More Than Enough (6 page)

“A whole lot,” he said.

“Times are good, aren't they? Soon we won't need to worry about money. That's what you always say.”

“I'm talking about now, Steven.”

“It's my stupid arm. Mine.”

“Of course it is,” he said, laughing a little. “But someone has to pay for it.” We both looked down at my arm. It was in a sling and my fingers were swollen and red. It was numb and tingling and felt far away. “That's why we're going after these people. All I need from you right now is a little good behavior. Can you give me that?”

I looked up at him, his eyes bloodshot but alert, awake. I felt sick to my stomach then, though not because of what my father was doing. I felt sick because I wanted to know something and had to ask him about it. “How much are they going to give us? How much money?”

“Enough,” he said. “More than enough.”

“Okay,” I said. “I'll be a good sport.”

Jenny was sprinting down the hallway toward us, stupid and happy and flailing her arms. “I get him back now!” she shouted. “I get to push him again.”

*   *   *

The cafeteria was large and mostly empty and uncomfortably quiet. The warm, suffocating smell of mashed potatoes seemed to be everywhere, even though no one stood in the food line. Danny Olsen and his father sat at a large round table in the middle of the room. I couldn't see them too well because I wasn't wearing my broken glasses. (I didn't want that kid to know he had defeated me in this small way, too.) As we drew nearer, I saw that the father and son seemed to be looking at some difficult, invisible object at the center of the table. We came to a stop, they stood up, and I could see that Danny Olsen was frightened of the cripple in front of him, frightened of what he had done to me. His hair was still wet from a shower or bath he had recently taken, and his chubby face seemed too white and harshly scrubbed; and even though he was sort of fat, he looked small and shaken. Jenny locked the wheels of my chair in place and Mr. Olsen nodded at me. He wore a suit and his hair was nicely combed, and in his middle-aged, chubby face I easily saw the resemblance between father and son. “Go ahead, Daniel,” he urged. My father stood off to the side of me, his arms folded. He wore a pleasant and somehow serious smile on his face. Despite his silly flannel pajama top, he was a capable-looking man with deep-set eyes and a nose that had been handsomely broken, set off slightly to one side. He looked strong and good-natured and, to use his word, gracious, more gracious than I knew him to be. I tried to stand up from my chair, but having only one good arm, slipped. When I tried again, I felt the surprising strength of Jenny's hand holding me down. “Don't,” she said. “You're not ready to stand yet.”

Danny Olsen looked at me. “I'm sorry,” he said in a small voice.

“I want to hear it,” Mr. Olsen said.

“I'm sorry,” he said in a louder voice.

“And,” his father prompted.

Danny Olsen bit into his lower lip, looked down at the floor and then up at me again. “I was in the wrong. I apologize for what I did to you. I apologize for what I said to you.”

“Go ahead, Daniel,” Mr. Olsen said. Danny Olsen put his trembling right hand out, which was confusing because I could only offer him my uninjured left. We grasped awkwardly at the other's mismatched hand and then quickly let go.

“We're not Catholic or anything,” I said.

My father cleared his voice behind me. “Steven,” he said.

“Okay,” I said to Danny. “Thanks for the apology.” Danny Olsen moved his arms from his pockets, crossed them, let one dangle. He felt awkward and ashamed, looking down at me in my wheelchair, and I knew that we had won, that that moment was my family's moment of victory, and I tried to feel whatever emotions—elation, superiority, graciousness—winners are supposed to feel. But I didn't feel those things. Instead, I felt satisfied to see that the kid who had hurt me was scared. I felt safe knowing that they were not only going to give us the money we needed, but also more than we needed, more than enough. I was pretty sure that this was not the feeling of winners. I was pretty sure that this was not “graciousness.” It was too greedy and mean for that.

Jenny stepped in front of my chair and put out her hand just as Danny Olsen had been about to turn around. “I'm Steven's sister, Jenny,” she said. “It's nice to meet you.”

He didn't turn to meet her at first, and I thought about how this was her chance to speak with one of the hundreds of names she had memorized from the yearbook. I hoped that he would be kind to her. “Daniel,” his father said sternly, after which he relented and, without looking her in the eye, briefly touched my sister's hand.

*   *   *

Later that night, after Mr. Olsen and his son had left and after my father had written a check to the hospital for the amount in full, a check he knew would not bounce, winning began to feel like something real and substantial, something that stayed with you and changed you and your life for good. It was past one in the morning when we finally drove away from the hospital. The snow had eased off by then, the roads had been plowed, and driving was easier. Jenny, who had always had a funny and demanding appetite, announced from the backseat that she was hungry. “I want an ice cream,” she said.

“I don't see why we shouldn't celebrate,” my father said. Perhaps had I not been on muscle relaxants, had it not been early in the morning, my father's use of the word
celebrate
on that occasion might have seemed odd to me. But at that moment, it seemed right, and we stopped and were soon all feasting on ice-cream bars in the parking lot of a Gas-N-Go. None of us laughed at or even noticed our odd choice of frozen desserts in the middle of winter and in the aftermath of a blizzard. We simply ate as the car heater blasted warm air and the windows around us fogged up.

For the rest of the drive home, my mother leaned into my father and whispered to him. I could not hear her, but I knew by the way he kissed her on the cheek and she returned his kiss that they were both happy. I think that she must have believed in him that night. I know I did. I know also that she must have seen, as I saw, that my father, for all his rage and past failures, could be a strong man, a man who knew, one way or another, how to get what he wanted. In fact, as we all saw a week later, when new furniture arrived, when the pissy-smelling La-Z-Boy disappeared from our rented duplex, when we were able to replace my eyeglasses with a new pair—new frames and new lenses—he had gotten more than enough, and at, or so I believed that night, a pretty good price—the price of a little pain, an injury, some tears and aggravation, a quarrel among kids. And as we drove across the city and my mother fell asleep and Jenny curled up on her side of the seat and dozed, I hardly remembered the pain. It had been masked and smothered beneath the medicine and the victory. For once, I believed that the future would be better and larger than I had ever before let myself imagine it could be. I knew how it felt to win. I knew that believing—and not just pretending—that the next day would be better than the present one was the conviction of winners. It was a boom time, and soon we'd be in the middle of it. I had not felt this way much before; it was a feeling that made that night remarkable with possibility, a night on which I had begun to see a future that held the promise of something as miraculous and unbelievable as an indoor pool, a warm swim in the middle of winter, in a blizzard on a night like that night. I could see that pool then, imagine myself walking from the dry carpet of the living room into the strange, damp enclosure where aquatic shadows flitted over the walls and where I stood and heard the wet suck of filters as I looked through the glassy slab of water and made out in the deep end the little silver coin of the drain at the bottom. A real pool.

“Steven,” my father whispered. “You awake?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You did well tonight. You hung in there.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You know how to throw a left hook?” he asked. Before I could answer, he began to tell me. “Don't telegraph it. You don't want the other guy to know what's coming. You want to step into it. You've got to be fast.” He threw a couple punches just short of the windshield, and with my good arm I threw two or three, despite the fact that it hurt a little. “Good,” he said, though he couldn't have been watching me closely. “That's the idea. We're going to teach you how to fight,” he said, still boxing. “We're going to make a fighter out of you.”

“Great,” I said, believing him, absolutely believing him, as I threw another two punches into the dark air in front of me.

Two

I HAD NEVER SEEN
my family spend more money than in the month after my accident. It was February and what the Channel 2 weatherman called an inversion—a soupy, dirty smog—had settled over the Salt Lake Valley and would probably stay for weeks. The sky and the ring of white mountains around the city disappeared in the murky brown air. Mornings at the bus stop were strange and a little spooky as the headlights of invisible cars pushed through the thick air and drove past us. My arm was still in a sling, and when Jenny and I walked to the back of the bus and past the boys who'd hurt me—Danny Olsen among them—they became quiet and looked away. We had gone from being outcasts to being unseen. My arm would not heal quickly, the doctors had told me; along with the dislocation, my muscle and some ligaments had been torn and damaged. I struggled to do schoolwork with my left hand, took vitamin supplements, and went weekly to The Richmond Clinics—where I was treated now that Mr. Olsen was paying the bill—for physical therapy.

Despite my arm and the bleak season, those few weeks of sudden riches were reminiscent of better times for our family. Our best time was the first year in Boise when my father had been the manager of a windshield replacement business, had liked his job and the people he worked with. My mother had found a nice house for us to rent. It was small, but it had new wood floors and the fuses wouldn't short when you toasted bread and brewed coffee at the same time. The owners, an old couple called the Brownings—related, my father claimed, to the family who sold the guns of that name—even talked about selling that house to us. My father and mother made friends, Mr. and Mrs. Kirkeby from across the street and Joel and his live-in girlfriend, Christina, who lived a couple streets down from us. My mother thought of returning to nursing school and taking a part-time job until she finished her degree. Both Jenny and I liked our school and had the sense that for once we would stay in a place for more than two years, maybe stay there for good. It was a nice thing to believe after having changed schools several times, moving from California to Arizona, then back to California, from where we moved once more to Washington State, and finally to Boise. We'd had good times in those places, too, though they hadn't lasted long. My father had had repeated bad luck and always knew an old friend in another state who had a job for him. When that golden year in Boise came to an end, we stayed another year before we moved on to Salt Lake, where, even if we didn't have friends, we could start again. I think we all hoped our unusual beginning in Salt Lake would put us on that same good track and keep us there. We had money, at least, and wouldn't have to worry for a change about how to pay the bills that winter and, I hoped, for many winters to come.

The things our new money bought made my family giddy for a while—the matching couch and La-Z-Boy, the new TV with stereo sound, black and sleek, so shiny it glinted with the flash of your reflection whenever you walked by, the new Danish blue dishes for my mother, some pots and pans, a set of kitchen knives in a knife block, a new pair of eyeglasses with silver frames for me. The chair and couch were red and had been carried in by two men from a place called Instant Furniture, which was printed on their white monkey suits and in giant letters on the side of their truck. It was instant, too, miraculously there, in the middle of our small home, packed in thick plastic that Jenny and I tore off until we got to the fabric that smelled new—of detergent and untouched cloth and of fresh-cut wood beneath the thick stuffing. We subscribed to more than sixty cable channels, including the ones you paid extra for—MTV, HBO, The Romance Station, and even a channel called Play It Again that featured reruns of
Gilligan's Island, Bewitched,
and
I Dream of Jeannie.
Jenny and I lay on the couch and surfed the channels for hours, fighting over the remote control, over which program to watch, until our eyes felt sore and our mother said no more TV and sent us to our rooms, exhausted and lethargic from doing what she called too much of nothing.

After a while, my father began to bring home stuff nobody wanted or needed. He bought a new basketball for me, even though I had an old one that I never used. “Smell that leather,” he said. I did smell it, though I couldn't hide my lack of excitement. (I had never been particularly good at hiding anything.) “You don't like it,” he said.

“Sure I do.”

“I'd appreciate some gratitude. A thank-you, at least.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“You're welcome,” he said in a tone that let me know I had disappointed him.

My sister and mother were even less receptive to his misfired attempts to please. When he gave Jenny a stack of CDs by Billy Joel, she said, “That's what I liked last year. I don't listen to him anymore. Why don't you ask me what I want?”

“You're very welcome,” he said.

To the candles and perfumes, soaps and cosmetics he gave my mother, she smiled. “Thank you, Billy,” she said. “But we don't need these things.” More than once, my mother and Jenny and I drove from store to store—sometimes as many as six—returning expensive bubble baths, incense sticks, a lava lamp, sea sponges, costume jewelry, chocolates, and sweets. When the sales people sometimes refused to accept the returns, my mother argued vehemently until they relented. “My husband bought these things,” she'd say, becoming fiercely honest. “But we can't pay for them. We are not the kind of family who can afford fifteen-dollar bubble bath.”