A Father for Philip

by Gill, Judy Griffith

  She showered and then stood in front of her king size bed. She and David had bought it together to accommodate his tall frame, and she could not bring herself to give it up though she sometimes felt lost in it. She twisted the wedding band she still wore, turned and examined her body closely in the full-length mirror. No drooping or sagging, yet, she reflected, but there were those little lines around her eyes, and the grooves of sadness between her nose and mouth, visible, especially when she was tired, as now.

  I’m twenty-seven years old, she told herself, nearly twenty-eight, and though it only shows a bit, Grant’s right. Time is passing... Neither of us is getting any younger. But how can I marry him, knowing the way it is with him and Philip?

  The sight of Grant doing what could only be termed showing off, three days before had imprinted itself on her memory. He had come galloping up full tilt on his new horse, Glider, thundering across the field, intending, they could all see, to jump the hedge surrounding the farmyard. At the last minute the horse had balked and Grant sailed up over its neck to land in the hedge unharmed. Philip, Bill, and Kathy had laughed. As she rushed to help him, Eleanor had to admit that Grant did look funny with one leg stuck up in the bushes, his head hanging down. Of course he was fine, though he had bruised his knee. He got to his feet without her assistance, his face red with white patches at the corners of his mouth. His eyes looked utterly mad he advanced on a still giggling Philip and threatened him with his riding crop. She’d screamed his name and stopped him in time, of course, and Bill had stepped between Grant and Philip.

  “Back off,” he’d snarled at Bill.

  “You put that whip away.”

  Grant had lowered the sort crop. “I wouldn’t really have hit the kid.” Then he’d added, “But he does have to learn not to laugh at others and he has to get over his childish fear of horses. That’s why I brought Glider over.”

  Then, before Eleanor could prevent it, Grant scooped Philip up and tossed him into the saddle, jeering, “Let’s see how you do, jumping a fence.”

  Philip, of course, had screeched and clung to Glider’s mane, howling like a banshee. The horse had reared if it hadn’t been for Bill catching the big black’s reins and taking the child from the saddle, the horse could have run away with Philip and hurt him badly. Philip, once safely on the ground, had run off to disappear into the woods, not to return until Eleanor called him. He had obviously hidden out until he knew Grant would be gone, and while he hid there in the safety of the forest, dreamed up his latest playmate for himself.

  Eleanor yawned tiredly and pulled on a nightshirt. Oh well, I’ll leave him to it for now. She slipped between the sheets. He’ll be back in school before long, and it’s a while until summer vacation. By then he will have forgotten...

  Chapter Three

  The yellow school bus shuddered to a stop, brakes squeaking before the doors hissed open to release Philip at the end of the driveway up by the farmhouse. Eleanor, leaning on the fence watching calves play, raised her hand to wave to her son who came hurtling toward her, lunchbox banging against his knee, plastic bag full of what she knew would be weird and wonderful drawings to be hung all over the kitchen walls.

  “Hi, Mom,” he panted. Never could that child walk, and arrive anywhere in a condition less than out of breath, his mother thought as she bent to kiss him.

  “You have a good day, son?” she asked as hand-in-hand they walked down the grassy slope to their home.

  “Sure.” He grinned, showing his new set of overly-large upper incisors. “I punched Jamie Peters on the school bus.”

  “What for?” Eleanor glared at her son as she pushed the kitchen door open.

  “Because he pulled Lorna’s hair.”

  “Oh... I see. Well, why not let Lorna fight her own battles?”

  “Oh, she did. She bopped him with a book, but I punched him anyway. I don’t like him.”

  Philip kicked off his new sneakers, saved for school, not play, and looked behind the kitchen door for his grubby ones. He gave his mother an accusatory glare, which she answered by saying, “Ever think of looking in your closet? Some things do get put away, you know.”

  “Can I go barefoot, Mom?”

  Eleanor made a production of walking to the window and gazing out and up. “Snow’s still on the mountain,” she said. Philip, who knew quite well there was still snow on the mountain, and therefore knew as well that he could not go barefoot outside, was ever hopeful that just once his mother might forget to check. He sighed. Not until the last vestige of snow had left the top of the nearest mountain would his mother deem it “bare-foot-weather.”

  He dashed into his room, from which emitted terrible noises for a few moments, then ominous silence.

  “Hang up your pants!” Eleanor called, and was rewarded by hearing the closet door squeak open then shut with a crash. “And come get your shoes!”

  Philip pelted back into the kitchen, skidded to a stop complete with squealing brakes sound-effects, grinned his most engagingly, and said, “Did you remember to make doughnuts today? Sticky doughnuts?”

  “One sticky doughnut coming right up, sir,” Eleanor replied, opening the can and passing him one. She licked her fingers and her lips and opened the can again, this time retaining a doughnut for herself. She bit into it, savoring. “I shouldn’t give in to you and make things I know are bad for me,” she said. “I always tell myself I’m not going to indulge, then I do. I’m going to get fat.”

  Philip hooted. “Aw, Mom, you won’t get fat.” Then, still holding his own doughnut, he said, “But can I have another one, please? For Jeff?”

  “Oh?” Eleanor pursed her lips, cocked her head to one side. “You really think ‘Jeff’ needs a doughnut?”

  “Uh-huh,” he nodded. She bit back a smile at her son’s earnest claim. “He doesn’t have a mom to look after him and he lives alone in a camper. He can make cakes and things in his little oven, but he couldn’t make these.” Philip waved his doughnut around as sticky crumbs of icing scattered all over the floor. “He doesn’t have a deep fryer.”

  More to save her kitchen floor than anything else, Eleanor gave Philip the extra treat he’d requested and pushed him out the door. “Okay, okay,” she laughed. “After a story as full of detail as that, I guess you deserve one for ‘Jeff’.” Not to mention creativity. A camper? Philip had been indignant when she’d declined to buy one for him so they could go to Disneyland like his friend, Tommy, and family had done last year.

  As Philip warmed up his jets for takeoff, his mother called loudly above the racket. “And don’t be late! We’re going out for dinner with Grant!”

  The whining jets suffered an abrupt flameout and Philip protested. “Aw, Mom, can’t I have dinner with Kathy and Bill or”—hopefully—“Jeff?”

  Eleanor shook her head. “Not tonight, love. Grant’s going to ask the chef to make a big juicy hamburger for you with cheese, bacon, tomatoes, and lots of sauce. Sound good?”

  “Fries, too?”

  “Fries, too.”

  Waving two the two sticky doughnuts, one half-eaten, the other intact, from his wingtips, which the uninitiated might have considered handlebars, Starfighter Philip screamed away, kicking in his afterburners as he soared out over the rapidly diminishing terrain three thousand miles below him. Boy, nobody’s ever taken one of these birds this high before.

  In a flash he had found the section of forest he wanted and the Starfighter became a helicopter which was landed with great expertise and all the correct sound effects in the clearing. Lying there beside a pile of peeled logs, it masqueraded as a battered bike.

  The glade was empty and the pilot stood near his machine looking for the enemy. The sound of a truck in low gear alerted him and he huddled behind a bush, lurking... waiting. In the month since school had been back in after Spring Break, much as been done in the clearing and as always, Jeff had left quite a bit for Philip to do this afternoon. There were littered patches beside naked logs, underbrush still to be
uprooted or cut back., and the helicopter pilot forgot his mission as Jeff limped into the clearing. “Hi, Jeff. Want a doughnut?”

  A smile lit the face of the man. “Surely would like a doughnut, sport,” he said. Philip produced the pair of sticky buns and leaning against a stump the two munched in companionable silence until the last crumbling bit of icing had been licked from each finger. Jeff said, brushing the icing off a short curly beard, “That was great. Who made them?”

  “My mom. She’s a good cooker. I’ll bring you another one after school tomorrow.”

  “That would be nice, Phil, but if you keep bringing goodies like that, I’m going to end up looking like a big old tub.” He picked up his axe and began limbing a tree which lay on the ground.

  “That’s what my mom said, that doughnuts make her too fat.”

  Jeff leaned on the handle of his axe and looked quizzically at the boy. “Your mom isn’t fat, is she?”

  “Nah. She’s skinny. Grant says she doesn’t eat enough. We’re going out to dinner at the hotel tonight with Grant and I’m getting a gooey hamburger with cheese and bacon and tomatoes and fries, too.”

  “Fries, too?” Jeff whistled, impressed. “Can you eat all that?”

  “Sure. I’ve got a hollow leg.”

  “It sounds like a good dinner. I’d like to have that, too. Where is this hotel you and your mom and Grant are going to?”

  “Oh, Grant doesn’t have to go to it. He lives there. It’s his. Appleton’s Hotel and Resort. You know.”

  “Yes,” Jeff said slowly. “I know. I’ve driven by it. Pool, air conditioning, gourmet dining, luxury cabins, riding trails, horse rentals? Live band on weekends. That the one?”

  “Yes. Hey, Jeff, why don’t you come too? We always have a table right by the windows and there’s four chairs and only three of us to sit there.”

  “Well, sport, that’s a nice thought, but it’s not such a good idea. You see, if your mom and Grant are going to get married, then they probably wouldn’t want a stranger horning in. He’ll be your stepfather when they marry, you know, and you’ll be a family.”

  “Yeah... I know.” Philip had no idea how revealing his answer was to his friend.

  “When do they plan to get married, son?” Jeff asked.

  “Grant says the minute my mom stops acting like she’s a love-lorna girl and tells the judge to say my father’s dead. What’s a love-lorna girl?”

  Jeff’s face relaxed from its tight lines and he grinned at the child. “I think you mean ‘lovelorn’, Philip. It means she’s in love with someone.”

  “Oh, yeah. Grant says she only thinks she is because she can’t love ghost for the rest of her life. My mom says she doesn’t know who she’s in love with unless it’s me and her computer. I asked her about it after I heard her and Grant fighting one night when they thought it was asleep.” He cocked his head to one side and Jeff felt his heart tumble painfully at the so familiar mannerism—so familiar and last seen so long before...

  Philip’s voice broke into his thoughts. “Hey, Jeff...” He frowned, as if unsure of the rightness of asking this question.

  “What is it, Phil?”

  “Well... When Grant was yelling at my mom, he said it was crimmal to let a king-size bed go to waste like that. I know a crimmal is someone who has to go to jail, and my mom laughed when I asked her and she said she wasn’t being crimmal at all and not to worry about what Grant says. She’s not going to go to jail, is she?”

  “No, son! She is most definitely not going to go to jail,” Jeff replied emphatically. “Tell me, Philip, what does your mom look like?”

  Philip thought hard for a moment. “She’s kind of pretty. Not like Miss Walker, but she’s okay.”

  “Is her hair black, brown, gray?”

  “Don’t know, it’s kind of like... like... like a root beer popsicle. And so’s her eyes.”

  Jeff threw back his head and roared with laughter. “A root beer popsicle! Oh, Phil, that’s wonderful. Who,” he asked, sobering somewhat, “is Miss Walker?”

  “She’s my teacher. She has real pretty yellow hair and it’s always blowing in the wind when we’re outside playing. She can run faster than me and she has blue eyes. She’s real pretty.”

  “She sounds nice. So you think your teacher’s prettier than your mom, do you?”

  “Well... Maybe not much, but a little bit. She’s not quite as nice, though. I love my mom best. Better even than Lorna.”

  “Another girl in your life? Who is Lorna?” There was absolutely no work being done on the clearing today. Jeff didn’t care.

  “She’s my girlfriend. I think I love her. That’s why I thought Grant was saying love-Lorna. I figured maybe my mom loved Lorna, too.”

  Jeff laughed deep in his throat and rubbed his hand over the straight-haired head by his knee. “Well, sport, there’s lots of time for you to think about loving Lorna. Right now we have a cabin to build. I don’t want to be living in the camper come winter, so let’s get on with this before the snow flies. What kind of fireplace should we make—stone, brick? You see, we have to do that first. We’ll build the cabin around it.”

  “Oh, stone,” Philip replied, earnestly and without hesitation. “Stone’s the nicest. The one in Grant’s restaurant is made out of orange bricks and it doesn’t even look like a fireplace. You can see into it from both sides and it only has pretend logs. The one in our house’s made out of big gray stones. My father built it, mom says. She said he could build anything. I wish I had a picture of him, but we don’t. My grandpa—I don’t remember him—put them all away so my mom would quit crying and now we can’t find them.”

  “What do you know about your father, Phil?”

  “He is tall and skinny and his eyes are like mine, just a little darker.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Well, my mom says he’s a hard act to follow... She didn’t say that to me though, she said it to Kathy. And he likes trees and he went away to the jungles ’cause they have special trees there, different, and he wanted to learn how to save them. They give us ox—oxy-something so we can breathe right.”

  “Oxygen.”

  “Yeah. My dad’s a hero. He got lost in the jungle and they’re still looking for him. I’m going to go to the jungle and help look for him as soon as I can. Then my mom won’t have to marry Grant.”

  Jeff raised his head, turned his face away from Philip and swallowed hard. “Listen,” he said. “Is that your mom calling you?” And sure enough, faint and far away, came the high clear call.

  “That’s her! See you tomorrow, Jeff!”

  “No... See you tonight, Philip. I’m going to the hotel for dinner, too. But...” He hesitated for a moment, eyeing the boy, and Philip interrupted.

  “Are you?” His eyes were alight. “But listen, Jeff...” Philip’s ears turned pink. “You won’t say anything to... Anybody about Lorna, will you?”

  “Of course not. Wouldn’t you like your mom to know you had another girl besides her?”

  “Oh, Mom wouldn’t mind. But Grant...” His nose wrinkled. “He’d make fun of me.”

  “I won’t say a word, sport. But tell you what. Just in case I forget, and mention it, we’ll pretend we’re strangers and not even say hi to each other. It’ll be our secret that we’re friends building a log cabin together. Okay?”

  “Sure Jeff!” And the call came again still faint, but with an undertone that meant business.

  ~ * ~

  Philip, on his half-broken mustang, burst from cover at the crest of the hill and ran down, firing his rifle into the horde of Indians who filled the bottom of the valley. Single-handed, he wiped out eighteen of them, dodging wildly from pine tree to pine tree. The remainder leapt upon their pintos and galloped out across the prairie, leaving behind a beautiful Indian princess whom Philip grabbed by the hand as he dismounted.

  “I caught you, Indian Princess! I’m going to steal you and hide you from those braves”—he waved a disdainful hand at the depar
ting Indians—“and they’ll never find you again. Hii yee!”

  And the Indian princess, who had been about to threaten laying some rawhide across a small bottom, instead cowered away from the intrepid cowboy and said, “Oh, please, please, brave cowboy, let me go! I must go back to the teepee of my father! If I don’t... He won’t let you have a gooey a hamburger for dinner.”

  Philip glowered at his mother. “He’s not your father. Or mine, either!”

  Briefly taken aback by the vehemence in her son’s tone, Eleanor paused for a moment before she spoke. “Wouldn’t you like to have a father, Phil... To have Grant as a stepfather?”

  Philip considered carefully for a moment as they walked on. “Would we live in the hotel, swim in the pool, play on the waterslides and eat in the restaurant all the time?”

  “Well, you could swim in the pool all you like, and use the waterslides when it’s warm enough, I suppose, but I imagine Grant would build us a house, and I’d make most of our meals in our own kitchen.”

  “Would Grant build the house his ownself?”

  “No, of course not, honey,” Eleanor picked up the bike and wheeled it along for him as he dragged his feet. “He’d have it built for us though, and it would be ours. We’d all three live in it, and be a real family.”

  “I’d rather live in the cabin with Jeff. We’re building that our ownselves.”

  “Ourselves, Philip,” Eleanor corrected, and dropped the subject.

  ~ * ~

  The restaurant was fairly crowded that evening when Eleanor entered on Grant’s arm with her son bouncing along ahead, peering interestedly into other people’s plates. Solicitous as always, Grant held out Eleanor’s chair, told Philip to sit down and quit gawking at the guests. He seated himself with his back to the window, surveying his domain with a proud expression. He ordered for all three of them, only requiring a reminder that Philip’s burger required extra gooey sauce on the bun. While the two adults sipped wine from Grant’s private stock, Philip fidgeted, twisting around, craning his neck, trying to see what lay behind him.