Change of Heart (2 page)

As Eli rode his bike onto the cracked, weedy concrete drive of his mother’s house, he caught a glimpse of the taillights of his father’s car as it scurried out of sight.

“Deadbeat!” Eli said under his breath, knowing that his father must have been watching for him so he could run away as soon as he saw his son.

Every time Eli thought of the word
father
his stomach clenched. Leslie Harcourt had never been a father to him, nor a husband to his wife, Miranda. The man had spent his life trying to make his family believe he was “important.” Too important to talk to his family; too important to go anywhere with his wife and child; too important to give them any time or attention.

According to Leslie Harcourt, other people were the ones who really counted in life. “My friends
need
me,” Eli had heard his father say over and over. His mother would say, “But Leslie,
I
need you too. Eli needs school clothes and there are no groceries in the house and my car has been broken for three weeks. We
need
food and we
need
clothes.”

Eli would watch as his father got that look on his face, as though he were being enormously patient with someone who couldn’t understand the simplest concepts. “My friend has broken up with his girlfriend and he has to have someone to talk to and I’m the only one. Miranda, he’s in pain. Don’t you understand? Pain! I
must
go to him.”

Eli had heard his father say this same sort of thing a thousand times. Sometimes his mother would show a little spunk and say, “Maybe if your friends cried on the shoulders of their girlfriends, they wouldn’t
be
breaking up.”

But Leslie Harcourt never listened to anyone except himself—and he was a master at figuring out how to manipulate other people so he could get as much out of them as possible. Leslie knew that his wife, Miranda, was softhearted; it was the reason he’d married her. She forgave anyone anything, and all Leslie had to do was say “I love you” every month or so and Miranda forgave him whatever.

And in return for those few words, Miranda gave Leslie security. She gave him a home that he contributed little or no money to and next to no time; he had no responsibilities either to her or to his son. Most important, she provided him with an excuse to give to all his women as to why he couldn’t marry them. He invariably “forgot” to mention that all these “friends” who “needed” him were women—and mostly young, with lots of hair and long legs.

When he was very young, Eli had not known what a “father” was, except that it was a word he heard other children use, as in “My father and I worked on the car this weekend.” Eli rarely saw his father, and he never did anything with him.

But Eli and Chelsea had put an end to Leslie and all his Helpless Hannahs two years ago. It was Chelsea who first saw Eli’s father with the tall, thin blonde as they were slipping into an afternoon matinee at the local mall. And Chelsea, using the invisibility of being a child, sat in front of them, twirling chewing gum (which she hated) and trying to look as young as possible, as she listened avidly to every word Eli’s father said.

“I would like to marry you, Heather, you know that. I love you more than life itself, but I’m a married man with a child. If it weren’t for that, I’d be running with you to the altar. You’re a woman any man would be proud to call his wife. But you don’t know what Miranda is like. She’s utterly helpless without me. She can hardly turn off the faucets without me there to do it for her. And then there’s my son. Eli needs me so much. He cries himself to sleep if I’m not there to kiss him good-night, so you can see why we have to meet during the day.”

“Then he started kissing her neck,” Chelsea reported.

When Eli heard this account, he had to blink a few times to clear his mind. The sheer enormity of this lie of his father’s was stunning. As long as he could remember, his father had
never
kissed him good-night. In fact, Eli wasn’t sure his father even knew where his bedroom was located in the little house that needed so much repair.

When Eli recovered himself, he looked at Chelsea. “What are we going to do?”

The smile Chelsea gave him was conspiratorial. “Robin and Marian,” she whispered, and he nodded. Years earlier, they’d started calling themselves Robin Hoods. The legend said that Robin Hood righted wrongs and did good deeds and helped the underdog.

It was Miranda who’d first called them Robin and Marian, after some soppy movie she loved to watch repeatedly. Laughingly, she’d called them Robin and Marian Les Jeunes, French for “youths,” and they’d kept the name in secret.

Only the two of them knew what they did: They collected letterhead stationery from corporations, law firms, doctors’ offices, wherever, then used a very expensive publishing computer system to duplicate the type fonts, then sent people letters as though from the offices. They sent letters on law-office stationery to the fathers of children at school who didn’t pay child support. They sent letters of thanks from the heads of big corporations to unappreciated employees. They once got back an old woman’s four hundred dollars from a telephone scammer.

Only once did they nearly get into trouble. A boy at school had teeth that were rotting, but his father was too cheap to take him to the dentist. Chelsea and Eli found out that the father was a gambler, so they wrote to him, offering free tickets to a “secret” (because it was illegal) national dental lottery. He would receive a ticket with every fifty dollars he spent on his children’s teeth. So all three of his children had several hundred dollars’ worth of work done, and Chelsea and Eli dutifully sent him beautiful red-and-gold, hand-painted lottery tickets. The problem came when they had to write the man a letter saying his tickets did not have the winning numbers. The man went to the dentist, waving the letters and the tickets, and demanded his money back. The poor dentist had had to endure months of the man’s winking at him in conspiracy while he’d worked on the children’s teeth, and now he was being told he was going to be sued because of some lottery he’d never heard of.

In order to calm the man down, Chelsea and Eli had to reveal themselves to the son who they’d helped in secret and get him to steal the letters from his father’s night table. Chelsea then sent the man one of her father’s gold watches (he had twelve of them) to get him to shut up.

Later, after they’d weighed the good they had done of fixing the children’s teeth against the near exposure, they decided to continue being Robin and Marian Les Jeunes.

“So what are we going to do with your father?” Chelsea asked, and she could see that Eli had no idea.

“I’d like to get rid of him,” Eli said. “He makes my mother cry. But—”

“But what?”

“But she says she still loves him.”

At that, Chelsea and Eli looked at each other without comprehension. They knew they loved each other, but then they also
liked
each other. How could anyone love a man like Leslie Harcourt? There wasn’t anything at all likable about him.

“I would like to give my mother what she wants,” Eli said.

“Tom Selleck?” Chelsea asked, without any intent at humor. Miranda had once said that what she truly wanted in life was Tom Selleck—because he was a family man, she’d added, and no other reason.

“No,” Eli said. “I’d like to give her a
real
husband, one who she’d like.”

For a moment they looked at each other in puzzlement. Eli had recently been trying to make a computer think, and they both knew that doing that would be easier than trying to make Leslie Harcourt stay home and putter in the garage.

“This is a question for the Love Expert,” Chelsea said, making Eli nod. Love Expert was what they called Eli’s mom because she read romantic novels by the thousands. After reading each one, she gave Eli a brief synopsis of the plot, then he fed it into his computer data banks and made charts and graphs. He could quote all sorts of statistics, such as that 18 percent of all romances are medieval, then he could break that number down into fifty-year sections. He could also quote about plots, how many had fires and shipwrecks, how many had heroes who’d been hurt by one woman (who always turned out to be a bad person) and so hated all other women. According to Eli the sheer repetition of the books fascinated him, but his mother said that love was wonderful no matter how many times she read about it.

So Eli and Chelsea consulted Miranda, telling her that Chelsea’s older sister’s husband was having an affair with a girl who wanted to marry him. He didn’t want to marry her, but neither could he seem to break up with her.

“Ah,” Miranda said, “I just read a book like that.”

Here Eli gave Chelsea an I-knew-she’d-know look.

“The mistress tried to make the husband divorce his wife, so she told him she was going to bear his child. But the ploy backfired and the man went back to his wife, who by that time had been rescued by a tall, dark, and gorgeous man, so the husband was left without either woman.” For a moment Miranda looked dreamily into the distance. “Anyway, that’s what happened in the book, but I’m afraid real life isn’t like a romance novel. More’s the pity. I’m sorry, Chelsea, that I can’t be of more help, but I don’t seem to know exactly what to do with men in real life.”

Chelsea and Eli didn’t say any more, but after a few days of research, they sent a note to Eli’s father on the letterhead of a prominent physician, stating that Miss Heather Allbright was pregnant with his child, and his office had been directed to send the bills to Leslie Harcourt. Sending the bills had been Chelsea’s idea, because she believed that all bills on earth should be directed to fathers.

But things did not work out as Chelsea and Eli had planned. When Leslie Harcourt confronted his mistress with the lie that she was expecting his child, the young woman didn’t so much as blink an eye, but broke down and told him it was true. From what Eli and Chelsea could find out—and Eli’s mother did everything she could to keep Eli from knowing anything—Heather threatened to sue Leslie for everything he had if he didn’t divorce Miranda and marry her.

Miranda, understanding as always, said they should all think of the unborn baby and that she and Eli would be fine, so of course she’d give Leslie the speediest divorce possible. Leslie said it would especially hasten matters if he had to pay only half the court costs and only minimal child support until Eli was eighteen. Generously, he said he’d let Miranda have the house if he could have anything inside it that could possibly be of value, and of course she would assume the mortgage payments.

When the dust settled, Chelsea and Eli were in shock at what they had caused, too afraid to tell anyone the truth—but if Heather
was
going to have a baby, then they
had
told the truth. One week after Eli’s father married Heather, she said she’d miscarried and there was no baby.

Eli had been afraid his mother would fall apart at this news, but instead she had laughed. “Imagine that,” she’d said. “But Miss Clever Heather
did
get her baby, whether she knows it yet or not.”

Eli never could get his mother to explain that remark, but he was very glad she wasn’t hurt by the divorce.

So now Eli had just seen the taillight of his father’s car pull away, and he knew without a doubt that the man had been there trying to weasel out of child-support payments. Leslie Harcourt made about seventy-five thousand a year as a car salesman—he could sell anything to anyone—while Miranda barely pulled down twenty thousand as a practical nurse. “As good as I make people feel, they don’t pay much for that. Eli, sweetheart, my only realistic dream for the future is to become a private nurse for some very rich, very sweet old man who wants little more than to eat popcorn and watch videos all day.”

Eli had pointed out to her that all the heroines in her romance novels were running corporations while still in their twenties, or else they were waitressing and going to law school at night. That made Miranda laugh. “If all women were like that, who’d be buying the romance novels?”

Eli thought that was a very good consideration. His mother often had the ability to see right to the heart of a matter.

“What did he want?” Eli asked the moment he opened the door to the house he shared with his mother.

For a moment Miranda grimaced, annoyed that her son had caught his father there. Escaping Eli’s ever-watchful eye was like trying to escape a pack of watchdogs. “Nothing much,” she said evasively.

At those words a chill ran down Eli’s back. “How much did you give him?”

Miranda rolled her eyes skyward.

“You know I’ll find out as soon as I reconcile the bank statement. How much did you give him?”

“Young man, you are getting above yourself. The money I earn—”

Eli did some quick calculations in his head. He always knew to the penny how much money his mother had in her checking account—there was no savings account—and how much was in her purse, even to the change. “Two hundred dollars,” he said. “You gave him a check for two hundred dollars.” That was the maximum she could afford and still pay the mortgage and groceries.