Teddy Wayne - The Love Song of Jonny Valentine

Robin looked over at Jane, who was staring at the stove like she was watching something boiling. “Were you as involved in Jonny’s life back then as you are now?”

Jane turned back to her quickly. “Well, obviously. I’m his mother.”

“But now you’re his mother and his manager. Before, you were just his mother.”

“I consider it a blessing that we get to spend so much time together.”

“Does it ever feel like it might be too much time?” Robin asked.

Jane looked ready to kill her, but she adjusted and smiled huge. Never lose control.

“Of course, you have to give your child room to breathe,” she said, totally composed in a cheery talk-show voice. “But I do fear that parents aren’t spending enough time with their children these days and are just scheduling them for activities without them or letting them entertain themselves.”

“And was it a hard decision to bring Jonny into show business?”

“The hardest decision I’ve ever made.” She shook her head and made a small frown like it still tore her apart. Jane could star in a dramatic vehicle. “But it was really Jonny’s decision. He wanted it so badly.”

“It was always my dream,” I said, to help her out.

“Since he was old enough to sing,” Jane said. We were like a veteran shortstop and second baseman on joint interviews, me flipping the ball to her to turn the inning-ending double play. “So we prayed on it, and we felt it was the right time to share Jonny with the world.”

That was really smart brand strategy, because it was just enough religious stuff to make her look good after she’d snapped at Robin, and also coastal media never probes when you bring up religion, because the risk of controversy is too high.

Sure enough, Kevin said the family was gouging them on each ten-minute block and we had to leave. I was kind of surprised they hadn’t set up a museum, like “Jonny Valentine’s Childhood Home.”

When we left, we passed by the TV, which used to be on the other side of the living room, because they’d switched where the TV and couch were, since it was better to sleep in the other position but better for people to sit in now, but before even that, when my father lived there with us, I had a bed in the living room and Jane and my father slept in the bedroom. And it brought back another memory.

It must have been right before my father left or I couldn’t have remembered it. It was rainy and gray and cold out, and Jane had been staying with Grandma Pat for like a week. She must have been sick or something. The Cardinals were on TV, on the road because they couldn’t have played in the rain, and I guess my father decided I was old enough for him to explain the game to me. I bet I didn’t get much of it since I was so young, but he talked nearly the whole game, in this really fast way, and he was sweating even though he was only lying on my bed and getting worked up every time the Cardinals got a hit or something. But one reason it stands out is that the Cardinals got into a brawl with the other team, both benches clearing out, and my father called someone on the phone and asked if they were watching this shit. That must be nice, to have a friend you could just call up like that and know they were watching the same thing as you. Me and Walter don’t follow the same teams, so I don’t call him in his bungalow when I’m watching a game.

The Cardinals scored a few runs off the other team’s errors, and I kept asking what an error was because the announcers kept bringing it up. My father tried to explain. He was like, “It’s when you make a mistake, and it screws everything up for your team.” Then the Cardinals gave up a few runs after they made a bunch of errors, and the announcer said, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” and his color man said that was always true in baseball, and it was the first time I’d heard that saying so I asked my father what it meant, even though he was pissed the Cardinals had let the game get tied.

He said something like, “It means right when you get something good, you lose it.”

“Like the toy car?” I asked. They’d gotten me a remote-control car for my birthday, and I’d been all excited to use it, but it broke right away.

“No,” he said. “We returned that to the store when it broke, and we got a new one that worked.” He didn’t say anything for a minute as we watched the Cardinals lose, then he spoke real slowly so I can still mostly remember it. He was like, “What it means is what our neighbor Mrs. Warfield said to me the other day, which is that God has a plan for everyone and it’s not our place to question him.”

He turned the TV off. “So if anyone ever tells you that in the future, you’ll know they’re as big a moron as Mrs. Warfield.” Up till then Mrs. Warfield had just been this nice older lady who gave me candy, but after that I knew she was a moron.

Just as we went out the door to the apartment, I got this empty feeling in my chest, like this would be the last time I’d ever see it. I turned back to look inside, but the final crew guy had already closed the door. Maybe if I reconnected with my father we could visit it again together, without a TV show.

Outside, the camera crew walked with me and Michael to the park down the block. “Should we be talking?” I asked Kevin.

“If you want,” he said. “Or we can cut footage with music over.”

But I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to ask Michael if he ever thought about our sleepovers, how we’d stay up late and sneak out of his room to watch the TV on low and raid the kitchen for cookies and chips and soda when his parents were asleep. His house always had a million snacks. I didn’t feel like it, though.

I used to lie in bed at night sometimes before sleep and I’d think about what if Michael died, and I’d imagine me being at his funeral and staring into his coffin like they do in the movies and seeing him in a suit even though he should’ve been in his Champion sweats, and knowing no one else knew the jokes we had together, like when we’d crack each other up by saying, “There was a weasel in here?” after Elinor Burt once asked that in the middle of science class when Mrs. Potts said the word weasel, and I’d make myself cry even. I wondered if I could even do that anymore. I could make myself tear up onstage when I sang “Heart Torn Apart,” but I didn’t have to think of anything to do it, I only had to tell myself to cry and the tears were waiting for me, like the song brought it on, not anything from real life.

It would sound pretty gay if I told Michael about that, or asked if he ever thought about anything like that for me.

No one else was at the park. It looked empty, just a swing set and a small field I also remembered being bigger that was all dirt now from the winter. Michael was always the QB and I was the receiver, so I tossed him the ball.

“Do you still play a lot?” I asked.

“I’m on the intramural flag-football team,” Michael said.

“I just play with Walter.”

“Who’s Walter?”

“My bodyguard.” I shouldn’t have brought him up. “He’s not here today, because it wouldn’t play good on camera.” Michael just picked at the grip on the ball, so I asked, “What was the name of that play we made up?”

“ ‘Oh Baby,’ ” he said.

“Right. Why’d we call it that again?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.” But it looked like he did. I couldn’t ask him on camera, though. I couldn’t even really ask him off-camera.

I ran deep. Like I’d practiced it every day the last two years, I thought, “Oh baby oh baby oh baby cut .” You cut left after the third “Oh baby.” I still couldn’t remember why we called it that. Michael’s pass sailed behind me.