Page 2 of The Falcon and the Foe

“So, can I do it?” His eyes went super wide. His hope and excitement lifted my heart.

Josh rarely got invited to birthday parties or playdates or sleepovers. When I asked about school, he didn’t say much, and he said even less when I asked about friends. It broke my heart on a regular basis, and I always wondered if his lack of social life was because of me. We weren’t rich like so many of his classmates. I couldn’t buy him the latest gadgets and clothes. Parents of other kids were doctors, executives, business owners, lawyers. They weren’t bagging groceries and taking on odd voiceover gigs.

So when Josh finally came to me about an activity where he could play and make friends, and he asked if he could do it?

“Heck yeah, you can do it!”

Josh’s face perked up in a big smile, his goofy two front teeth, badger-like, sticking down from the roof of his mouth. He wrapped his skinny arms around my neck.

In my mind, I scrambled through my schedule to see how tough it’d be to pencil in driving him to these weekly meetings. Whatever it was, I would make it work.

“The first meeting is tomorrow.” He bounced in his chair. “With Scout Leader Russ.”

Just as he said his name, I flipped to the back of the brochure where Russ Ettinger’s face grinned back at me, flipping my joy into rage like a light switch.

“This guy is the scout leader?” I pointed at Russ’s chiseled face with those familiar intense eyes, which under any normal circumstance I would find sexy, but now repulsed me since it was attached to this garbage dumpster fire of a human being. “Russ Ettinger is Scout Leader Russ?”

Josh nodded. “He came to our class last week. He seems cool.”

Oh, he certainly was not cool.

He was as cool as flat cola.

“Uh, Dad…”

I followed Josh’s eye-line to my hand, where the brochure crumpled in my white-hot fist.

“Is something wrong?”

“What?” I tossed the brochure onto the kitchen table, where it landed atop a smattering of unopened mail. Mostly bills and ads. “Will Scout Leader Russ be at this introductory meeting tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Great.”

“Is that okay?”

Was that okay? Well, years ago, I made a pact with myself not to curse in front of my child. I wanted to set a good example.

But I was ready to throw that rule out the window because Russ Ettinger was a fucking asshole who, in the words of our lord and savior Britney Spears, could eat shit and step on Legos.

Why did the one person standing in the way of my son’s happiness have to be this guy?

I shoved down my emotions like an adult. “Of course, it’s okay!”

It was not okay.

* * *

I tradedshifts with a co-worker so that I could accompany Josh to the Falcons meeting the next night, which was being held at the Arden MacArthur Community Center. My friends and I called it the Bea Arthur Community Center because every town should have an important building named after a Golden Girl. Hell, Sourwood had a gay mayor who was also a personal friend. (Humblebrag.)

Every time I drove through Sourwood, the town looked less and less familiar to me. It was still the quaint small town along the Hudson River in New York, about ninety minutes outside Manhattan. The best of both worlds. But new stores kept popping up; old houses kept getting demolished in favor of big, new ones. My house was on the older side of town, as opposed to the new side with fancy developments. Even though the town was growing at a fast clip—low property taxes and highly ranked public schools were like pouring gasoline on a fire—Sourwood still maintained the smalltown charm.

We drove through downtown Sourwood, a tight network of streets cluttered with cutesy shops with the mountains and river in the background.

If you had told me I’d be living back in Sourwood with a son a decade ago, I would’ve said you were on crack. After spending my twenties living the artist and hookup life in New York City, I had this realization that I needed a change. While I was getting by doing voiceover work for commercials, bed-hopping and living in grimy walkups lost their luster. And in between my parents passing away and me entering my thirties, I got baby fever. I wanted to be a dad and start a family. Mr. Right hadn’t shown up, but I wasn’t going to put my dreams on pause waiting for him.

Josh was a two-year-old in foster care, and I fell in love the second I saw him. Something clicked in me, and I was ready to shift everything in my life to care for him, including moving back to my hometown where he could have a good life. I took a job at Market Thyme, which offered health insurance and flexible hours, and booked voiceover jobs for extra cash. It was a lot, but he was worth it. I wanted him to have a good life, even if it now meant having a social interaction with the human barf bag known as Russ Ettinger.

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