"Why do I need breakfast," he answered, "in a world with candy machines?"
Then he got up and left.
Taking Stevie to Dr. Weeks was almost an anticlimax. She piled the kids into the car. Stevie was silent on the way to the doctor's office, but then he was usually silent, and there was no waiting when they got there, the receptionist just greeted Stevie with a smile and told him that his mother and brother and sister would be waiting for him when he got through and why not come in right now and meet Dr. Weeks? Stevie didn't even give DeAnne a backward glance. He just let the receptionist usher him into the office like a soldier letting the sergeant herd him into battle.
This has to work, thought DeAnne as she told stories to Robbie and Betsy in the waiting room. Please, Lord, let Dr. Weeks find a way for us to help get Stevie back to his old self.
Then the hour was up and Stevie came out. DeAnne raised a questioning eyebrow to Dr. Weeks, but the psychiatrist was not going to confide anything in front of Stevie. She just smiled and shook DeAnne's hand and then graciously shook hands with Robbie, who asked if he could come in and talk to her sometime, too, because he was really good at talking to people and he liked to do it a lot more than Stevie did. Dr. Weeks laughed and said, "Maybe someday you will, Robbie, but not for now."
On the way home, DeAnne wanted to ask Stevie about what happened, but she resisted the impulse. He couldn't be free to speak openly to Dr. Weeks if he knew he would face an inquisition as soon as he got into the car. So she confined her questions to one: "How was it?"
"Fine," he said.
The next morning, alone in the kitchen at 8:30, she called Dr. Weeks at home, hoping to catch her before she went to work. A man answered; it must be Lee, DeAnn realized. "May I speak to Dr. Weeks?" she asked.
"Who may I say is calling?" asked Lee.
"This is DeAnne Fletcher."
A pause.
"What's this about?" asked Lee.
"Is she not at home?" asked DeAnne.
She wasn't about to confide in this young man, not after his display at the baptism.
"I need to tell her what it's about," said Lee.
"Then I'll call back later."
As she spoke, however, there was a click on the line. "Hello?" It was Dr. Weeks.
"Dr. Weeks, I'm so sorry to bother you at home, but I wanted to speak to you before you had other patients in the office and while the kids were still asleep."
"That's fine," said Dr. Weeks. "And who is this?"
"Oh, I'm sorry, I thought Lee had told you. This is DeAnne Fletcher, Stevie's mother."
"Lee was on the phone with you?"
"Yes, he answered the-"
"Lee, hang up the extension right now."
A long silence.
"He must already have hung up," said DeAnne.
"Lee, hang it up now. This conversation will not continue until you hang up the phone."
Another silence. And then a click.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Fletcher. Sometimes it's like living with an oversized four- year-old."
"Yes, I understand," said DeAnne. But she did not actually understand.
"You wanted ...?"
"I just-I needed to know if you- if there's anything I can help you with. Information or whatever. After your first visit with Stevie yesterday."
"Not really," said Dr. Weeks. "You already gave me the basic information before. Oh, I would appreciate it if you would make a list of all the names of his imaginary friends and mail it to me at the office."
"I could tell you all the names right now," said DeAnne.
"At the office, please," said Dr. Weeks. "That is how I maintain things in the strictest confidence."
"All right," said DeAnne. "Thanks. And I won't bother you at home again, I promise."
"That would be best," said Dr. Weeks. "Good morning." Then she hung up.
In the moment before DeAnne hung up, she heard a second click.
Lee had not hung up before. He must have listened to the whole thing.
No wonder Dr. Weeks was having her mail the list to the office. No wonder she said "That would be best."
It wasn't rudeness, it was simple recognition of reality. Lee was spying on his mother every chance he got. Lee was out of control at home.
DeAnne sat down at the table at once and wrote down the names she could remember. Jack and Scotty, of course. But yesterday morning while Stevie was playing Lode Runner ... what were the names? Roddy. And David was the one Stevie had mentioned after the baptism. Four now. Jack, Scotty, Roddy, and David.
Then she set that paper aside and wrote another: Names of Stevie's frie nds in the order we heard them: Scotty Jack David Roddy She sat there for a while, looking at the list. Imagining those imaginary friends herself. Four boys, Stevie's age. Maybe Scotty was a redhead like that child actor Johnny Whitaker, and Jack was a freckled round- faced brown-haired boy like Artful Dodger in Oliver!, and David was quiet, shy, holding back, perhaps a medium blond. And Roddy, bold as brass and inclined to get himself in trouble from which others had to rescue him. All hanging around the house here, always coming into the kitchen and she had to keep shooing them away from the fridge or there'd never be anything left for dinner, but then they'd come in and tell her all about the game they were playing in the back yard, and they'd be sweaty from running and have that acrid little-boy smell that DeAnne remembered from her brother, probably the worst smell in the world she had thought then, but now she thought that she would love to smell it on Stevie, on his friends, the stink of sweat from hours of hot play in the afternoon as the summer vacation got under way and the still- lengthening days left them with so much time, so much time in the evening, the lightning bugs like tiny meteor showers on the lawn as the children ran and ran, and they would never stop until at last she called them in and said, "Time for you boys to go home, don't you think? But first here's some milk and I made these cookies after supper, Stevie remember to let your friends choose first, one to a customer please, and maybe if you washed your hands you wouldn't catch a vile disease. I suppose I'll have to teach you how to work the faucet, from the look of you none of you boys has ever turned on a watertap in your lives. The square thing by the sink is a bar of soap." And they would laugh and protest and Stevie would say, "Mo-om," and then they'd eat the cookies and flecks of chocolate would cling to the corners of their mouths.
Oh God, why can't Stevie have real friends? Why can't I hear my son's voice crying Ollie ollie oxen free in the front yard as dusk settles over the street?
She folded up the list and put it in an envelope and addressed it to Dr. Weeks's office and then took it out front and put it in the mailbox at the curb.
When she got back into the kitchen, Robbie was kneeling on a chair, sounding out the names on the first list DeAnne had written.
"You forgot Peter," said Robbie.
"What?" asked DeAnne.
"Peter," said Robbie. "He won't come out and play though. He just watches."
"Do you know what this list is?" asked DeAnne.
"Stevie's friends," said Robbie. "He won't ever let me meet them, though."
"No, I don't guess he would," said DeAnne.
"What you writing them down for, Mommy? Is Stevie having them come over?"
"Don't worry about it," said DeAnne. She put the list up on top of the serving dishes in the top cupboard. "I was just writing names. What do you want for breakfast?"
"Cream of Wheat!" cried Robbie.
DeAnne let him help make the mush, and within moments the list was forgotten.
Dicky came into Step's office on Tuesday afternoon. "Good news," said Dicky.
"Oh, really?" Step immediately felt a thrill of dread: Ray had decided to support the PC after all.
"Ray has decided to publish a Commodore 64 version of Hacker Snack."
How ludicrous! thought Step. No one had ever spoken to him about Hacker Snack, not even after he walked in on the programmers working on it as a secret project just before the San Francisco trip. He had assumed that the programmers told Dicky and Dicky told Ray and they just dropped the whole thing. But no, apparently it was still alive and now Dicky had the gall to walk in here and say that Ray had decided to publish a game that didn't belong to him.