“Yes. Have we made a deal?”
“I... I guess so, Dad.”
“This is between us. A private matter. Now you can stop hiding in the dark feeling sorry for yourself. Act your age. Your mother is going to need a lot of help closing the house, and I expect you to give her that help willingly.”
“Okay.”
“Shake hands on it.” They shook hands and his father stood up. “I’ll tell your mother you’re more... resigned to your horrid fate. We’ll go next door. When you next see her, it wouldn’t be out of order for you to apologize for being rude.”
“All right, Dad.”
Ben Durmond went back to the kitchen. Eileen looked up at him anxiously. “He’ll be okay, honey.”
“You didn’t roar at him, did you?”
He grinned. “I came close a couple of times. It’s tough on the kid. But he’s a good kid. He’ll be reasonable.”
“I... I wish sometimes... we could stay right here.”
“You’ll get a kick out of furnishing a new nest. I’ll find you something gaudy in Philly. You’ll be happy as a clam trotting around measuring for draperies and squinching your eyes and staring into space. Let’s go join the party, party girl.”
About 15 minutes later Jaimie turned on the lights in his room. He glowered at himself in the mirror over his bureau. He rubbed a thumb along the infrequent hairs on the side of his jaw.
“You kids wouldn’t know how to act, even, in a big city like Philadelphia,” he muttered contemptuously.
He looked toward the corner where, from wires so fine as to be almost invisible, his collection of model jet aircraft hung, moving slightly in the breeze that came through the screen. He went over and tenderly unhooked the B-52 and turned it this way and that, frowning at the deadly lines of it. Suddenly it slipped in his hands that looked too big for the rest of him, and the wing snapped off close to the fusilage...
On the following Saturday morning Eileen Durmond looked into his room and saw him hunched over his work table. She went in and saw that he was working on one of the model airplanes he had built. “What are you doing, dear? I thought you said you were going to start packing.”
“Oh, I’m just fixing this one up. It got broke.”
“Broken,” she said automatically.
“So I’m fixing it up before I give the whole batch of them to Junior Robbins.”
“To the pest?”
“He’s all the time begging to come in and look at them. He promised he’d be careful with them. I’ll take them over in a little while.”
She put her hand on his shoulder. “Gosh, you worked so hard and did such a nice job on every one, it seems a shame. I think we could pack them so they wouldn’t get broken, darling.”
He glanced up at her. “Aw, Mom, I don’t need them any more. They’re... kid stuff. The pest can have them.” He looked back at the model. “You’d never know it was broke. Broken.”
She left his room and there was something tugging at her heart. Something in his face when he had glanced up at her. A maturity, a steadiness, a hint of the man he might become. As she started to make her bed she was praying. Make him the man Ben is. Give him the chance to be as strong and good and gentle.
