The Man I Love by Suanne Laqueur
To My Favorite
Part One: Erik
A Guarded Boy
Some seek the limelight and some hold the light in place.
Erik Fiskare didn’t like being the center of attention, but he liked situations where he had to keep the attention centered.
He was the son of a builder and a musician. He grew up around his father’s workbench, watching how things were made. Or around his mother’s piano, listening to how things were composed. The smoky smell of cut wood and the dizzy odor of turpentine wreathed his childhood days, along with the strains of Bach and Mozart. He played with scrap wood on the saw-dusty floor, pattering along to the ring of hammer on nail and the dissonant squeal of a power saw. Or he lay on the rug beneath the piano, listening to hammers striking strings, nattering to himself as his mother gave lessons to neighborhood kids.
“Erik is happiest when he’s underfoot,” she always said.
In the dark of a night when he was eight years old, Erik awoke to the sound of wheels crunching over gravel in the driveway. From his bedroom window he stared as his father’s pickup truck backed out. It gleamed white in the moonlight, the blue letters crisp on the driver’s side door—FISKARE CONSTRUCTION arching over a fleet of blue fish. Fiskare was Swedish for “fisherman.”
Erik watched the red taillights pull further and further down the street, then turn a corner and disappear.
He never saw his father again.
It was a cruel and unexplained desertion which left in its wake a little boy soothed by routine and structure, calmed when things went to according plan. He grew into a teenager with an insatiable need to know how things worked and why. He took everything apart and put it back together, usually successfully. Anything refusing to reassemble was jerry-rigged, and anything that wouldn’t jerry-rig was recycled. Any guy with half a brain knew to have a plan B. Erik had a plan C and D, minimum.
In youth sports he was continually elected captain, for not only was he a natural athlete, but also a natural rallying point. He knew just enough about all his teammates’ personalities to figure out how the team worked best. The team had its superstars, its weak links and its filler. And the self-effacing guy who had his finger on the pulse of it all, the oil keeping the gears in motion, the unifying force making the many into one—that was Erik.
He dialed into basketball in elementary school. An early growth spurt had him at a promising five-eleven by the start of junior high. But to his disappointment, later adolescence only granted him another three-quarters of an inch. He would never break the six-foot ceiling so beloved to boys.