“Okay.” The kid’s voice was a little deeper than Daniel had expected. “Okay…Mr. Warren.” He disappeared around the partition, already tugging at his jersey top.
Daniel went to his locker on the adults-only side of the partition and changed into his trunks. He moved quickly, stuffing damp gym shorts, T-shirt, and socks into the basket at the bottom of the locker, then slamming the door and spinning the combination. He grabbed his towel from the bench and hurried back to the center of the room.
The boy was already there waiting. He looked even thinner in the trunks, which were large on him, barely hanging on his narrow hips, it seemed, and so full in the legs that they made Miles look as if he were perched on two knobby stilts instead of on legs. But the kid was still smiling, and in his eyes Daniel saw intelligence, eagerness, and interest.
“Come on, Miles. Last one in’s a rotten egg.”
They swam for nearly an hour, doing laps at first, then just horsing around in the water, ducking and splashing each other and playing a kind of two-man tag in which Daniel always seemed to be ‘it’, leaping in the water and trying to tackle Daniel, who would twist and spin and swivel away. To Miles, it seemed like only moments before Marty came in to yell at them through the noise that Miles’ mother was waiting in the foyer to pick him up.
3
By the end of February, Miles Stanton and Daniel Warren were officially partners at the Helping-Hands. They swam together for at least an hour two or three times a week. They played basketball and racquetball and handball. They went on an all-day field trip to the L.A. Zoo on one Saturday that was unseasonably warm and too perfectly glorious not to be doing something outside. They had shared hamburgers and fries at McDonalds and pizza with everything at Straw Hat.
And sometime during that interval, Daniel Warren had met Miles’ mother, Elayne.
Divorced for eight years, Elayne was bright, vivacious, intelligent, witty. And beautiful. Once free from a husband who had turned alcoholic and vicious at the same time, she had struggled hard to provide for her son and herself, and had done a remarkable job. She had waitressed at half a dozen restaurants, sometimes working two shifts to bring back enough money to keep their small household going. She had taught Miles self-reliance and responsibility-he had to have both in unusual concentrations, she knew from the beginning, because sometimes she had to be gone for hours at a time, even when he was only seven or eight years old.
He was self-reliant and responsible, all right. He also had no friends to speak of. He preferred staying in the apartment and reading or watching TV to rough-housing with other guys his age. Guys who had Dads that blustered through the door in the evenings and gave them hugs and tickles and took them neat places. Guys who had Moms that baked cakes and cookies and played games with them when it was too rainy to play outside or when they didn’t feel good.
In spite of Elayne’s best efforts to be both a Mom and a Dad, Miles effectively had neither. He was a true latchkey kid, and he responded to his enforced isolation by withdrawing into his own world of imagination. It was safer there than on the outside. No one could hurt you there.
For a long while, Elayne Stanton wasn’t particularly aware of how withdrawn her son was becoming. When she did finally notice, she didn’t know quite what to do. She was working double shifts again-the rent had spiraled another $75 a month, and the car was making funny noises that in her limited experience with mechanics usually translated into major bucks, and Miles was starting to outgrow his clothes almost before she could get them home from the store. He needed help, she realized, but she couldn’t give it to him.
Then, just after Christmas the previous year, she heard about Helping Hands. She checked it out, was pleased with what she saw, and decided that the Club might be just the thing for Miles. But it took a while for her to convince Miles to leave the apartment and try it out
When he went into the Helping-Hands building that first afternoon, his eyes were fixed on the ground and his shoulders were slumped so much that it looked like his raincoat would slide right off and lay in a bright orange puddle at his feet. To Elayne’s worried mother-eyes, he didn’t look like a little boy on his way to an exciting afternoon of male bonding; he looked like a condemned prisoner on his way to be involuntary guest of honor at an electrocution.
When he came out that night, though, everything had changed. His hair curled damp and tousled against his head. His cheeks flushed red with excitement. His eyes snapped with an electricity that she could not remember ever having seen before. And all he could talk about was Daniel Warren.
Daniel did this. Daniel did that. Daniel said this. And Daniel said that. Miles chattered so constantly about Daniel Warren that by the time they entered their tiny apartment that night, Elayne had both a headache and an frighteningly yearning desire to meet this man who had so abruptly become the solitary focus of her child’s universe.
Elayne met Daniel for the first time two weeks later. They had their first official date in the middle of March- they took Miles to a dollar-a-car drive-in to see Home Alone. Even though it was raining so hard that neither of them could see through the front window, and Miles fell asleep fifteen minutes into the film, they counted the date a huge success.
And a week after Daniel Warren’s thirty-second birthday, accompanied to the Chapel of the Roses in Las Vegas only by Miles and by a still stunned Amanda Warren, Daniel and Elayne were married.
4
The new family lived for another couple of weeks in Daniel’s apartment, but it had been clear from the beginning that that arrangement was only temporary. The apartment was spacious enough, but there was only one bedroom, and even though Miles insisted repeatedly that he thought sleeping in the living room on Daniel’s overstuffed sofa was “real cool,” both Daniel and Elayne realized that the boy needed a home, a real home.
They began looking at possibilities.
From the beginning, Daniel had insisted that they not even consider anything right in the San Fernando Valley.
“It’s already too expensive to buy here, too crowded for a family,” he explained to Elayne late one evening. “In another few years, it will be like living in the middle of a fishbowl. There’re some new places going up farther north, between here and Ventura, that look pretty nice.” Besides, he continued, he had begun negotiations to take over an ailing Ford dealership in a rapidly developing area called Coastal Crest. So far there wasn’t much there, but what there was had been building up fast. Daniel could imagine it as it would be in ten years or so-an exclusive, high-priced neighborhood where the people would have plenty of money to spend on things like second or third cars.
So they began looking near Coastal Crest, in the hollow tucked comfortably into the Coastal Range that was generally known as Tamarind Valley.
It didn’t take long to find the perfect place.
On a beautiful, summery day early in May, Daniel took a day off from work. Miles was still in school, but Elayne had already quit her jobs, so the two of them drove the thirty minutes by freeway out to Tamarind Valley. The further they went, the more Elayne liked what she saw-gently sloping hills crowned with bright green grass and patches of vivid yellow, thigh-high mustard. They met the realtor at his office on Tamarind Boulevard, just off the 101 Freeway between one knot of developments that was Coastal Crest and a second, maybe five miles further north, that was Tamarind Valley.
Half an hour later, they were comfortably seated in the back seat of a brand new, air-conditioned 1992 Ford Taurus wagon and heading out to look at listings.
Elayne fell immediately in love with the third house they viewed. It was certainly big enough for the three of them. “And for more children, if you want more,” she added in a whisper to Daniel. Diplomatically, the realtor chose
