Fortunate Son

This child was twelve or thirteen. He had a thick neck and intense eyes.

“Hey, man,” the boy said. “I’m sorry ’bout them. You know, I gotta uncle live in the street. They say he’s schizo, is that’s what’s wrong wit’ you?”

Thomas hunched his shoulders and shook his head. He didn’t know.

“His name is Alfred Kwawi,” the boy continued. “You know’im?”

“No. Sorry.”

“That’s okay, brother,” the boy said. He reached into his pocket and came out with a fistful of change. “Here you go.”

As soon as the money was in Thomas’s hand, the boy took off in the direction from which he had come. Thomas stood there for a moment trying to remember where he was standing and the features of the boy’s face. He forgot so many things in his days on the street — he would have forgotten the incident with those boys in an hour or two — but he wanted to remember kindnesses. He collected them the way he collected blue glass. An old white woman on Wilshire that once sat next to him and shared her sandwich, a stray dog that slept up against him on a cold night before he got his silver blanket, a black man who stopped to help him pull his cart out when it had fallen into a ditch — he remembered every moment of kindness and carried them along with his cart to remember at night. He penned these events as well as he 2 0 2

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could into a bound book of blank paper he’d found behind a stationery store. Every now and then he’d copy the acts of kindness onto a new leaf in the book and admire his penman-ship and the benevolence of his fellow man.

“ H e l lo ? ” sh e sa i d upon answering the phone.

“Grandma?”

“Hello?”

“Grandma, it’s me — Lucky. I-I mean, Tommy.”

“Tommy? Tommy. Is that really you? Where are you, baby?”

“At a phone booth. I been livin’ in the streets for a while now, and I, and I just thought about you and so I said to myself that I should call.”

“Tommy, where have you been? I haven’t heard from you in years, years. We thought you were dead.”

Thomas closed his eyes and imagined the big woman in the small apartment. He could hear the TV playing in the background. He thought it was probably Oprah at this time of day. He took a deep breath and smiled.

“After I broke my hip they put me in a foster home, but the other boys didn’t like me so I left. Then I lived with Monique and her baby for a while, but I got in trouble an’

they put me in the facility. Now I’m just movin’ around kinda. You still watch TV all the time?”

“I sure do,” she said gently.

“You talk to my dad?”

“He’s in Galveston,” Madeline said. “He married a woman named Celia, an’ they had kids and moved down to Galveston. He’s a mechanic for the city down there.”

“Galveston. That’s pretty far, huh?”

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“Yes, it is. All the way down in Texas.”

“What about May? You heah about her?”

There was a long pause, and then she said, “No, not really.”

“Oh. You know what, Grandma?”

“What’s that, child?”

“I wish I was still small like I was. ’Cause if I was I could still sleep on the floor in your kitchen.”

“I wish that too, baby. But those days are all gone. We nevah did right by you.”

“You did okay. I mean, I’m fine. I ain’t sick or on drugs or nuthin’. I drink some wine sometimes but not like some’a these winos out here.”

Again there was silence.

“Please insert ten cents for another five minutes,” a woman’s recorded voice said.

Thomas dropped the dime into the slot.

“Tommy, are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“Listen, baby. Maybe you should call that family you used to live with. Maybe they could help you out. You know, I don’t have hardly enough to keep me goin’. Now I got somethin’ in my stomach and the doctors wanna cut me open. I can’t take care of you, baby.”

“I called Dr. Nolan a long time ago,” Thomas said. “They said not to call no more.”

“You must’a not understood’em, Tommy. ’Cause that boy Eric was writin’ you letters once every mont’ up until about four years ago. I must’a had a hundred letters and postcards from him in my dresser.”

“Do you still have’em?”

“No, baby. I did a spring cleanin’ just two weeks ago and 2 0 4

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threw them all away. I hadn’t heard from you in years. I didn’t know.”

Thomas spoke to his grandmother until all the change ran out. He asked her if she wanted to call him back, but she said that she was behind on her phone bill and they had blocked her making any outgoing calls except for 911.

Thomas lost all direction for a while then. He wandered the streets, talking to Alicia sometimes and other times to his mother. He daydreamed about all of those letters and what they might have said. Here in Hawaii,Tommy.The pineapples are really great, or, I just bought a new car and I’m driving to Frisco for the weekend.