The Things I Want Most

by Richard Miniter

  “Look,” she said in a sharp bark, “you’re just about grown men, and I’m only going to say this once. Mike can’t sleep well if he doesn’t have a dog on his bed. I know these are your dogs, but he’s been with them for months now while you’ve been gone, and Liam will tell you that ever since he’s been able to have a dog, he doesn’t cry or moan at night. So here’s what’s going to happen. Mike will always have a dog, and since I’m not going to get another one to clean up after, it’ll have to be one of yours. I don’t care which; they can take turns.”

  “Mom.”

  “Don’t ‘Mom’ me. This kid has been working all afternoon to make your meal for tonight. So if any of you give me one single little itsy-bitsy word of argument, I’m going to rip your lips off.”

  “Cinderella.”

  “What?” I looked up from my book the next morning.

  “Cinderella,” Sue repeated. “He’s a foster child, and he feels it. He’s smart, he resents being a foster child, resists it, and he’s supersensitive about being labeled one. Any child in his situation would feel the same way. Then it follows that if you hand him chores to do by himself, you’re working him like Cinderella was forced to work for her stepmother. To his mind it’s as much as hanging a sign on him saying ‘foster child,’ ‘stepchild,’ ‘I don’t fit in.’ It’s what Kathy meant when she said his own image of himself was the most important possession he has.”

  “So?”

  “So when I asked him to help me, not work for me, he was more than happy to—grateful, even. He stayed with me in the kitchen for over three hours, cleaning, putting the lasagna together, doing pots and dishes, carrying out the garbage.”

  “It’s a subtle distinction—he still worked.”

  “To us it’s subtle. To him there’s a world of difference between helping and working. And to tell you the truth, I never saw him enjoy a dinner more, despite the fact that the boys cold-shouldered him. He felt that the lasagna was partially his.”

  “Hmmm. So it seems both of you got what you wanted. He’s not working and you have him pitching in around here.”

  “Yeah,” she said slowly, thinking it out, “although every chore can’t be a group effort. So I have to go out of my way to make him think it’s inclusive, not isolating. If I manage that, I’m positive he’ll look around in a couple of months and feel much more secure and a little bit more responsible. In any event, it’s got to be downhill from here.”

  But instead, it turned into a hard slide up. Acquiring a place in the family requires acceptance, and there was more to this family than just Sue and me.

  We had been concerned that the boys’ acceptance of Mike would be rough. We should have been concerned about there being any acceptance at all.

  Brendan is usually susceptible to a kind impulse, and Liam was doggedly cooperative even as he watched his relationship with us get shortchanged with Mike on the scene, yet both of them also take cues from the older Henry and Frank, and those two were just about unreservedly of one mind about Mike. In the infrequent conversations we’d had since the summer and over parents’ weekend, they’d as much as told us straight out that they considered Mike insignificant, a “welfare” child with strange, quirky habits and a bizarre fringe history. Not that they meant him any harm; it was just that they didn’t see the necessity or the economics in salvaging a grievously wounded animal, and that’s how they talked about Mike, as a social cull who had somehow become a fixation of their parents in late middle age.

  And besides, he had their dogs.

  Not that we were entirely without hope. All the children exhibited a hefty degree of intractability, but Frank and Henry’s steel-tendoned and decade-long determination to focus on first the mountain, woodcraft and hunting, and then on academics in college, to the exclusion of normal family amenities; parceling out words as if they were gold coins; staring at you mute when asked to pick up after themselves or perhaps disappearing at odd times; often prompted special worry on our part in the past. In our day-to-day dealings with those two boys it wasn’t hard to get the impression that they believed family life, and Sue and I in particular, were just a phase, something to be endured until they were old enough in Henry’s case to become a harrier pilot for the Marine Corps or an FBI agent, and in Frank’s case a photographer for National Geographic or the Smithsonian Magazine in some backcountry somewhere. And while we could accept their future vision of themselves as good—goals and striving and concentration were very good, although I did have severe doubts about harriers—what about the first part? What about family? If that’s what they believed, would it ever be possible to change their minds, to explain to these two dense guys that family is the only endgame in town? Could they even understand anything like that? In fact, was there any real feeling or attachment on their part at all? Suppose, we sometimes wondered, something really serious happened to us or to the family? Would they even care or respond?

  Two incidents went a long way toward our coming to understand that much of Henry and Frank’s public facade was just that, a facade. That beneath their distant exterior was some hidden inner ward. That no matter how coldly they came on, something else was there behind a door.

  One was Susanne’s wedding, when all the boys stood up in a line and spoke in public about their love for their sister. Those five minutes profoundly moved Sue and me. We never thought the boys—Henry and Frank, in particular—would reveal their feelings that way. The other was an accident—one of those bizarre household happenings, usually with fatal result—that one reads about in the paper.

  I fell down our well.

  The wellhead for our house is located in a large, underground concrete room out back, and one day I was having a heated argument outside with the four of them. I had a heavy item to move, and it was one of those rare occasions when I had four strong bodies right at hand all at the same time. But of course they all had something else to do and couldn’t be bothered.

  “You are the most selfish, self-centered shits I can imagine,” I remember saying to myself.

  Then I took a step backward onto the square manhole cover over the underground room. But one of the supports had shifted, and the large sheet of thick steel plate revolved, dropping me eight or nine feet down onto the steel ladder inside. Then the manhole cover rotated ninety degrees and fell in on top of me.

  If the edge had come down first, I would have been killed outright, but the large flat top struck me instead, smashing me against the steel ladder and knocking me mostly unconscious.

  I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t see. But in an instant I could feel the weight of the cover fly off me and then my body floated miraculously up out of the well room.

  I came to on the grass with Henry looking me in the face while the other boys were stretching me out and Henry was issuing orders: “Okay, CPR now—I’ll administer. Frank, you call Rescue. Liam, get Mom. Brendan, stand by to assist.”

  “Hey, guys,” I managed to gasp and sputter. “I’m okay.”

  “You sure?” I could feel them searching for broken bones, poking and prodding at me, their faces furrowed, anxious, all trying to talk to me at once. “Dad, Dad, are you all right?”

  Then they lifted me up to my feet and helped me inside, where Sue found me lying on the bed a half hour later.

  “What are you doing?”

  I was sore all over but able to crack a contented smile and say, “I’m reflecting on what excellent sons we have.”

  So they aren’t all bad.

  But they are tough.

  And maybe, just maybe, all Sue had done by fighting Mike through to a “helping” position in the family was to set him up for a big fall. Because each night Mike worked in the kitchen with Sue baking cakes, preparing dinner, helping to carry in and then clean up. All night, every night, Mike had some pride of ownership in the meal, in the way the house looked, and all night, every night, the other boys ignored him.

  In fact, worse than ignoring him, they openly disdained him. If
one of them wanted the potatoes and they were on the table in front of Mike, they’d pointedly ask someone else to pass the dish. They’d never say hello to him when they walked into a room; they never said good-bye. They never once said his name.

  It was awful.

  Worse than awful, it devolved into one of those pointless contests of will between father and sons. No matter how much I glowered at them, they were determined to ignore my disapproval as much as they ignored Mike. Words didn’t do any good, either. I just got the blank-faced look back. Several times I heard Sue arguing with them, but it was like trying to reason with a box of rocks.

  For the first couple of nights Mike kept his head up. “I made this pie. I made these vegetables,” he’d say to the boys. But they rarely responded, and when they did it was with a sarcastic, “Really?”

  Every time they did something like that it rocked Mike. I could feel the stab, and I could see that the next time his head came up it wasn’t quite as high as the day before.

  But the last and final shot came when, on the day before Thanksgiving, I spotted Brendan and Henry talking with Tony Tantillo and a group of men in front of Tony’s sporting goods store.

  “Hey, Tony, Brendan, Henry.”

  Indifferent nods from Henry and Brendan when they saw Mike tagging along behind me; a broad smile and a “Hello, Rich” from Tony

  “Hey, who’s this?” Tony asked, looking at Mike. A big man with a beard and a happy, smiling face, Tony was a biologist who used to teach school in Alaska but was from this area, originally, and returned to open Sunset Sporting Goods in New Paltz. He and his wife, Fawn, had long ago become friends. Four of the boys had worked for Tony at one time or another.

  Now Tony said, “Is there a Miniter I don’t know about?”

  “This is Mike.”

  Tony knew all about Mike, of course, but pretended he didn’t. “Well, it’s about time your dad brought you over.”

  Mike smiled back and nodded, but his wary eyes were on Henry and Brendan. They didn’t look back.

  The circle of men had been discussing the deer take so far this season, and now the conversation started back up again.

  “Dave Kirchner shot a six-pointer off the power line opening day.”

  “Yeah. Well, no big deer anywhere I’ve seen.”

  “Fawn and I both got nice racks. Henry here shot a six yesterday. But I know what you mean—most of what I’ve seen are the size of sick dogs.”

  “Everybody’s switching to .243s.”

  “They’re lengthening Black Powder this year.”

  “I saw the old ghost in velvet this August, nearly scared the hell out of me.”

  “Lotsa turkeys in the woods.”

  “Seven-millimeter Magnum …”

  Mike’s head was swiveling back and forth, fascinated with the conversation but also furtively reading the looks on the boys’ faces, waiting for them to say hello to him, even just nod in his direction. Disappointed, I grabbed Mike and wandered off, waving good-bye.

  Tony walked after me. “Those guys have a real case about Mike.”

  “Yeah,” I laughed, “it seems it started with the dogs. Now it’s some sort of general grievance”

  “They’ll come around.”

  “I guess so.”

  “See ya later, Mike—you’re in a good family,” and Tony hit Mike in the shoulder.

  Mike looked at Tony, his face a steely mixture of anger and hopelessness. “I’m not part of this family. I’m a foster child.”

  Later on at home I relayed the conversation to Sue.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know whether to cry or stampede. It makes you wonder why we’re doing any of this.”

  And then Mike wouldn’t help anymore.

  CHAPTER NINE

  the initiation

  Early in the morning the house was full of the smell of turkey in the oven and I was sick with a major case of the flu. I hadn’t even thought of getting up to go hunting, and when I did come downstairs, it was late in the morning with three or four aspirin in me and a sweatshirt on under a heavy flannel shirt.

  In the kitchen, Sue had a mountain of fixings laid out in various stages in the kitchen.

  “How’re you feeling?”

  “Like death.”

  “Are you going to be able to eat with us?”

  “I can always eat.”

  Then I looked around the kitchen. “Where’s your little shadow?”

  Sue nodded inside to the barroom. “He came down, got a bowl of cereal, and went inside.”

  I went in to him.

  “Why don’t you help Sue?” I asked him.

  Head down over his cereal bowl: “I don’t help.”

  “I see.”

  Then I tried to lower my voice. “Mike, those boys have been together a long time. It’s a little bit too much to expect that they would accept you right off. You give them time. They’re acting like jerks right now, but that will change.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Mike?”

  “They think I’m a retard. They don’t even talk to me.”

  “They don’t think that. They’re just put out.”

  “I hate this family. I wish they’d put me in a good family.”

  “David and Susanne will be over.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll talk to David. I hate everybody else. There’s nobody else I like in this family.”

  I went to walk away when the barroom door slammed open.

  “Howdy, howdy, howdy.” My niece and her husband Matt tromped in, Kathryn smiling shyly and Matt whooping, “Howdy.”

  “Hi, Uncle Richard,” and Kathryn gave me a hug. “Boy, it smells good in here. Where’s Aunt Sue?”

  I pointed inside, and then Matt came over and took my hand.

  Six foot something, tall and spare, with a southern accent, Matt worked a Coast Guard rescue boat out of Fire Island. He had been raised on a farm in the mountains of North Carolina and had met my niece when he was stationed in Florida.

  An inveterate deer hunter and woodsman, Matt was ill at ease at first with what he saw of Kathryn’s family. He hadn’t much in common with her mother, her aunt, and her uncles, all living within the city limits of St. Petersburg. And sight unseen, he transferred that forlorn impression to us. So much so that Kathryn had to drag him up to see us for the first time. “More of this family? Well,” gulp, “I’ll jest try to be polite.”

  But when he came up and saw the mountains, saw the deer heads mounted on the walls, and met the boys, he kept repeating over and over, “I didn’t know about the Miniters in New York. I just didn’t know, golleee!”

  And of course he fit right in.

  Now Matt peered around me to where Mike was standing. “Who’s this?”

  Mike hung back and rudely asked, “Who’s that person? That’s not one of the sons.”

  “No, Mike, that’s the nutcase my niece married. He’s up here for four or five days.”

  Mike stuck out his lower lip and turned away, but was immediately spun around and confronted with an outstretched hand in front of his face. “I guess you’re Mike and I guess I’m Matt, so shake.”

  Reluctantly, Mike took the hand and then had his arm pumped. “Why, you’re even uglier than they said. But gosh, I’m new in this family, too, so the two of us have to stick together close, even if you do look like you’ve been chewing on briars.”

  Just as a Texan says “tarred” when he means “tired,” Matt says “briaaars” when he means “briars.”

  Matt bent down, looked him in the eye with his head tilted sideways, and smiled.

  Against his will Mike smiled back, and then he laughed in shrieks as Matt whipped off his baseball cap, pulled it down over Mike’s face, and pummeled him on top of the head.

  Sue was watching from the kitchen doorway. “Matt, am I glad to see you.”

  The boys arrived home and cleaned up, the table was nicely set, and David and Susanne had arrived. It was long after dark— late for Thanksgiv
ing, but we always eat late. The boys want every last moment up on Shawangunk.

  Each time Mike came into the barroom he’d walk a big circle around Henry, Frank, Brendan, and Liam, taking a place where he’d be close to Matt or David.

  The two turkeys were out of the oven, and Sue had gone upstairs. “Rich, I’m going to change. Don’t let the cat into the kitchen.”

  I walked over to the bar, where David asked me, “Can I mix you another drink?”

  “No,” I said, “with this flu, everything is tasteless. Besides, if I’m asleep when Sue’s dinner is served, I’ll never hear the end of it.”

  David shrugged his shoulders over at the four boys, sitting and listening to a loud story of Matt’s. “Maybe you should sleep through this one.”

  “I know what you mean. Sue has been entirely too quiet. Somewhere between turkey and pie there’s bound to be an explosion. All I want to do is keep my head down.”

  David laughed. “Me, too.”

  Mike popped up next to David with a petulant look on his face. “I’m hungry. When is this family going to eat?”

  There was something about the way he said this family that touched a nerve, but I let it go. “Mike, the turkeys are out of the oven. I’m going to carve them in a couple of minutes. You can go in there and slice yourself off a little bit”

  Then he popped back down and disappeared.

  “Maybe I will have that drink.”

  A couple of minutes later Sue came back downstairs and walked into the kitchen. Then she came storming out in my direction.

  “Follow me,” she hissed.

  I walked behind her into the kitchen, but before I got fully in she turned and poked me in the chest. “What’s the one thing we know about Mike?”

  “I don’t have any idea of what you’re talking about.”