Page 22 of Baby for my Dad's Best Friend

On Saturday mornings, I typically picked up doughnuts and coffee and drove over to my old neighborhood to spend some quality time with my little brother. He wasn’t related to me by blood. I’d hooked up with this mentor program a few years ago when I was profiled in a few local papers as a local boy made good.

They’d paired me up with Carl O’Donoghue, a local boy determined to make bad. He made sure I knew that the doughnuts were the only reason he waited for me on the front steps of his run down rowhouse every Saturday morning. He called me big bro like he was spitting it between his teeth. Maureen gave me shit about bringing doughnuts instead of something with actual nutritional value, but Carl had a stomach curdling habit that involved chewing tobacco for breakfast, so I figured doughnuts were a step up.

This morning, he was sitting on the bottom step, looking rough and hard and about as tough as a couple of matchsticks. An ulcerous splinter. He glared at me when I pulled up and stayed right where he was. I recognized a bad morning when I saw it. I guess he’d gotten in a fight with his mom, who was far closer to Layla’s age than mine, or he’d broken up with his girlfriend who kept trying to scare him with the idea she might be pregnant.

I hoped it was the latter.

Carl scowled when I got out of the car and dropped the Dunkin Donuts bag at his feet before dropping onto the step beside him.

“Where’s my coffee?” he asked ungratefully.

“Where’s mythank you?”

He sneered, a feeble lift of his lip that showed his mom had had about as much money for an orthodontist as mine had had at his age. I’d gotten veneers at twenty-six rather than try to deal with the jumbled mess of teeth. The thing was, I hadn’t had a state-appointed big brother to tell me about the free orthodontic services a kid like me could access. Carl did, but he was too proud to do it.

I handed him his coffee. A vanilla latte that would put Maureen’s sugar excess to shame.

Carl drank it down and smashed the donut holes in his mouth one after another. I didn’t bother to tell him to slow down anymore. I understood that he couldn’t. Maybe he would, one day, when he got used to food always being available. Maybe he’d have to live alone first, long enough that his body lost that fight or famine reflex it had developed from living with too many cousins with too little in the pantry.

“You want to go grab a real breakfast?” I asked when he was done. I always asked this, and not because Maureen had given me shit. It was because I’d honest-to-God love to buy the kid something with protein and micronutrients.

“Nah,” Carl said, like he always did.

“You want to talk about it?”

Again, that lifted lip. “Nah,” he drawled.

I leaned back, putting my elbows on the half-rotted step above us. Sometimes, Carl really irritated the shit out of me. Sometimes I thought about telling the outreach initiative that I was done reaching out, but then I always remembered Jack.

Fucking Jack, with his endless patience. The way he slid past my prickly defenses for no other reason than he thought,this kid can’t be all that bad.

“How’s school?”

“Shitty.”

“Your mom?”

“A–” he swallowed the wordbitchand substituted it with a sarcastic, “–real nice lady. You want to be my stepdad?”

“Hell no. I’d retroactively drown you at birth.”

Carl thought that was funny. I often wondered what the hell had happened in his life that he’d shit on you for bringing him doughnuts but crack up over death threats. Probably the same thing that happened to a lot of us in this neighborhood. Parents who hustled so hard for survival that neglect felt like love. Hell, maybe it was, in its own way. My mom didn’t have time to make my lunch or tuck me in at night, but I had food and a bed.

Christ, it put things in perspective. I couldn’t have a day at work that was so bad that I still wasn’t a hundred times better off than I was at Carl’s age. And selfishly, I appreciated that more than ever this morning. Sure I was in an untenable, no-win situation with the twenty-five-year-old daughter of my best friend, but I’d take my problems over Carl’s any day.

“Come on,” I said, determined to repay him for this gift of perspective somehow. “I’m buying you breakfast.”

“Man, keep your fucking money. I can’t stomach food this early.”

Before I could sayit’s after ten, Carl, he reconsidered. Not the part about breakfast though. “Or hell, if you want to throw some bills around, just gimme cash. I’ll get myself a nice, well-balanced lunch later.”

That wasn’t happening. He’d get himself more dip and a fifth of vodka.

“School supplies,” I said instead. “It’s July. You go back in what, a month? What are you going to need?”

Carl laid back, impaling his thin back on the jutting edges of the stairs, leaning his head back against one. He looked like he’d been dropped there from the sky, broken. “Nah, man,” he said tiredly. “I got pencils. School gives you everything you need.” He stared up at the sky for a minute, and then said in almost a throw away mutter, “Could use some shoes.”

He was wearing good shoes. Nike Men’s Air Force 1s that looked brand new out of the box. I guessed he probably cleaned them every night, carefully removing scuff marks and buffing the midsole with his thumb. I remembered being in high school, putting all your faith into that one thing, polishing it and cherishing it and hoping that everyone saw it instead of everything else.

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