The City. Dean Koontz

house was nicer than our apartment, and I said so. At ten, I had no control of my tongue, and I also said, “Why’re we moving? Is Grandpa too sad to be alone? Do you really have a migraine?”

      Instead of answering me, she said, “Come on, honey, I’ll help you pack your things, make sure nothing’s left behind.”

      I had my own bright-green pressboard suitcase that pretty much held all my clothes, though we needed to use a plastic department store shopping bag for the overflow.

      As we were packing, she said, “Don’t be half a man when you grow up, Jonah. Be a good man like your grandpa.”

      “Well, that’s who I want to be. Who else would I want to be but like Grandpa?”

      Not daring to put it more directly, what I meant was that I had no desire to grow up to be like my father. He walked out on us when I was eight months old, and he came back when I was eight years old, but then he walked out on us again before my ninth birthday. The man didn’t have a commitment problem; the word wasn’t in his vocabulary. In those days, I worried he might come back again, which would have been a calamity, considering all his problems. Among other things, he wasn’t able to love anyone but himself.

      Still, Mom had a weak spot for him. If he showed up, she might go with him again, which is why I didn’t say what was in my heart.

      “You’ve met Harmon Jessup,” she said. “You remember?”

      “Sure. He owns Slinky’s, where you sing.”

      “You know I quit there for this other job. But I don’t want you thinking your mother’s flaky.”

      “Well, you’re not, so how could I think it?”

      Folding my T-shirts into the shopping bag, she said, “I want you to know I quit for another reason, too, and a good one. Harmon just kept getting … way too close. He wanted more from me than just my singing.” She put away the last T-shirt and looked at me. “You know what I mean, Jonah?”

      “I think I know.”

      “I think you do, and I’m sorry you do. Anyway, if he didn’t get what he wanted, I wasn’t going to have a job there anymore.”

      Never in my life, child or man, have I been hotheaded. I think I have more of my mother’s genes than my father’s, probably because he was too incomplete a person to have enough to give. But that night in my room, I got very angry, very fast, and I said, “I hate Harmon. If I was bigger, I’d go hurt him.”

      “No, you wouldn’t.”

      “I darn sure would.”

      “Hush yourself, sweetie.”

      “I’d shoot him dead.”

      “Don’t say such a thing.”

      “I’d cut his damn throat and shoot him dead.”

      She came to me and stood looking down, and I figured she must be deciding on my punishment for talking such trash. The Bledsoes didn’t tolerate street talk or jive talk, or trash talk. Grandpa Teddy often said, “In the beginning was the word. Before all else, the word. So we speak as if words matter, because they do.” Anyway, my mom stood there, frowning down at me, but then her expression changed and all the hard edges sort of melted from her face. She dropped to her knees and put her arms around me and held me tight.

      I felt awkward and embarrassed that I had been talking tough when we both knew that if skinny little me went gunning for Harmon Jessup, he’d blow me off my feet just by laughing in my face. I felt embarrassed for her, too, because she didn’t have anyone better than me to watch over her.

      She looked me in the eye and said, “What would the sisters think of all this talk about cutting throats and shooting?”

      Because Grandma worked in Monsignor McCarthy’s office, I was fortunate to be able to attend Saint Scholastica School for a third the usual tuition, and the nuns who ran it were tough ladies. If anyone could teach Harmon a lesson he’d never forget, it was Sister Agnes or Sister Catherine.

      I said, “You won’t tell them, will you?”

      “Well, I really should. And I should tell your grandpa.”

      Grandpa’s father had been a barber, and Grandpa’s mother had been a beautician, and they had run their house according to a long set of rules. When their children occasionally decided that those rules were really nothing more than suggestions, my great-grandfather demonstrated a second use for the strap of leather that he used to strop his straight razors. Grandpa Teddy didn’t resort to corporal punishment, as his father did, but his look of extreme disappointment stung bad enough.

      “I won’t tell them,” my mother said, “because you’re such a good kid. You’ve built up a lot of credit at the First Bank of Mom.”

      After she kissed my forehead and got up, we went into her room to continue packing. The apartment came furnished, and it included a bedroom vanity with a three-part mirror. She trusted me to take everything out of the many little drawers and put all of it in this small square carrier that she called a train case, while she packed her clothes in two large suitcases and three shopping bags.

      She wasn’t finished explaining why we had to move. I realized many years later that she always felt she had to justify herself to me. She never did need to do that, because I always knew her heart, how good it was, and I loved her so much that sometimes it hurt when I’d lie awake at night worrying about her.

      Anyway, she said, “Honey, don’t you ever get to thinking that one kind of people is better than another kind. Harmon Jessup is rich compared to me, but he’s poor compared to William Murkett.”

      In addition to owning the glitzy nightclub where she’d been offered five nights a week, Murkett had several other enterprises.

      “Harmon is black,” she continued, “Murkett is white. Harmon had nearly no school. Murkett went to some upper-crust university. Harmon is a dirty old tomcat and proud of it. Murkett, he’s married with kids of his own and he’s got a good reputation. But under all those differences, there’s no difference. They’re the same. Each of them is just half a man. Don’t you ever be just half a man, Jonah.”

      “No, ma’am. I won’t be.”

      “You be true to people.”

      “I will.”

      “You’ll be tempted.”

      “I won’t.”

      “You will. Everyone is.”

      “You aren’t,” I said.

      “I was. I am.”

      She finished packing, and I said, “I guess then you don’t have a job, that’s why we’re going to Grandpa’s.”

      “I’ve still got Woolworth’s, baby.”

      I knew there were times when she cried, but she never did in front of me. Right then, her eyes were as clear and direct and as certain as Sister Agnes’s eyes. In fact, she was a lot like Sister Agnes, except that Sister Agnes couldn’t sing a note and my mom was way prettier.

      She said, “I’ve got Woolworth’s and a good voice and time. And I’ve got you. I’ve got everything I need.”

      I thought of my father then, how he kept leaving us, how we wouldn’t have been in that fix if he’d kept even half his promises, but I couldn’t vent. My mom had never dealt out as much punishment as the one time I said that I hated him, and though I didn’t think I should be ashamed for having said it, I was ashamed just the same.

      The day would come when despising him would be the least of it, when he would flat-out terrify me.

      We had no sooner finished packing than the doorbell rang, and it was Grandpa Teddy, come to take us home with him.