Evan Hunter: Me and Mr. Stenner

YOU’RE THE KING, KONG!

HAPPY FATHER’S DAY.

I knew he’d get the joke because we’d watched King Kong on television together only a few weeks before. Mom told me it was appropriate for me to visit my father on Father’s Day, even though it wasn’t one of the weekends I was supposed to be visiting him. The calendar in our house was marked with “Abigail here” or “Abigail Frank’s” on alternating weekends. It got confusing around holiday time, when all the rules were canceled. Speaking of rules, Mr. Stenner had taken down the Rules List the day after the wedding. When I asked him how come, he just shrugged and said, “We don’t need them anymore, do we?” Anyway, on Father’s Day, at about twelve noon, my father’s car came driving up to the front of the house, but my father wasn’t driving it. Instead, Chiquita Banana was behind the wheel.

“Where’s Dad?” I said.

“He’s sick,” she said.

“Sick?” Mom said. I could see the look of alarm in her eyes. What did the poor man have? Something communicable? Would Abigail O Neill come back from a visit to her father with some incurable Asian disease?

“Just a head cold,” Chiquita Banana said. “But he didn’t think he should leave the house.”

“I don’t want Abby catching a cold,” Mom said. “We’re leaving for Europe in two weeks...”

“It makes no difference to me,” Chiquita said flatly, “whether she visits her father or not. He asked me to come for her.”

“I see,” Mom said.

“Well,” Mr. Stenner said, “if it makes no difference to you, it makes a lot of difference to us. We can’t afford to have Abby catch whatever it is Frank has.”

“Gee,” I said, “I won’t catch it.”

“I’d better call your father,” Mom said.

This was another subtle difference, by the way. After the wedding, Mom never referred to my father as “Dad” anymore. In the old days, she would have said, “I’d better call Dad.” Now she said, “I’d better call your father.”

Which she went to do while we all waited in the driveway.

“What part of Brazil are you from?” Mr. Stenner asked our Latin American neighbor.

“Rio,” she said.

“I shot some stuff for Vogue down there once,” Mr. Stenner said.

“Vogue?” she said.

“The magazine,” he said.

“Ah, Vogue,” she said. “The magazine.”

Mom came out of the house.

“Well?” I said.

“Your father and I think it might be best for you to stay home today,” she said.

“But it’s Father’s Day!” I said.

“You can see him next week, Abby,” Mom said.

“Next week isn’t Father’s Day!” I said.

“Abby, we don’t want you catching cold,” Mom said.

“You just don’t want me to spend Father’s Day with Dad!” I said.

“Abby, that isn’t...”

“ For get it!” I said, and stormed into the house.

It wasn’t the same spending Father’s Day with him a week after Father’s Day. His cold was gone by then, but so was the holiday. I gave him the tie, and he said he liked it very much. Before I left him, he made me promise to write him every day from Italy, if only a postcard.

Two days before we left, Mr. Stenner shaved off the beard.

The thing Mom forgot to do was get her name changed in her passport.

At the last minute, she remembered that in her passport she was still Lillith O’Neill. So Mr. Stenner had a photocopy made of their marriage certificate, and he stapled that into the back of her passport — “Not that it’ll make any difference,” he said.

The way he explained it, in Italy there were so many complications with forms and papers that the average Italian always figured there’d been some error and simply shrugged it off. My passport read Abigail O’Neill. Mom’s passport read Lillith O’Neill. When Mr. Stenner registered us in the Milan hotel as “Mr. and Mrs. Peter Stenner, and daughter,” the clerk didn’t look at all surprised. The different names on the passports didn’t necessarily mean the Stenners, or the O’Neills, or whoever , were not a family. An error in the papers, no doubt. They looked like a family, they’d registered as a family, so perhaps that made them a family. Or at least, that’s the way Mr. Stenner explained the Italian attitude, and I think he was right.

The first thing I did in the lobby was go over to where they had a rack of postcards. I bought four postcards from my Italian allowance. In Italy, I was supposed to get the equivalent in Italian money of five dollars a week to spend on myself and on souvenirs.

I bought the postcards for Dad, of course.

To send to Dad.

Mr. Stenner was still at the desk, signing in, and asking the clerk whether it was necessary to leave his camera in the hotel vault. The clerk, in perfect English, said that it might be a good idea, if it would not inconvenience the signore. The signore was Mr. Stenner. In Italy, the word for “mister” or “sir” was signore and the word for “Mrs.” or “madam” was signora. But the plural of signore was signori , and the plural of signora was signore. So you had to be careful when you went to the toilet, otherwise you could walk into the wrong place. In France, when I was there with my mother and my father, we went to some towns where the men and women used the same bathroom, would you believe it? I was washing my hands at the sink in one of those bathrooms — this was in the Loire Valley, when we were looking at all the castles — and a man came out of one of the stalls! I almost dropped dead right on the spot. “ Bonjour, mademoiselle,” he said to me, and smiled, and proceeded to wash his hands at the sink next to mine.

In France, when I took the trip with Mom and Dad, I slept in the same room with them wherever we stayed. I wanted to do that in Italy, too, with Mom and Mr. Stenner, but he said absolutely not.

“Why not?” I said.

“Because we all need privacy,” he said.

“It’s cheaper with just one room.”

“We can afford two rooms,” he said.

“Then they have to be right alongside each other, and there has to be a door between them, okay?” I said.

“We’ll ask for connecting rooms. If we can get them, fine. If not, we’ll have to take what we can get.”

“Well, I don’t want to be on a different floor.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’d be afraid.”

“Of what?”

“That somebody would kidnap me.”

“If somebody kidnaps you, just yell and I’ll come rescue you,” he said, and smiled.

That’s what I was really worried about, you see. That he wouldn’t come rescue me. Because he wasn’t my real father. I knew my real father would throw himself in front of a bus for me, but Mr. Stenner was only my stepfather. With your natural father you could assume that he and your mother wanted to have a baby, and got together, you know, and had one nine months later. But with your stepfather, you had to assume that what he wanted was to marry your mother. Period. The rest came along with the deal. If he wanted to marry Mom, well — you see, there was this gorgeous little eleven-year-old brat who was part of the bargain. You took one, you automatically got the other.

So why should he worry if anybody kidnapped me?

Why should he come to the rescue?

He was still at the desk when I walked over from the postcard rack. In the middle of what he was saying, I asked, “Are they connecting?”

“Just a minute, Abby,” he said. To the clerk, he said, “Is someone always here at the desk?”