The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1) by Suanne Laqueur
To My Favorite
Part One: Erik
A Guarded Boy
Some seek the limelight and some hold the light in place.
Erik Fiskare didn’t like being the center of attention, but he liked situations where he had to keep the attention centered.
He was the son of a builder and a musician. He grew up around his father’s workbench, watching how things were made. Or around his mother’s piano, listening to how things were composed. The smoky smell of cut wood and the dizzy odor of turpentine wreathed his childhood days, along with the strains of Bach and Mozart. He played with scrap wood on the saw-dusty floor, pattering along to the ring of hammer on nail and the dissonant squeal of a power saw. Or he lay on the rug beneath the piano, listening to hammers striking strings, nattering to himself as his mother gave lessons to neighborhood kids.
“Erik is happiest when he’s underfoot,” she always said.
In the dark of a night when he was eight years old, Erik awoke to the sound of wheels crunching over gravel in the driveway. From his bedroom window he stared as his father’s pickup truck backed out. It gleamed white in the moonlight, the blue letters crisp on the driver’s side door—FISKARE CONSTRUCTION arching over a fleet of blue fish. Fiskare was Swedish for “fisherman.”
Erik watched the red taillights pull further and further down the street, then turn a corner and disappear.
He never saw his father again.
It was a cruel and unexplained desertion which left in its wake a little boy soothed by routine and structure, calmed when things went to according plan. He grew into a teenager with an insatiable need to know how things worked and why. He took everything apart and put it back together, usually successfully. Anything refusing to reassemble was jerry-rigged, and anything that wouldn’t jerry-rig was recycled. Any guy with half a brain knew to have a plan B. Erik had a plan C and D, minimum.
In youth sports he was continually elected captain, for not only was he a natural athlete, but also a natural rallying point. He knew just enough about all his teammates’ personalities to figure out how the team worked best. The team had its superstars, its weak links and its filler. And the self-effacing guy who had his finger on the pulse of it all, the oil keeping the gears in motion, the unifying force making the many into one—that was Erik.
He dialed into basketball in elementary school. An early growth spurt had him at a promising five-eleven by the start of junior high. But to his disappointment, later adolescence only granted him another three-quarters of an inch. He would never break the six-foot ceiling so beloved to boys.
Despite his height he’d been a talented, scrappy point guard on the junior varsity team, possessing a lethal three-point shot and a reputation as an elegant thug on defense. He held the league record in steals until he was benched with an ankle injury his sophomore year. Christine Fiskare allowed her oldest son a three-day pity party. It was all she could afford. She had sold the piano and now worked two jobs while pursuing a nursing degree. The bulk of her worry was allocated to her younger son, Peter, who was profoundly deaf after a childhood illness and stubbornly uncommunicative since his father had left.
Three days was also the limit of her patience. Even before the desertion, Christine had never coddled either of her sons. Nor had public hand-wringing ever been in her nature. Her pain as an abandoned wife was suffered in private, far from the boys’ eyes. As a single mother, she set the past aside and made plans. Shrewdness and self-sufficiency were the bedrock beneath her little family. Once Erik was in a walking cast and maneuvering easily on his crutches, she challenged him to find a new hobby, something to fill up the hours between dismissal and five-thirty. “Something accountable, Mister,” Christine said. “I need to know where you are. And no hanging around street corners, or I’ll find you a job.”
She ruffled his short blond hair, teasing. Erik wasn’t a troublemaker. He’d been making his own pocket money since he was eleven, when he became familiar with such terms as “willful desertion” and “child support,” and the need to check the “divorced” box on forms. He knew his Fiskare grandparents contributed to his and Pete’s upbringing. They lived far upstate near the Canadian border, a modest and self-sufficient couple full of Scandinavian reserve. They pledged support to their two grandsons, but it was a stoic assurance. Erik could never tell if they helped out of love, obligation or shame. They expressed appreciation through deeds, not words. No loving sentiments or warm embraces had ever marked Erik’s visits with the Fiskare elders. He got his fill of physical mush from Christine’s family, a close-knit Italian clan with no money to spare but affection on tap.
Erik was his mother’s apt pupil. He earned his degree in shrewdness and adjusted quickly. He learned to stay out of trouble and always let Christine know where he was. He knew how hard she worked, knew the basics were covered, and knew Peter’s needs took priority. If he wanted luxuries, either material or spiritual, he had to get them himself.
With sports out of the equation, though, Erik had no idea what to do with his time. Out of loyalty he presented himself at basketball practices and games, continuing to rally his mates and picking up some skills as an unspoken assistant coach. But his soul was lost, and his inner compass whirled in a desperate search for another True North he could align to.