Fortunate Son

“I think so,” his father said. “It wasn’t hard with Branwyn like it was with other women.”

“What do you mean?” Eric asked softly.

“Other women I’d known wanted something you couldn’t see or touch or even say. They called it love, but it was more like a game the way I saw it. One night I asked Branwyn if she loved me, and she said that she fell in love with me every night that I carried her up the stairs to our room. When she said that, I felt like a kid. I kissed her and she laughed at me . . .”

Minas got lost in the memory.

“What is it, Dad?”

“I asked her to marry me, but she said no. I asked her all the time, but the answer was always the same.”

“You think that was because she didn’t love you?”

“No. It had to do with Tommy,” Minas said. “Tommy’s father was alive, and she didn’t want her boy to feel his loss with our marriage.”

It was time for Minas to leave.

“Have I neglected you, Eric?”

In his mind Eric saw his father rising up and walking toward the door. He was supposed to be leaving, but he was not.

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F o r t u n a t e S o n

Behind the pantry door Ahn was thinking the same thing.

She feared that something terrible was about to happen.

“No,” Eric said.

“It’s just that,” Minas continued as if his son had not spoken at all, “you’ve never seemed to need help. All we ever had to do was contain you, hold you back from eating all the Christmas fruitcake or from jumping off the roof to fly with the sparrows.

“You never complained about anything. If I told you something, you just listened to me. Children are supposed to fight with their parents. Sons are supposed to want to push their fathers aside. But I always felt that you were trying to protect me instead of the other way around.

“But now that you’re asking about your mothers, I see that I haven’t been there for you.”

Eric was staring at his father’s face, imagining that he had his sketch pad before him. He would paint the portrait of his father many years later, but this was the sitting for that canvas.

The drained blue eyes and graying blond hair, the gaunt jowls and dry lips.

Mothers, Eric thought. Mothers. Other children only had one mother, but he had two and both of them had died for him to survive.

“Would you like to go down to Malibu this morning, son?” Minas asked.

“I have to do something, Dad.”

“What’s that?”

“Christie’s going to the doctor. I told her that I’d go with.”

“You’re still with her?”

Eric had seen Christie almost every day for a year. “Yeah, Dad.”

It was 7:05, and Minas dawdled at the table.

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Wa l t e r M o s l e y

“I could come home early,” the doctor offered.

“Sure, Dad.”

A h n cam e out of the storeroom moments after Minas left.

She stood near the door staring at Eric.

“Hi, Ahn,” the young man said.

She came up to the table and sat in the doctor’s chair.

Ahn was the only person that Eric had ever been afraid of.

It was long ago that he’d first felt this fear, before he was twelve and after Thomas had been taken away. He would find Ahn standing somewhere, staring at him. When he’d ask her why, she wouldn’t say anything, just wander away only to return later, still staring silently.

“The only thing I remember,” she began, “before I ran to the refugee camp, was a story that a very old man said to me.

I don’t know who he was. Maybe my grandfather, maybe some elder in the village where we work in rice paddies.

“He told me the story about a young woman who fell in love with a tiger. The woman go to her mother and tell her that she is in love with the tiger that lived in the north jungle.

“At night he calls outside my window and asks me to come awaywith him, the girl said. And when I look out I see him in moonlight. Mother, he is so beautiful and handsome, and his deep voice makes me tremble inside.

“But, my daughter, the mother said. He is a tiger, a man-eater, a monster.

“For you, Mother, I know that he is a beast. But for me he hasnothing but love. He takes me riding on his back through the jungleunder golden moonlight, and all the creatures there bow down to meas consort to their king.

“It is true, the mother said, that the tiger is a king. He is better 1 4 2

F o r t u n a t e S o n