Kevin Becomes a Man

By L. G. Merrick
Illustrated by Steve Morris

Kevin Lambert’s mother became a worrier, so he became a nervous child. In kindergarten he would not dare to go near dogs, even small silly ones, because she had impressed on him that any dog might suddenly bite. In first grade he hesitated to eat cake, because he had been fed dire warnings about sugar. By third grade, his mother had made him intensely aware of the threat posed by germs, so he washed his hands every time he was supposed to, as well as other times — and when some reckless boy did not wash, Kevin informed the teacher. In fourth grade, the final ruination of his social life, he was invited to a sleepover party, where, at 9:50 p.m., unable to stop himself, he began to insist everyone be quiet and go to sleep, his lips bunched in distress, voice tremulous, because when his mom dropped him off she had asked about the bedtime and they had told her 10 p.m. Why would they risk upsetting her? And didn’t they know how dangerous lack of sleep could be? It could make you inattentive, you could be hit by a car—

This frustrated the other children and made the parents uncomfortable.

“If they don’t invite you back, they were never really your friends,” his mother said, as she had on other occasions. “Don’t sit like that, you’ll ruin your spine. They put you under for spine surgery. People don’t wake up.”

He heard the black note creeping into her voice and immediately changed his posture.

One thing he could not change was his walk to school. She hated that he walked, but the district refused to send a bus to a house so close. 

“Don’t take crazy risks,” she said weekly. “Stay off the pavement. If you go on it, I’ll know.”

 It was safe. It was only a quarter of a mile. The road had been laid for a development that never came to exist, so on one side it passed only an overgrown field. On the other side stood only trees. Cars had little reason to use it. And the trees did not qualify as forest, which might have produced rabid animals. They were only a leafy screen through which Kevin could glimpse the messy backyards of old houses. 

He and his mom lived in one of those. Most mornings, she walked him across their backyard and up a short path through the “woods” to the road, then stood there to watch for as long as he remained in sight. The road rose gently to a crest at the midpoint of his walk, then eased back downward. He knew she could see him only two minutes after he passed the crest. Every day at the point he was last visible to her, he turned and waved, to reassure her that he would be mindful the rest of the way. 

He wished he still had a father and his older brother Clayton. Before, he sort of remembered, she didn’t worry.

Coming home, he obeyed one paramount rule: He must not be late. This meant that if the other walkers whipped up a game of tag on the way, he couldn’t join in. Or he could — for four minutes. When he ran five minutes late, his mother snapped. She marched up the path to the side of the road to await him, fretting and angry. Sometimes she remained in that mood until after dinner. So the idea of making her anxious made him anxious.

Then came the day the man waited by the side of the road. 

Kevin was looking at the ground as he walked, so he didn’t see him as soon as he might have.

The man stood at the crest. He wore a tweedy jacket that bunched up where his hands thrust into his pants pockets. The sun, behind the man, cast his face in shadow. 

The field buzzed with cicadas. Kevin was alone. 

Except for the man.

There were no other walkers with Kevin because it was the sunniest May afternoon of the year so far. The others had fled from school to McKinley Park, in the opposite direction, to play touch football and capture the flag, to wade in the stream. Kevin had already been feeling alone because of it. And now — obviously a stranger was not good news. 

He considered going back to school to ask for help. But lately he knew that even the teachers laughed at him. So he slowed, but kept walking. He hated being afraid of everything. 

Then he had an idea. 

He would loiter. Five minutes. His mother would appear. The man would not try anything with his mother watching.

Kevin had to do something to make loitering sensible, though. He couldn’t just stand there. So he acted out quite a mime show of suddenly noticing his laces were loose, shaking his head like how could he be so careless, heaving out a glad-I-noticed sigh, kneeling to fix them. He knew the man was too distant to see the laces had been perfectly cinched.

But it did not take five minutes to tie two shoes. So he took off his backpack and organized items inside. 

He did all this because it was crucial the man not get suspicious. The man could not wonder Hey, why is this kid acting strangely? But a shoelace, a backpack re-org, these were things any kid might have to do. He wanted the man to feel secure and not have any reason to believe anything was out of joint, and so not have any reason to do anything sudden or frightening or distressing.

When Kevin was sure five minutes had passed — maybe six! — but not more, because he did not want to overstress his mother and have to deal with that — he slipped his knapsack back up his arms and resumed walking. 

He could not see his mother from this side of the crest, but Kevin was smart enough to know that the man could see her from where he stood. 

It was a good plan, and feeling confident because of it, Kevin decided that when he passed the stranger, he would wave hello. 

But when he got close, he saw the man’s face. He did not wave. He couldn’t breathe.

His blood quickened. He broke into a run without meaning to — into the middle of the road — then made himself slow down. He concentrated on not walking faster in alarm. He wanted to steer back to the side of the road, but—

The man’s face was damaged. Mottled and pitted. It had shiny patches, and patches like gray hamburger. The man’s face looked as if it had been pulled off and cut into jigsaw pieces, then put back by somebody who took too long to figure out where each piece went. So some, by the time they were pushed into place, had gone rotten. 

The man took three strides onto the road and walked alongside Kevin. 

Kevin walked down the yellow line.

He fought back tears of fear, and of guilt at running, which had possibly hurt the man’s feelings. But he was at the crest now, so he could look ahead to his mother for help. 

Except she was not there.  

The man kept pace, casually.

“You don’t know who I am.”

The voice was wet. Phlegmy.

Kevin shook his head no without looking over.

“I’m your new dad.”

Kevin flushed. He always felt humiliated, saying what he said next.

“Yeah, well. My dad is dead.”

“I said new.”

Kevin kept walking.

The man said, “Where do you think you’re going?”

Kevin wanted to deliver a ringing, sharp retort, like None of your beeswax! But he decided to bide his time until his mother appeared. He said nothing. 

His mother still did not appear.

The man said, “Don’t go home, little boy.” He sounded as calm as someone suggesting lemonade because of hot weather. “I just came from your house. I don’t think you’ll like it there.”

At this, Kevin began to bound forward in half-leaps, as if he had, out of nowhere, invented a game — so that the man might see a spontaneous, happy kid, not one trying to get away. He could not treat the man like a problem. Things only got worse when adults got upset.

But he did hurry. 

The man slowed, let him get ahead.

Kevin didn’t look back until turning down the path.

And from there, peering through the trees, he saw — no trace of the man.

His backyard, however, after the encounter, felt changed. Nothing looked different. The patches of bare dirt were just that. Knots of weeds sprouted same as they had that morning. Dandelions dotted the grass, same. The house remained every inch a narrow, two-story job painted a color his mother called “Fancy Mustard,” and stood no differently. Yet he crossed the yard with growing trepidation. Each step took longer than the last.

Outside the kitchen door he stopped. He always went in the kitchen. The screen door was closed, the inner door open, as usual. The linoleum was shiny.

Even so, he had to take the man’s warning seriously. Don’t go home. What if the man had rigged a trap? Kevin had seen a cartoon where a cat opened a door and a mouse had rigged a guillotine to fall. The blade shaved all the hair off the cat’s back, which was lucky. It could have been worse.

If the man knew Kevin’s patterns, the man would have rigged this door. The front door would be safe. 

He went around to it. Along the way he made careful note of how there was nothing unusual. The green hose was coiled on its hook beside the faucet that stuck out of the side of the house. A spider had spun a web in the center of the coils. He paused to make sure it was not a poisonous spider. His mother had made him memorize their markings. He felt safer already.

At the front door, though, as he reached for the knob, he realized — maybe the man had said those weird things so that he would break his pattern and use the front door. Which meant the front door was trapped.

Kevin stood for a long time on the cracked cement step, wondering what to do.

He wondered why his mother had not appeared. Her car sat in the driveway. She was home. Maybe she had nodded off. He had never known her to nap. It disrupted healthy sleep. But maybe.

Eventually, he yelled to the upstairs windows. He did not want to. Yelling was causing a scene. Ms. Leonidas next door might hear. But waiting in silence had not produced his mother. He needed her to come downstairs and confirm there was no trap rigged to either door.

He cupped his hands to direct the sound. 

“Mom! I’m home! Can you let me in?”

Nothing happened.

He proceeded to the other three sides of the house and yelled the same up each of those.

It was another hour — a wearying, sickening hour, of standing outside, feeling ridiculous, of feeling exactly like what the man had called him — little boy — before he finally gave up.

This hit him hard. It was not a decision. It hit as an overwhelming, whole-body shake of revulsion at his predicament.  

All at once he was fed up. Comprehensively. With himself. With his mother. With his whole stupid life. Of course he didn’t get invited to more sleepovers — or birthdays, or movies, or pizza parties. Who would want to spend time around the kind of person he was? He barely wanted to. Why should he worry so much when no one else did? And everyone else was fine! The other kids fell and scraped their knees and kept right on going. They did not run to the nurse worried about infection, did not panic anticipating their mother’s pending tantrum, her bleak fury at what this scrape proved about his behavior and how we talked about always thinking and how he was ungrateful for his life and spiteful and never going to let her live in peace.

He was fed up. 

The doors were not trapped. He was just going to go in. Go right in, and be a new person, from now on. He was eleven, for crying out loud! Time to take charge! He was going to march upstairs and wake up his mother and for once he was going to yell at her, for causing him stress.  

I stayed outside for an hour, he was going to tell her, and that’s your fault for making me afraid of every tiny thing! 

Things that aren’t even real! 

From now on he was going to be his own person. As if he didn’t have a mother at all. 

He yanked open the kitchen door, full of resolve. It gave its usual aluminum rattle.

He decided heck, he was going to have a glass of apple juice before he told her off, because he was in charge, and he went to the fridge and yanked it open and took out the big jug of Mott’s.

He got down a glass and poured.

What did not register with him, what he sort of elided from his field of vision, was a very large mason jar on the kitchen counter that had never been there before, and likewise he did not quite see that inside it, in a cherry-red syrup, there floated what appeared to be — or would have appeared to be, had he processed it — a fetus. Human. Male. Big. Perhaps not a fetus, but a newborn, or a one-year-old. Kevin honestly would not have known which it was, had his brain let him see its sour face. Standing in front of it, seeming to stare at it, he drank his apple juice.

Then he screwed his resolve tight. He put his glass down. It was time to tell his mother that he was sick of how much she worried, and it had to stop. He stomped out of the kitchen to go find her and tell her off and become his own person, once and for all.

It was, actually, going to be a big day for Kevin.

The end