Max had a very laissez-faire attitude toward the rules of life. He was fifty-five, had never married, and didn’t seem to be working. “Where does he get his money?” and “What does he do for a living?” were unanswerable questions. From what I was able to gather from his texts and occasional emails, he was traveling around the world going to Burning Man events with baby-faced tech billionaires.
Do you want to go to Burning Man Africa? he’d text.
No thanks! I’d text back. Gotta work. On deadline. But you have fun!
I always got a bit squirrelly when my friends asked about the actual circumstances of how a person like Max happened to have a kid, especially as he hadn’t had the kid “on purpose.”
Max was one of those people who’d never led a conventional life and was always up front about it. He’d tell his partners that he didn’t believe in marriage, nor did he want children. Max knew his personality and lifestyle weren’t suited to the raising of small, vulnerable humans.
But Max became a parent anyway. He met an Icelandic woman at a party in Italy and they had sex for the next five days. She called two months later to say four things: she was pregnant, she was going to have the child, she was going to take care of it, and he didn’t have to be involved.
Six years passed. Six years in which the son grew up in the small Nordic country, speaking only Icelandic. Occasionally Max would mention his son. “You saw him?” I’d ask, mildly surprised. “How is he?”
“He seems fine. But we can’t communicate. He doesn’t speak English.”
The boy had a simple life. He had a half sister whose father was the opposite of Max—a local fisherman. The boy spent a lot of time outdoors. It was possible that he, too, would have ended up becoming a local fisherman.
But one day the woman decided to seek a better life for her and her children. She took all her savings and moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was able to get a job as a real estate agent working on twenty-five-hundred-dollar-a-month rentals.
She had enough to get by.
But mostly, because she was in New York City, a place where Max spent a few weeks a year, Max began seeing his son more often. And now, at the age of fifty-five and with no previous experience, Max was trying to feel his way into being a father.
I was determined to help him. After all, he was making an effort and surely this should be encouraged. This, I explained to my friends, was why I had offered to help Max realize his dream of the perfect camping trip with his son.
But not everyone was buying it.
“Don’t you think it’s weird, this strange woman sending her child to stay at your house?” Tilda Tia asked. She pointed out that as a mother she would never have sent her eight-year-old kid to stay with a woman she’d never met.
I’m not a parent so I wouldn’t know. But I can imagine there might be some circumstances under which a mother might send her child away. Like in Heidi.
“This isn’t Heidi,” Tilda Tia barked. “I mean, you’re not even Max’s girlfriend.”
“Maybe that’s why it’s okay,” Kitty said. “She’s not a threat.”
“Do you have any idea what you’re getting into?” Tilda Tia was a real den mother. When she stayed at Kitty’s, she was always going to the supermarket and cooking meals and yelling at Kitty’s other houseguests to clean up their rooms.
She was right. I had no idea of what I was getting into. But I had already committed, prepared for the fact that anything might happen and probably would. As I had no children of my own, I figured at the very least the adventure would be research.
Now I picked up my phone and checked the time and the weather. The heat was going to kick up severe thunderstorms, starting in the next hour or so. Meaning it wouldn’t be a good time to set up tents. Because . . . electrocution.
I texted Max: Where are you?
* * *
When the boy and his father finally arrived by Uber at 10:00 p.m., I’d like to say that I was as gay as a Doris Day housewife, but I wasn’t. I was annoyed they’d arrived hours later than promised.
But the arrival of houseguests is like giving birth: you’re so happy to see them you immediately forget how irritated you were while waiting for them to show up.
In a display of good parenting, the father rushed the boy into the bathroom while I carted some of their stuff from the driveway to the living room.
As I looked around for where to put the boy’s bags, I realized Tilda Tia was right. It was sort of awkward. I wasn’t his mother and yet he was staying at my house. His father was not my boyfriend, and yet he was staying at my house, too.
On the other hand, they weren’t technically staying in the house. They were supposed to be camping in the backyard and hanging out in the barn. They would have their space. I would have mine.
The problem was the impending thunderstorms, which made sleeping in a tent not only unpleasant, but dangerous.
But the boy wasn’t interested in being inside. He’d been promised a tent. And he wasn’t impressed when his father and I pointed out that the upstairs of the barn was big enough to put up a tent. And it even had a small air conditioner!