One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(32)

I handed it to him. He looked at it.

“Now let me see another box,” he said. “A losing box.”

“Which losing box?”

“Any of them.”

“There are seven—”

“Any f*cking box,” he said quietly. “Any box. All of them, just one—any of them.”

I walked over with all the boxes. He looked at two and then put the rest back down.

“Go to your room for a few minutes. Your mother and I are going to discuss this.”


“There are values,” my father said an hour later to begin the unprecedented second family meeting of the day, “that some people have—that many people have—that most people have. That we understand—that we respect, definitely—that are the prevailing values of the day, even, and we respect that, too, on its own terms, but. But. Respecting a value doesn’t necessarily mean sharing that value—often, but not always—only sometimes, anyway. For your mother and I … We in this household … That’s what we believe.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. My mother looked like she knew what he was supposed to be talking about, but not why he was saying it the way he was.

“We are not going to claim the prize,” said my mother.

Now I understood why my father had answered in such a nonsensical way: what he was trying to say made no sense.

“Why?”

“Because it’s based on actions that we don’t allow in this household,” my mother said. “It’s the result of broken rules.”

“But I already broke the rule, and you forgave me,” I said.

“It doesn’t work like that,” said my mother.

“Why don’t you punish me for that,” I said, “something fair, like grounding me, and then I’ll keep the hundred thousand dollars. You wouldn’t fine me a hundred thousand dollars just for going to the store when I wasn’t allowed to, right? You’d ground me, right? So just ground me. Okay?”

“But everything that would follow would be based on breaking that rule,” said my father. “So any change in our lives—and there would be a great many—would be following from a corrupt core, from a foundation of values we didn’t believe in. Do you understand?”

“This is a test, in a way,” said my mother. “A test of fate.”

“Yes, except there’s no such thing as fate, there are only consequences of previous actions, and coincidences, which are the consequences of factors and decisions which are too many and too minute to be aware of—”

“Okay,” said my mother. “Okay, stop. In any case, it’s a test of our values.”

“How about this,” I offered. “You put all the money in a college fund for me. I’m not even allowed to touch it until I get to college. And then, it’s only to pay for college.”

I stared at them, daring them to turn down a prospect as joyless as this one. If I won a hundred thousand dollars and it all went into a college fund, would it still be the greatest single letdown of my life? Yes. I had no interest in college; I planned to be a professional wrestler. But at this point I just needed to find out if this free-falling disappointment even had a floor.

“No,” said my mother.

“That would still be basing everything on something that isn’t our value system,” said my father. “In terms of college, if you work hard, there are still plenty of ways to earn scholarships or find alternative paths toward a good education without a lot of money.”

“I thought you said all of higher education was corrupt and based only on money,” I said.

My mother looked at my father.

“I said that in a heated moment, in the midst of a stressful tenure … No, there … there are definitely ways …”

I no longer understood my parents.

“Can I at least keep the sugar cereals?” I asked.

They looked at each other.

“Yes,” said my mother.

“All of them?”

They smiled, relieved to have this conversation end on the word “yes.”

“Yes,” they said.

“Okay,” I said.


It wasn’t okay at all, and looking back, I think that question represented the birth—forced under high pressure at the age when a moment like this is bound to be born anyway—of my first pulse of truly sophisticated manipulation.

In that instant, it had suddenly come to me that if I were to ask that adorably missing-the-point question, I would appear to them like the fifth grader who would leave it at that, who would trust that his parents were always right, instead of the fifth grader who now knew, with certainty and for the first time, that his parents were wrong and that it was his destiny to use all the powers he had, including a calculated flash of the belovedly unpredictable kid logic of their only child, to set things right.


Tom Salzberg was a fifth grader who was old for our grade and acted it. We weren’t exactly friends, but I considered us respectful acquaintances, and I had a sense he would know what to do with this information. I found him at his locker in the three minutes between homeroom and library and quickly told him everything.

“Mm-hmm,” he said. As if this happening were one of many things like this he had to balance today. As if it had happened before. “Mm-hmm. Do you know where the ticket is?”