The Path to Ardroe by John Lent

Author:John Lent
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC019000, FIC039000, FIC025000
Publisher: Thistledown Press
Published: 2012-04-03T00:00:00+00:00

I threw a party for Danny last Saturday. Wendy and Catherine and I figured it all out. We started at the house with a Nintendo tournament, took the six kids to McDonald’s for supper, then back to the house to watch Ace Ventura, Pet Detective.

Danny worships that movie. He’s seen it four times now. I watch him mouth the words. He knows the whole script. He makes the same faces as Jim Carey. It’s incredible. If he’d only apply the same genius at school. For me, the entertainment was Danny, not the movie.

Danny just turned nine.

I’m thinking of him because I just passed the playground across from where Giuseppi’s Pizza used to be, just past the Safeway on the west side of 109th Street.

Here I am tonight, sifting through the streets of my childhood while he’s sleeping, safe and sound, back at the house, in the middle of his childhood now.

I decided to have Danny on my own. One of the only deliberate choices I ever really plotted out in detail. He’s become my life’s work.

When I knew for sure I was going to have a baby, I’d been living in an apartment in Lendrum for four years. I’d put away a bit of money and my father had given me a bit when he sold the house and moved back to Krydor after retiring. I looked around the old neighbourhood for three months and finally bought a house in Parkallen, on 68th Avenue, just west of 109th Street.

It’s a big house, two storeys , and I rented out the upper floor to a couple, Wendy and Catherine, whom I’d met in my women’s group. We share the kitchen and the utilities. They’ve become second and third mothers to Danny; they’re built-in baby-sitters. We’ve had our moments, but basically, the arrangement has worked out well. They’re going to assume custody of Danny. They don’t know exactly how soon that’s going to be, but it’s been arranged. Even my dad has accepted this, which was a big breakthrough.

Of course, it all sounds smooth from this perspective. It wasn’t smooth at the time, any step of it. But again, my instincts were good. I’m a good arranger. I’ll give myself that.

When I realized I was going to go ahead with the baby, my next step was to figure out how.

I knew I could set it all up through a sperm bank, but I wanted to make it real, make him arrive out of a love, even if it were just the pleasure of love. I looked back over the lovers I’d had and wondered who I could seek out who would go along with it at the beginning, but not interfere afterward. This was the tricky part.

That’s when I knew Ronnie would be perfect, and that’s how he figures in all this.

When we were in St. Mary’s a few restaurants opened up on the South Side that became hang-outs, and Giuseppi’s was the best of them, the most exciting. Pizza itself was a new thing and we all fell in love with it.

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