Joyland

like a bastard. Don’t tell my mother.”
    “Jesus, kid! Like she doesn’t know?”
    “She knows too much, that’s what I think,” Mike said. “She knows I might have three more good months and then four or five really bad ones. Like, in bed all the time, not able to do anything but suck oxygen and watch MASH and Fat Albert. The only question is whether or not she’ll let Grammy and Grampa Ross come to the funeral.” He’d coughed hard enough to make his eyes water, but I didn’t mistake that for tears. He was bleak, but in control. Last evening, when the kite went up and he felt it tugging the twine, he had been younger than his age. Now I was watching him struggle to be a lot older. The scary thing was how well he was succeeding. His eyes met mine, dead-on. “She knows. She just doesn’t know that I know.”
    The back door banged. We looked and saw Annie crossing the patio, heading for the boardwalk.
    “Why would I need to know, Mike?”
    He shook his head. “I don’t have any idea. But you can’t talk about it to Mom, okay? It just upsets her. I’m all she’s got.” He said this last not with pride but a kind of gloomy realism.
    “All right.”
    “Oh, one other thing. I almost forgot.” He shot a glance at her, saw she was only halfway down the boardwalk, and turned back to me. “It’s not white.”
    “What’s not white?”
    Mike Ross looked mystified. “No idea. When I woke up this morning, I remembered you were coming for smoothies, and that came into my head. I thought you’d know.”
    Annie arrived. She had poured a mini-smoothie into a juice glass. On top was a single strawberry.
    “Yum!” Mike said. “Thanks, Mom!”
    “You’re very welcome, hon.”
    She eyed his wet shirt but didn’t mention it. When she asked me if I wanted some more juice, Mike winked at me. I said more juice would be great. While she poured, Mike fed Milo two heaping spoonfuls of his smoothie.
    She turned back to him, and looked at the smoothie glass, now half empty. “Wow, you really were hungry.”
    “Told you.”
    “What were you and Mr. Jones—Devin—talking about?”
    “Nothing much,” Mike said. “He’s been sad, but he’s better now. ”
    I said nothing, but I could feel heat rising in my cheeks. When I dared a look at Annie, she was smiling.
    “Welcome to Mike’s world, Devin,” she said, and I must have looked like I’d swallowed a goldfish, because she burst out laughing. It was a nice sound.

    That evening when I walked back from Joyland, she was standing at the end of the boardwalk, waiting for me. It was the first time I’d seen her in a blouse and skirt. And she was alone. That was a first, too.
    “Devin? Got a second?”
    “Sure,” I said, angling up the sandy slope to her. “Where’s Mike?”
    “He has physical therapy three times a week. Usually Janice—she’s his therapist—comes in the morning, but I arranged for her to come this evening instead, because I wanted to speak to you alone.”
    “Does Mike know that?”
    Annie smiled ruefully. “Probably. Mike knows far more than he should. I won’t ask what you two talked about after he got rid of me this morning, but I’m guessing that his . . . insights . . . come as no surprise to you.”
    “He told me why he’s in a wheelchair, that’s all. And he mentioned he had pneumonia last Thanksgiving.”
    “I wanted to thank you for the kite, Dev. My son has very restless nights. He’s not in pain, exactly, but he has trouble breathing when he’s asleep. It’s like apnea. He has to sleep in a semi-sitting position, and that doesn’t help. Sometimes he stops breathing completely, and when he does, an alarm goes off and wakes him up. Only last night—after the kite—he slept right through. I even went in once, around two AM, to make sure the monitor wasn’t malfunctioning. He was sleeping like a baby. No restless tossing and turning, no nightmares—he’s prone to them—and no moaning. It was the kite. It satisfied him in a way nothing else possibly could. Except maybe going to that damned amusement park of yours, which is completely out of the question.” She stopped, then smiled. “Oh, shit. I’m making a speech.”
    “It’s all right,” I said.
    “It’s just that I’ve had so few people to talk to. I have housekeeping help—a very nice woman from Heaven’s Bay—and of course there’s Janice, but it’s not the same.” She took a deep breath. “Here’s the other part. I was rude to you