For Whom the Minivan Rolls (10 page)

“Well, have an apple or something,” I said, trying
to hold onto my calm.
One
of us had to speak in a normal
tone for a moment.

“Daddy, I got my cereal and the bowl all by myself
this morning,” Leah chirped.

“Very good, Cookie.”

Ethan’s mocking tone mimicked me perfectly. “Very
good, Cookie.” Then, in his own voice, “I may puke.”

“Watch yourself, Ethan.”

“
Watch yourself, Ethan.”

“Look, Pal, it’s not my fault
that. . .”

In mid-sentence, he started aping me again. And my
eyes were just a little wider, my throat a little tighter, than
when I’d started speaking. Remember, I told myself, he’s the one
who’s having the rough time. It’s not his fault.

Ethan got up from the table, with a triumphant smirk
on his face, and started for the living room. I walked to the
cabinet where we keep his Ritalin pills and took one out.

“Hey, Ethan, you forgot your pill.”

“
Hey, Ethan, you forgot your pill.”

Leah’s eyes widened a bit as she watched me, sure
that I’d blow up in Ethan’s face. I am not the most patient man in
the world, and Asperger’s Syndrome is a perfect fit for someone
like me (your Sarcasm Alarm should be going off about now). I’m
likely to pop a blood vessel one morning.

“Ethan. . .”

“
Ethan. . .”

I grabbed him by the forearms and forced him to look
into my eyes. His hands started to flap at his sides, and his eyes
rolled up in their sockets, a sign the Asperger’s was in full
bloom.

“
I
didn’t write anything on the sidewalk,” I
said. “
I’m
not the one who doesn’t like you.
Don’t take
this out on me!”
As usual, I’d tried, and failed, to hold onto
my temper. A swell start to another great day.

Leah jumped up and ran to the bow window in the
living room. “Who wrote something on the sidewalk?”

Abigail walked down the stairs in her work clothes,
still putting on her earrings, just in time to hear Leah ask,
“Daddy, what does F-U-C-K mean?”

“Nothing, Honey.”

“Then how come somebody wrote it out on the
sidewalk, with Ethan’s name. . .”

Ethan broke my grip on his arms, glared at me, then
walked out of the room. He grabbed his backpack off the banister
hook, threw it over his shoulder, and barreled his way out of the
house, slamming the door behind him.

Abby looked at me.

“What happened?”

“What do you think happened? He’s upset, so he’s
taking it out on me because you’re upstairs putting on
pantyhose.”

“Hey, it’s not my fault that. . .”

“It’s not mine, either.”

She looked at me and took a long breath. Then, at
the least likely time, she reached over and kissed me gently on the
cheek. “I know.”

“I know, too.” I held her in my arms, the only time
of the day I truly feel right, and exhaled. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, the Ritalin will kick in before he’s at
school.”

I groaned. “No, it won’t. He didn’t take his pill
before he left.”

Abby stared at me. “Are you kidding?”

“No, and he didn’t eat breakfast, either.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Mommy, what does ‘oh, shit” mean?” Leah suddenly
appeared from behind Abby.

“Nothing, Baby.” She looked at me. “You want me
to. . .”

“No, I’ll call the nurse and tell her to get a pill
into him as soon as he gets there. They know me. Besides, I think
I’ll be over there this morning, anyway.”

Abby nodded. After she left, Leah and I had our
Dad-and-daughter time, when she usually gets silly with me and
plays some game like “move your arm like this.” But today, she just
wanted me to sit next to her on the living room couch.

“Daddy, why did somebody write something about Ethan
on the sidewalk?”

“I don’t know, Sweetie.”

“Is it something bad?”

“Yes,” I said. “It’s something bad the way they used
it. And as far as I can tell, they did it just to be mean.”

“Is that why you and Ethan got into a fight?” Leah
hated it when voices were raised in the house. I sometimes wondered
how she’d gotten into this family to begin with.

“We didn’t get into a fight, Leah. Ethan was upset,
and I got upset with the way he showed it. A fight is where people
try to hurt each other, and we never do that.”

“But that’s why he’s upset, right?”

“Right, Baby.”

She sat still for a very long time, which is not at
all Leah’s style. “I don’t like who did that to Ethan.” She rested
her head on my knee and stared at the TV set, which was turned
off.

“Neither do I, Honey.”

After Leah got on the school bus, I got out a bottle
of chlorine bleach from the basement laundry room and poured some
over the sidewalk. Let it set, and I’ll come back later to hose it
down. Maybe that’ll get rid of the stain. Then I packed a lunch for
Ethan and walked over to the Buzbee School, where all Midland
Heights children—those who attend public school, anyway—go from
third to sixth grade. This was Ethan’s third year there, and both
he and I are well known in the Buzbee hallways.

I walked up the front steps of the two-story brick
building, which stretches all the way across a city block. At the
lobby, I made a quick right turn into the main office.

Ramona the school secretary was behind her desk,
Jersey hair a foot in the air, drinking an orange soda at 8:20 in
the morning. Ramona, it was rumored, had once been the receptionist
at an Atlantic City brothel, and, having dealt with all sorts of
juvenile behavior, was perfectly suited to her work in an
elementary school.

“What’s up, Mr. Tucker?”

“He forgot his lunch, Ramona.” I waved the bag in
front of her. Ramona nodded.

“I thought maybe Mrs. Mignano had called you,” she
said, taking the lunch bag out of my hand. Ramona flashed me a
look, then glanced quickly into the principal’s office behind
her.

My lips tightened around my teeth. “Did something
happen?”

“Ethan tried to choke someone.”

“He tried to
what?”

“Before school, Justin Hartman was getting on Ethan
in the playground, and Ethan went for his throat.” Ramona’s voice
lowered from its usual glass-breaking pitch to a tone that could
only be heard across a football field.

“On the playground? Why wasn’t he in the
Before-School Club?” Joan Delbert, a teacher who’s displayed more
patience in a single minute than I have in an entire lifetime, runs
the Before-School Club for kids who are, frankly, better off not
staying on the playground when they don’t have to be there. And
Ethan has been in the club every morning for two and a half
years.

“I don’t know. He’s usually there.”

“Was his aide there?” I saw Anne Mignano, Buzbee’s
principal, approaching the office, and figured we were about to
have a conference.

“Wilma hadn’t gotten here yet. She’s used to Ethan
going to the club.” Ramona spotted the principal, too, and smiled
at me to pretend we were discussing her recipe for chocolate
soufflé.

Anne wasn’t taken in. She smiled when she saw me,
but wasn’t convincing. Her well-tailored gray suit gave her a
starched appearance, but we’d been through a few battles together,
and I knew her to be a warm-hearted administrator (if those words
can be placed next to each other) who cares deeply about the
students in her school.

“I was going to call you,” she said, extending her
hand, which I took. “I imagine Ramona has filled you in.”

“Yeah. Have you got a minute?”

“No,” she said. “But for this, I don’t have a
choice.”

We walked into Anne’s office. She closed the door
behind us, and motioned me to a chair behind her disturbingly neat
desk.

“It seems we have a problem,” she said.

“We have more than one problem. One of the reasons
he’s on a short fuse is that somebody wrote ‘Fuck Ethan’ in
barbecue sauce on the sidewalk outside our house last night.”

She didn’t flinch. “Aaron, I know that’s upsetting,
but it doesn’t mean he can grab people by the throat.”

“I know. Believe me, he’s not going to be rewarded
for his behavior when he gets home. But Anne, I need some help. Is
this Hartman kid a particular enemy of Ethan’s? Might he have
written something like that in front of my house?”

Anne’s face, more attractive, not less, because of
the fine lines around her eyes and mouth, seemed to narrow in a
frown as she thought. “No, he’s not the type,” she said. “You know,
there’s nothing I can do about that, since it happened outside the
school, not during school hours.” Her eyes looked right into me,
and I got the impression she could make an educated guess as to who
our graffiti artist might be.

“I’m not asking you to do anything, but if you have
any ideas, let’s just say nobody’s ever going to know who my source
is.”

Anne Mignano nodded. She thought for a few seconds
more, and reached for a sheet of blank paper in a Lucite box on her
desk. She wrote a few words on the paper and put it back in the
Lucite box. Then she coughed, surprisingly daintily, twice.

“Excuse me for a moment, would you, Aaron? I need a
drink of water. Won’t be gone a minute.” Anne got up and walked out
of her office, but closed the door behind her.

I reached over and took the paper from the Lucite
box. On it were written three names. I pocketed the paper and
waited a moment until Anne returned.

“I’m sorry I can’t help you with your investigation,
Aaron,” she said.

“It’s okay, Mrs. Mignano.”

“Now. About Ethan’s behavior. . .”

“How is the school dealing with it?” I asked.

“He’s getting three days detention and a special
homework assignment.”

I nodded. “Does Mrs. Turner know he needs his
medication?”

“Yes,” Anne said. “I think he’s already had it.”

“Good. Then his behavior should improve— somewhat—in
a little while.” I walked to the door and opened it, then turned to
her. “And rest assured, Anne. He won’t be seeing his Nintendo game
for a good long while.”

“Good luck, Aaron.”

On my way out, I waved at Ramona, who was finishing
her orange soda.

Ethan at home with no Nintendo, extra homework, and
detention. I took the slip of paper out of my shirt pocket and
looked at it. One of the names was Joel Beckwirth’s.

Good luck, indeed.

When I got home, I finished up a piece on “How To
Shoot Your Baby,” which—honestly—was a home video article for
American Baby Magazine
, and emailed it to my editor. I took
a deep breath, sat back in my prized swivel chair, closed my eyes,
and tried to summarize my progress, if you could call it that, on
the Beckwirth story.

Gary Beckwirth didn’t want me to speak to his son,
who might have been the kid who wrote epithets on my sidewalk with
barbecue sauce. These two facts, of course, immediately heightened
my suspicion of Joel Beckwirth, and made me wonder what it was his
father was trying to hide. Probably a secret stash of plastic
squeeze bottles in the basement, along with copies of “Catcher in
the Rye” written entirely in condiments.

At this point, I decided that since every other
single thing I could think of doing was more pressing, I’d work on
my latest screenplay.

I’ve been writing movie and TV scripts since high
school, when Mahoney and I filmed three epics: “Unseen Enemy,” a
war movie in which we had only enough actors for one side (Mahoney
refers to it as “Unseen Enema”—I counter with the fact that if you
can see an enema, they’re not doing it right); “House Of Halvah,”
which we billed as “the world’s first (and hopefully last)
detective/horror/musical/comedy”; and “Marriage Contract,” the
story of a guy who hires a hit man to
almost
kill his
girlfriend, so he can rescue her and impress her so much she’ll
agree to finally marry him.

I’ve been a movie freak since my parents took me to
see
Pinocchio
when I was four. Because I knew I couldn’t
act, but could write, screen-writing has been a professional goal
since I was roughly nine. Mahoney saw it as a hobby. I thought of
it as a career path. We spent a few thousand dollars making those
three movies, and were in pre-production on “Far Trek,” our science
fiction epic, when Mahoney had to go get married and spoil
everything.

After college, I began writing screenplays with an
eye towards actually selling one. I’ve written 22 now, and still
have the same eye. Hollywood, in my opinion, is just playing
incredibly hard to get.

Comedies, dramas, westerns, sci-fi’s, fantasies, and
romances have all come tumbling out of my printer. One actually
made it as far as a three-year option from a very, very big
production company (no names, but a frog’s involved), but ended up
being returned to its original owner (that’s me) unproduced.

Writing my latest screenplay, the story of a doctor
who falls in love with a woman who ages only one year for every ten
she lives, was proving to be a struggle. I was aiming for romantic
comedy, but the characters, those vicious little scamps, kept
turning serious on me, and I was afraid I’d end up with an unhappy
ending. To a writer who’s “new” in Hollywood parlance (despite 20
years of experience), a dark curtain-closer would be the kiss of
death. That is, unless you’re selling to the New York independent
film crowd, who love unhappy endings, but then everybody in the
movie would have to wear black and live in converted warehouse
space, and at least one of the main characters would have to be a
heroin addict. I wasn’t sure I could write that.

Anyway, I began as I always do, by re-reading what
I’d written the day before, and had fingers poised over my keyboard
when Milt Ladowski called. He was in his high-priced office, you
could tell, since a secretary came on first, asking me to hold for
Mr. Ladowski. Mr. Ladowski, after all, couldn’t be bothered taking
sixteen seconds out of his life to talk to an answering machine,
had I not been in.