“I wet the bed,” he told Abby.
They didn’t adopt him. They didn’t notify Social Services. They didn’t even make an announcement to their friends. Everything went on as before, and Douglas went on being Douglas O’Brian—although, since Abby developed a habit of calling him “my little stem,” he did acquire a nickname. And sometimes the neighbors referred to him as Stem Whitshank, but that was just absentmindedness.
Outsiders had the impression that he was only staying till his mother got her affairs sorted out. (Or was it some other relative? Stories differed.) But most people, after a while, just assumed he was one of the family.
In a matter of weeks he took to calling Red and Abby “Dad” and “Mom,” but not because they told him to. He was merely echoing the other children, in the same way that he echoed Abby and addressed even grown-ups as “sweetheart,” till he got old enough to know better.
He grew more talkative, though so gradually that nobody could recall what specific day he became a normal, chattery youngster. He wore clothes that fit him, and he slept in a room of his own. It had once been Jeannie’s room, but they moved Jeannie in with Mandy because Stem certainly couldn’t continue sharing with Denny. Denny was sort of prickly about Stem. It all worked out, though. Mandy more or less put up with Jeannie’s presence, and Jeannie was thrilled to be living in a teenager’s room with cosmetics crowding the bureau top.
Above Stem’s bed hung a framed black-and-white photo of Lonesome holding a Budweiser, snapped by one of Red’s workmen the day they finished a building project. Abby believed very strongly that Stem should be encouraged to cherish his memories of his father. Of his mother too, if he’d had any memories, but he didn’t seem to. The reason his mother had gone away was, she was unhappy, Abby always told him. It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him. She loved him very much, as he would see if she ever came back. And Abby showed him the page in the phone book where his own name was listed year after year, “O’Brian Douglas A,” along with the Whitshanks’ number so his mother could easily find him. Stem listened to all this closely, but he said nothing. And in time it seemed he lost his memories of even his father, because when Abby asked Stem on his tenth birthday whether he ever thought about him, he said, “I maybe remember his voice.”
“His voice!” Abby said. “Saying what?”
“I think he used to sing me a song when I was going to sleep. Or some guy did.”
“Oh, Stem, how nice. A lullaby?”
“No, it was about a goat.”
“Oh. And nothing else? No recollection of his face? Or something you two did together?”
“I guess not,” Stem said, without sounding too concerned about it.
He was an old soul, Abby told people. He was the kind of person who adapted and moved on, evidently.
He went through school without a fuss, earning only average grades but fulfilling all his assignments. You could imagine him as the butt of school bullies, since he was small for his age in the early years, but actually he did fine. It may have been his friendly expression, or his general unflappability, or his tendency to assume the best in people. At any rate, he got along. He graduated from high school and went straight into Whitshank Construction, where he’d been working part-time ever since he was old enough; he said he didn’t see the need for college. He married the only girl he had ever shown any real interest in, had his children one-two-three, seemed never to look around and wonder if he might be better off someplace else. In this last respect, he was the one most like Red. Even his walk was Red’s—loping, leading with his forehead—and his lanky frame, though not his coloring. You could say that he looked like a Whitshank who’d been left out to bleach in the open too long: hair not black but light brown, eyes not sapphire but light blue. Faded, but still a Whitshank.
More of a Whitshank than Denny was, Denny had remarked when he heard that Stem had joined the firm.
Although once, back when Denny was a teenager still living at home, he’d asked Abby, “What’s this kid doing here? What did you think you were up to? Did you ever consider asking our permission?”
“Permission!” Abby said. “He’s your brother!”
Denny said, “He is not my brother. He is not remotely related to me, and for you to tell me he is is like … like those pretend-to-be liberals who claim they never notice whether a person is black or white. Don’t they have eyes? Don’t you? Were you so keen on doing good in the outside world that you didn’t stop to wonder if this would be good for us?”
Abby just said, “Oh, Denny.”
Oh, Denny.
4