Me and Mr. Stenner

Автор: Хантер Эван
Год: 1976
Язык: английский
Год: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins
ISBN: 978-0-397-31689-2
Жанр: Роман, новелла

Электронная книга - «Me and Mr. Stenner». Краткое содержание книги:

“I’m not really a brat, please understand that. But, you know, school one day... and there’s your mother wearing her Long Grave Face... and she tells you she’s leaving your father... that you and she will be making new plans...”
For Abby O’Neill, those “new plans” mean some big changes in her life, like living in a rented house with her mother and Mr. Stenner, the man her mother plans to marry as soon as a couple of divorces are out of the way. And like seeing her real father only on weekends. The trouble is, Abby still loves her real father, and she is growing to love Mr. Stenner, who is alternately the villain and the hero of her life. But how can she love one without betraying the other?
In his first important novel for young readers, Evan Hunter portrays the traumas and triumphs of a child caught in the middle of a divorce. With tenderness, insight, and humor, he shows that change is a part of life, and that accepting change is what life is all about.

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I know that sounds like I was being a traitor to my real father, and actually, whenever I had a thought like that, I did feel as if I were betraying him. But at the same time, I felt that now that Mom and Mr. Stenner were married, and we were sort of a family, with Mom being Lillith Stenner and all — well, it just sometimes seemed to me that it would be more natural if I were Abigail Stenner. If only for the sake of avoiding confusion.

Father’s Day was a real hassle.

Father’s Day came in June, and this particular Father’s Day fell on a Sunday two weeks before we were supposed to leave for Europe. This was the first time I’d ever had two fathers to worry about, a real father and a stepfather. The main problem was where to spend Father’s Day. Should I spend it at home (Mr. Mauley’s house), or should I spend it away from home (Dad’s house)? The choice seemed obvious to me. Of course I would spend Father’s Day at Dad’s house. He was my father, right? My real father. My natural father. But at the same time, I didn’t want to hurt Mr. Stenner’s feelings. Because I was beginning to think of him as a good man. Which is what Mom had told me he was.

So here was Father’s Day, and Mom had taken me out on the Tuesday before, mainly to shop for clothes I would need in Italy because I seemed to be suddenly outgrowing things in leaps and bounds, but also to buy presents for the real father over there and the fake father over here. For the real one — Frank O’Neill himself, world’s greatest architect — I bought a striped silk tie that cost four dollars and thirty-six cents with the tax, and I made up a poem that I typed on Mom’s typewriter. This is what the poem looked like:

To My Father

I love you, Dad, in every way, I love you more than I can say. I want to wish you, if I may, A peaceful, happy Father’s Day.

Love,

Abby

For the fake one — Peter Stenner, world’s greatest fashion photographer, punch-drunk fighter, and punster — I bought a metal statue of the Empire State Building, and I cut out a picture of a gorilla from a magazine, and I Scotch-taped it to the top of the Empire State Building, and on a little piece of white paper, I hand-lettered:

YOU’RE THE KING, KONG!

HAPPY FATHER’S DAY.

ABBY

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...”

“Forget 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.

10.

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.

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