“Love you, too,” she returns, and today she means it more than ever.
As the crow flies, Kurt’s stepfather’s Weehawken condo is less than a mile and a half from Kurt’s Manhattan apartment. But it takes him nearly an hour to cover that distance in rush hour traffic, even though he’s heading in the opposite direction of most commuters crossing the Hudson River.
He’d been surprised when his stepfather chose to stay in New Jersey after divorcing his mother.
“Why not the city?” he’d asked Rick the day he’d helped him move into a high--rise located on the wrong side of the river, as far as Kurt was concerned.
“Too expensive.”
“Not everywhere.” He’d managed to find an affordable place a few years earlier, and so had his brother. Then again, they’re both probably making more money than Rick is these days—-or has in years.
He’d always seemed content to stay at home with the kids and Mom had been fine with that scenario. After Kurt’s sister, Erin, started preschool, Rick went back to work. But his income was a drop in the bucket compared to Mom’s.
She didn’t mind. As far as she was concerned, Rick Walker had been her knight in shining armor at a time in her life when she was on her own with two little boys. She loved him.
And so did we.
Kurt will never forget the sunny afternoon when he and his brother came home from school to find Mom waiting for them on the stoop. The last time that had happened, she broke the news that their father had disappeared. This time, Kurt—-then in first grade—-braced himself for another bombshell.
“Rick wants to marry me,” she said. “I won’t say yes unless you guys want me to.”
They were momentarily dumbstruck.
Kurt managed to speak first. “Will he live with us?”
Mom smiled. “He sure will.”
“Can we call him Dad?”
“That’s up to him. Should I say yes?”
Their answer to her was yes; Mom’s answer to Rick was yes; Rick’s answer to the dad question was yes.
He was the one who taught Kurt how to pitch a baseball and helped him with multiplication tables and made his lunch every day. He was the one who gave Kurt the Big Talk after the seventh--grade biology teacher sent home a note to all the parents that the reproduction unit was looming. He was the one who sat in the passenger’s seat on the New Jersey Turnpike after Kurt got his driving permit; the one who tied his bow tie for his senior prom; the one who taught him how to shave, using an old--fashioned straight razor just like his own father had taught him.
“Those plastic safety razors are fine when you’re in a hurry,” Rick said, as they looked at each other in the bathroom mirror, faces lathered in preparation for the lesson, “but real men use real razors.”
Kurt wanted to be a real man just like Rick, who wasn’t his real father—-not biologically, anyway—-but was the only one who’d ever mattered.
His biological father did resurface a -couple of times over the years, wanting to bond with him and his brother. But neither of them wanted anything to do with him, and neither did their mother.
She despised her first husband, but according to the suicide note she was clutching when she killed herself last November, she never stopped loving her second.
This morning’s weather is as oppressive as yesterday’s was luminous, with the threat of rain or snow hanging low in the sky beyond the turrets of the Mundy’s Landing Historical Society.
Rowan stands beside the open doors of the yellow school bus parked at the curb in front of 62 Prospect Street, counting heads as her class files out onto the sidewalk.
The most important rule of a fourth--grade field trip—-always count heads, always, constantly—-seems particularly important this morning. She’s seen more police cars than usual around the village and Bari Hicks mentioned that they’re looking for a high school girl who never came home last night. She didn’t remember the name, but had heard that the girl had a boyfriend at a college somewhere in New England.