Evan Hunter - Me and Mr. Stenner

“I missed it!” I said.

“What?” Mom said.

“What?” Mr. Stenner said.

“I missed the wedding!” I said, sobbing. “You didn’t tell me the wedding was happening!”

“But I did tell you, darling. I came into the music room...”

“You didn’t!” I said. “I missed the divorce, and now I missed the wedding, too!”

“Well,” Mr. Stenner said, “if you missed it, you missed it.” He took a fresh handkerchief from his pocket, dried my tears, and then said, “Now stop crying, or you’ll miss the reception, too.”

Mom watched him as he took my hand and walked to where his sons were standing. Both of them embraced him as he approached, and then Luke awkwardly patted me on the head.

Mr. Stenner began growing a beard shortly after the wedding, at about the same time Chiquita Banana came into my life. I was the one who nicknamed her Chiquita Banana. Her real name was Maria Victoria Valdez. Mr. Stenner had taught me the Chiquita Banana song, and I used to sing it around the house all the time. But I never thought I’d meet someone who was actually from South America, and who was my father’s girlfriend besides. Well, not actually his girlfriend. I mean, they weren’t too serious. I guess. But they were going out together. And maybe sleeping together, I’m not sure. Anyway, by the time I met her, they’d been seeing each other for quite some time. Maybe ever since Christmas. Or at least since Mom got the divorce in January. Come to think of it, that probably was when Dad started dating Chiquita Banana. Because in January he probably realized the marriage was really and truly over, red blob of wax on two red ribbons.

So one Saturday morning in June, Dad drove up to the house, everything in bloom, the forsythia bursting with yellow, the magnolia dripping pink petals on the lawn, the crocuses and day lilies and, oh, just everything in bloom, it was absolutely magnificent — and there was Chiquita Banana.

How to describe her?

Black hair.

Very white skin.

Eyes so brown they looked black.

Very curvaceous.

Yoke neck on her dress, rah -ther protuberant boobs.

Simpering smile on her face.

(Or was it fear?)

“Abby, I want you to meet Maria Victoria Valdez. Maria, this is my daughter.”

“How do you do?”

(Should I curtsy?)

“How do you do, Abby?”

(She says it so that it sounds like “Ah-bee.”)

“Well, get in, get in,” my father says.

“What about my bag?”

“Oh, your bag. Right, right, your bag.”

“I’ll get it, Frank,” Mr. Stenner says.

“That’s okay, I’ve got it, Peter.”

I hated her on sight.

I couldn’t tell which I hated most — Mr. Stenner’s beard or Chiquita Banana. To begin with, the beard wasn’t a beard. Not like Jeff’s beard. Not a real beard, not hair, not a full bushy beard on a person’s face. It was just a scraggly collection of bristles that felt as if you’d walked into a porcupine whenever he gave you a hug.

“Please, Mr. Stenner,” I begged him day and night, “please shave off the beard.”

“I like the beard,” he’d say, rubbing his hand over it. “Don’t you like the beard, Lillith?”

“No,” Mom would say.

“Gee, I like it,” he’d say. “Give it a chance. It’s only a few weeks old.”

I guess he intended going through with it because when he went down to renew his passport, he didn’t shave the beard, even though he knew they’d be taking a new picture of him. I went with him that day. The reason I went with him was because school had already ended at Hadley-Co, and I had nothing to do before we left for Europe.

We went for his passport on a Friday. Dad was supposed to pick me up at five-thirty, after work, and it was about eleven in the morning when Mr. Stenner asked if I’d like to join him for lunch and for getting his new passport. I said I guessed it would be better than sitting around the house. The place we went to for his passport was the courthouse in White Plains. He filled out the application for renewal there, an then we went around the corner to have his picture taken. The photographer told us to come back for it in an hour, and that’s when we went to lunch.

We had an interesting conversation during lunch.

I told him all about the time I’d been to Paris.

He said Mommy had told him a lot about that, too, about me going down the Champs Elysees doing a little dance with an umbrella. He told me that when Luke had been my age, he’d taken him and Jeff to London and the only thing Luke had wanted to buy was a bowler hat. He’d worn it all through England. He told me that every time he thought of me dancing down the Champs Elysees with my umbrella, he automatically thought of Luke wearing his bowler hat all through England. I didn’t know what a bowler hat was. Mr. Stenner said it was a derby. Then he asked me how I liked my new stepbrothers.

“Well,” I said, “no offense, Mr. Stenner, but I don’t think they’re really my stepbrothers yet.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Well, I guess what it is... well, I don’t think they like me very much.”

“They’re not used to having a sister,” Mr. Stenner said.

“That may be part of it,” I said, “but the other part is they just don’t like me.” I paused, and looked him straight in the eye, and then I said, “They don’t like Mommy either.”

He thought about this for what seemed like a long time. Then he nodded and said, “I guess you’re right, Abby,” and sighed.

“But I guess they’ll begin to like us after a while,” I said.

“I hope so,” he said.

When we went back for the photograph, it was the laugh riot of the century. Even the photographer laughed. I begged Mr. Stenner to have another picture taken, but he thought this one was priceless and insisted that he would use it in his passport. The picture made him look like a punch-drunk fighter. He had this scraggly beard on his face, and the photographer snapped the picture just as he was blinking his eyes, so that he looked as if he was coming out of his corner for the tenth round. On the way back to the courthouse, I asked him why he hadn’t taken his own picture for the passport, and Mr. Stenner said, “Bad subject.”

“What do you mean?”

“I blink a lot.”

Then he did something that embarrassed me to death.

“Bong!” he said, and immediately put up his fists like a fighter and came out of his corner bobbing and weaving and ducking his head and jabbing at an imaginary opponent, except that he wasn’t in a prizefight ring — he was on the main street of White Plains with people walking everywhere around us and thinking he had gone totally bananas. When he gave the picture to the clerk in the passport office, she looked up at him and said, “That’s a winner, all right.”

Driving back home from White Plains, I asked him something that had been bothering me for a while. “Mr. Stenner,” I said, “what’s the difference between a step brother and a half brother?”

“Well, if Mommy and I were to have a baby, a little boy, he’d be your half brother. Because you’d both have had the same mother but different fathers.”

“Are you going to have a baby?” I asked immediately.

“We haven’t really discussed it,” Mr. Stenner said.

“But when you discuss it. Then will you have a baby?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t want you to have a baby,” I said.

“It’s not something we vote on,” Mr. Stenner said.

It was a good joke. I laughed at it.

If you encouraged him, he did outrageous things. In a restaurant, for example, he would order wine, and when the wine steward came and pulled the cork and poured a little of the wine into his glass to taste, Mr. Stenner would lift the glass to his lips, and take a sip of the wine, and roll it around on his tongue, and then pretend he’d been poisoned, clutching his throat and gasping for breath. Then he’d suddenly look up at the startled waiter, and smile, and say, “That’s very nice, thank you.”