following winter, he helped Jasper train their first team of sled dogs, to add another tourist attraction to the business. For good money, he helped a friend of Jasper’s build a tool-shed and a sugarhouse. Over these years, it was Jasper’s approval and praise he sought, more than his mother’s.
But Kit and Jasper weren’t close, or not in any singular way. With Rory and Kyle weaned (as their father put it)—Kyle at the University of Vermont; Rory leaving college, midway through, to teach Outward Bound in Colorado—Jasper still cooked breakfasts and dinners, but in those margins of time when he and Kit were alone together, Kit’s mother on the road or working late, he did not make much effort toward fatherly small talk. He kept a weather radio on at all times, sometimes stopping in the midst of an indoor task (caulking a drafty seam on one of the many windows; filling the firewood bin; unpacking groceries) to listen and comment on approaching changes.
“Sunny weekend, there you have it. Bonanza.”
“That’s not what the barometric pressure tells me, buster.”
“Two feet of powder, Santa: that’s right there at the top of my list.”
Kit began to do his homework at the kitchen table rather than up in his chilly room. Jasper’s periodic remarks on the changing climate became a companionable source of amusement to Kit, commercial breaks in the slog of history papers and cramming for Spanish or algebra tests.
His mother, meanwhile, seemed less amused by Jasper; by everything,
really: by Garrison Keillor, by the dogs’ antics in the first snowfall, by sharing songs on the stereo. She began to voice regrets: that she had never made Kit persist with piano beyond a single year’s lessons, that they had never traveled outside the country together, that she had never searched out fellow musicians to form a local chamber group. On the occasional weekday afternoon, she’d call from work to say that she was staying overnight with a friend; she was just too tired to make the drive. When summer arrived, she did not appear to savor its freedoms. As if she were the budding adolescent, the restless, disdainful teenager, she seemed to prefer her own company to either Kit’s or Jasper’s. She hiked alone and read a great deal. She played her cello more often. When Kit told her how glad he was to hear her playing again, she gave him a skeptical, almost cautionary look. “Not a lot else to do around here, honey.”
The second time Kit asked his mother about his phantom father was at the beginning of his senior year in high school, when she told him she would be moving out—and expected him to move with her.
He had stayed late on the second day of classes to attend the first cross-country meeting. It was nearly dinnertime, yet as he approached the house, he saw Jasper heading toward the trail that wound to the top of the hogback. When Kit asked where he was going, he said, “Gotta seize the last long days of summer, seize ’em by the throat.” But he looked grim, as if someone had just seized him by the throat.
In the kitchen, Kit’s mother waited at the table with two glasses of iced tea. She did not ask about his day. She said, almost before the screen slid into place behind him, “Kit, sweetie, I’ve made a big decision. I’m moving back. I can’t make this long-distance thing work anymore. I’m worn to the bone. If it feels like I’m letting you down, I’m sorry.” She spoke swiftly, breathlessly, clearly having rehearsed her lines, fearful of interruption.
Kit hung his pack on its hook and faced her across the table. “But you’ll be back for weekends.”
She looked at him for a moment, as if making up her mind just then. “No. I don’t think so.”
“Don’t think so?”
“No. I won’t be. We won’t be.”
“We?” Had Jasper agreed to move, too?
“Please sit,” she said. Reluctantly, he obeyed her. Immediately, she
reached across the table. When he kept his hands in his lap, she withdrew hers.
“Kitten,” she said, “I shouldn’t have let the decision wait so long. I know you’ve started your classes. But you and I are both moving back. You’ll do fine. There’s a place for you on the team, I’ve already made sure of that.” She smiled proudly. “Your times are better than most of the best boys they already have.”
“Moving
out
, you mean,” he said. “Well, I’m not.”
“Sweetie …”
“I’m not! I don’t have to. I don’t.”
The look she leveled at Kit was half threat, half fear. “You’re my son, and I’m your mother.”
“And Jasper’s my dad.” Why wasn’t he part of this conversation? Kit remembered the argument three years before, practically the very same one, at the restaurant. Jasper had made her see sense.
She looked at the stove, as if remembering a pie or a cake that might be done. Kit followed her gaze; the oven wasn’t on. She said, “He’s not your father as much as I’m your mother.”
Kit felt his legs shaking. His voice shook, too, when he said, “Since when is it like some kind of quantitative thing? We’re not talking math.”
“It’s not math,” she said quietly. “It’s … biology. You were born to me, not to Jasper.”
“Did Jasper say I have to go?”
“Kit, you are almost an adult. But not yet. This decision is mine.”
“Why not Jasper’s, too? I’ll bet Jasper doesn’t want us to move.”
“He doesn’t. You’re right. But this has to do with me.” Hastily, she added, “And you. With us.”
“I’m not talking more about it till he gets back,” said Kit.
His mother regarded him as if he had slapped her, as if her pain were physical. Kit felt himself grow harder, not softer. He willed himself to stop shaking. “So if Jasper’s not my father, then tell me who is. Tell me once and for all who is. Or who was. Or could have been. What
ever
.”
She closed her eyes and stood. She took her empty glass to the sink. Without turning around, she said, “You’re right. Let’s wait for Jasper to return. You need time to absorb this. I should have made this decision a lot sooner. That’s my fault. I understand your anger.”
No, she didn’t. Of course she didn’t. Kit left the kitchen quickly. He took the stairs two at a time, all three flights leading to his room. He wished he were wearing boots, not sneakers, so his footsteps would sound vehemently through the echo chamber of the house, proxy to his protest. He lay on his bed, listening to his mother move pots and pans around, turn the water on and off, open and close the fridge. He heard the crinkling of foil, the percussive assault of a knife on a cutting board. She did not put music on, the way she normally would have.
When she called him to come down and eat, he ignored her. He heard her start to climb the stairs, hesitate, descend. He lay there, hungry, angry, determined to listen for one thing only: Jasper’s return.
Jasper returned at nine; the numbers on Kit’s alarm clock glowed in the dark. He rose and rushed out his door, down the many stairs, as if afraid that Jasper might go out again, this time for good.
His mother and stepfather stood in the kitchen, facing each other across the table. “I’m not moving,” Kit said to Jasper. “Am I?” He refused to look at his mother.
“Oh, sweetie,” she said. “I know how upset you are …”
“He’s not the only one,” said Jasper.
Kit’s mother started to cry. “I have tried. God knows I have tried.”
“Tried what?” said Jasper. “To have your dandy cake and eat it, too? None of us gets it easy, Daphne. Not me, not you. Not even good old Kit here.”
“This isn’t talk for him to hear.”
“Why the heck ever not?” said Jasper. “He’s no tender edelweiss. He’s not your precious baby, not anymore, no ma’am.” Jasper turned to the stove and ladled soup into a bowl. He set it on the table, loudly. He looked at Kit, his gaze stern. “That’s for me. You want some, too?”
Kit nodded. “Thanks.”
As Kit’s mother stood to the side and watched, the boy and the older man sat down to share a late dinner. After a few spoonfuls of soup, Jasper looked up and said to her, “He stays. If he wants. Absolutely. Up to him is what I say. And I am—legally, by the way—his father. Guardian, what have you. And guard him I will, from this nonsense if nothing else.”