"What Would You Have Me Do?" by Pia Ehrhardt

What Would You Have Me Do?
by Pia Z. Ehrhardt

We’d driven from Baton Rouge to Myrtle Beach to see my husband’s son. Rodney was twenty-one and had been working in South Carolina for the summer. Mornings, he strapped kids into go-carts at Sand Kastle Kingdom, and afternoons, he ministered on the beach. He was raised a Catholic, but during the divorce his mother joined an evangelical church and had him rebaptized when he was fifteen.

“Why’d you let her do that?” I asked once.

“How could I stop her?”

“A court order,” I said, but he didn’t answer.

Rodney had spoken to his father a few times by phone, hadn’t sounded homesick but like he’d be OK with a visit. He was waiting for us at the Pancake Shack with a pretty girl and got up from the table. He had on a kelly-green uniform from the amusement park and a Confederate baseball cap.

“Do you know the meaning of that flag?” Matthew, my husband, said, pointing to Rodney’s head.

“Yeah.”

“Then take it off,” Matthew said, extending his hand. He pulled his son close, and they clapped each other on the back.

Rodney introduced us to Marguerite. She wore dangly turquoise earrings, white denim cutoffs, and a black-ribbed tank top. They’d gone skydiving that morning. “The instructor taped us free-falling,” he said, wagging the video at us, a done deal.
Our five-year-old son, Logan, pushed his chair closer to Rodney’s and wanted to know if he could jump, too.

“No,” I answered.

Matthew asked the waitress to bring ice water. “At any point did you want to change your mind?” he said.

“Never,” Rodney said. “They train you by making you jump off a three-story building.”

Marguerite nodded her head, his thrill pal. “We smiled the whole way down, right, Buddy?” she said. “The Lord kept his hands under us.” She cupped hers to show us how.

Rodney ordered what he always ate, one egg sunny side up, grits, buttered white toast, but he’d started drinking coffee with cream and sugar.

“Remember how I used to trick you at breakfast with that rubber egg?” his father said.

Rodney shook his head. “I was a sucker back then.” He leaned over and shoveled food into his mouth like the plate was on fire.

Logan flooded his pancakes with syrup. “Dad tries giving me that egg.”

“You’ll learn,” Rodney said.

Logan forked food in his mouth as fast as his brother. “Quit eating like Vikings,” I said to them. Rodney gave me a dirty look that stung me. We’d never had a cross word, but I’d never corrected him. He’d always been someone else’s kid, and I tried to curry favor by staying out of his way, unless he needed me to run interference with his dad. Or wanted someone to listen to how things happened. When he was ten, eleven, twelve he’d recount long, detailed plots of the movies he’d just seen, backtracking when he messed up some bit of it. I was grateful that he thought I cared.

“You got taller,” Matthew said.

“Measure hands.” Rodney pressed his palm against his father’s, and his nail-bitten fingers hooked over Matthew’s.

“Do me!” Logan said, knocking over his glass of milk. He looked over at me, worried.

“It’s OK,” I said. I tried to downplay spilled drinks because my mother had berated me when I made a mess, but the first look on my face—“Can’t you be careful?”—is what Logan saw.

So did Matthew, who wiped up the mess, calm, because he knew what to do for this son. “The job’s going okay?” he asked Rodney, because we couldn’t talk about the religion, his zeal, the Real Work he’d come to do.

“I could live here,” Rodney said, splitting a piece of carrot cake with Marguerite. “Next, we’re bungee jumping off a bridge.”

Marguerite leaned forward. “They say it’s like suicide with your second chance built in.”

Matthew didn’t comment, just asked for the check. He was sure of what she would never know: his son was careful, shy, susceptible.

Rodney kissed Marguerite good-bye so he could show us to our hotel. He waited in the lobby while we changed into swimsuits because Logan needed to swim immediately.
“Throw me high,” he instructed his half-brother, and Rodney did.

“Easy,” I said, because the pool was kidney shaped, and I didn’t trust him right then with the one who was mine.

“Come here, little baby,” Rodney said, launching Logan again.

“I’m in kindergarten.”

“That’s enough,” I said.

Rodney had lost weight and had a deep tan and a washboard stomach. Every muscle was sharp cut. On whose watch did these changes happen? Suddenly there was a stack of reasons I would never again be with a boy like him: age, impropriety, religion, his disregard. I was forty, furtive, righteous, and angry at Rodney for proselytizing, angry at his father for letting the ex dunk a boy who used to be curious and rational, angry at myself for not riding out this troubling visit on a wave of near-mother love.

Rodney sat with his dad and me on the side of the pool. In the middle of his back was a rug burn in the shape of New Jersey that probably matched the states on Marguerite’s knees.

“Do you still think about medical school?” I said, because I didn’t want to give up.

“Bible college,” he said. “I want my own church one day.”

“So you’re not going to finish LSU?” his father said.

“They’ve asked me to stay on in Myrtle Beach and work with the youth group.”

Matthew was too quiet, so I took a breath, got ready to question Rodney, but Matthew touched my arm to protect Rodney, which made me jealous. My heart dehydrated. I might not always be a wife, but Rodney was a son for good.

“This area has a hundred and sixty golf courses,” Rodney said. Chamber of Commerce stuff because none of us played. His eyes were hidden behind dark wraparound glasses.

“Can I buy you a beer?” his father said.

“I don’t drink,” Rodney said. “I’m gonna need to get over to the beach for Sunset Service. I’m preaching, and I’d like it if you came.”

“I don’t think, son,” Matthew said. “Religion is personal.”

Rodney looked disappointed and like he had an answer to that reaction.

“I want to go,” Logan said, kicking water at his father.

“We’re gonna stay and swim,” Matthew told Logan.

“Here, pal,” Rodney said, handing the skydiving cassette to Logan. “Watch me on the tape.”

“I’ll take it,” I said, so it wouldn’t get wet.

Matthew poured the rest of his beer into a Styrofoam cup he could take up to our room. “Christ. It’s ugly here,” he said when Rodney was gone.

This place wasn’t a beach. It was one arcade built on top of another arcade across the street from dirty sand and waves.

Clouds darkened and drew closer. The heat index was 107, and I hoped a thunderstorm would let go on top of us and stop all the sun. Rain would drive us all back inside to turn off the lights, grab a pillow, and order a movie.

Logan, bored without Rodney, wanted to go up to the room and watch cartoons.

“What are we doing here?” Matthew said, sitting down on the double bed. “He’s gone.”

“Mom,” Logan said, digging in my purse. “Put in Rodney’s tape.”

The video was bleached out and grainy, but it took us through their training, the harnessed jump off a thirty-foot wall, them stepping into orange jumpsuits and slipping their arms through parachute harnesses, the patchwork of views from the open door of the plane, nervous laughter, muffled prayer, and then Marguerite jumped out first, her body starfishing through space. Rodney looked at the camera, and his face was pale.

“Go!” the instructor said.

“I can’t,” Rodney said.

His father moved toward the TV as if to reach through the screen and pull him inside.

“Go! With me!” the man said, and he grabbed Rodney’s hand and they jumped out together and somehow caught up to Marguerite. The three jumpers held hands. The camera mounted on the instructor’s helmet caught the two newbies smiling, yes, but ready to pull the chutes, and the free fall that I had imagined was akin to fucking at ten thousand feet looked more like pained waiting. “Pull!” the instructor said, and everyone got jerked up by invisible strings. The float down was all release and joy, too personal for me to watch, so I looked at my bare feet on the thin carpet.

Theirs finally touched ground, and Matthew took a deep breath. “I think I could do that.”

“I could, too,” Logan said. He jumped high on the bed, his hands clutching imaginary parachute straps.

Again, I tried to understand how Matthew had given up dominion over his older son. “Does it upset you that you can’t tell him what to do anymore?”

“I don’t want to push him away,” he said.

“So what do you do with the worry?” I said, but the question was mean, a poke in a wound.

“What would you have me do?” he said, popping open a cold can of beer. I lived on the wrong side of the arc of this story. He’d forgiven Rodney and taken to the sky, because he lived in his boy and trusted he wouldn’t crash to earth.

The tape turned to static. “I’m afraid of heights,” I said. The truth: I’d always been afraid of how irrevocably parents love their children. Afraid of how terribly I loved Logan—so much I often forgot he was Matthew’s, too.

“Play it again,” Logan said, and I showed him the rewind so he could look at his brother and Marguerite skydive thirty more times.

Our window faced the water, and from up there we could see Rodney’s Bible group advance across the beach, how they interrupted two girls on their stomachs on bright blue towels. Someone staked a wooden cross into the sand.

“They’re encouraged when people shoo them away,” Matthew said. “It makes their work seem misunderstood and righteous.”

When he was fifteen, Rodney brought a book home from science class that illustrated how the human body flexed and bent and torqued, and he counted its odd-numbered proportions: five appendages to the torso, five fingers or toes on four of these, and five openings to the face. Our bodies made asymmetrical sense! He had me hold my arm out straight and with a stubby finger traced every muscle, tendon, and joint before he pointed out the twenty-seven bones in my human hand. Me, surprised and relieved to be touched on purpose by my stepson.

Lightning knifed the ocean, and thunder cracked. Logan ran to the window and counted, “Five-Mississippi, six-Mississippi.” People hurried off the beach. A lightning bolt hit the lifeguard stand, then another hit the beach. The hotel’s power went out. Three-wheelers arrived from every direction, and people ran back toward a girl on the sand in a red bikini. The crowd circled her with concern until medics pushed their way through. From our window, the danger was so clear; but out there no one was taking shelter.

Matthew ran from the room and headed for the exit; I grabbed Logan’s hand, and we started after Matthew down twenty-three flights, but it was slow going. “Wait for us,” I said, and Matthew paused on a landing, picked Logan up, and carried him the rest of the way in his arms. On the beach, many of the boys wore baseball caps. We couldn’t tell which kid was Rodney.

The lightning had stopped, but rain was coming down hard. I tried to keep Logan with me under the hotel’s overhang, but he pulled my arm, said, “I want to go with Dad.”

Matthew found Rodney next to the lifeguard stand, watching EMTs work on the injured girl. Marguerite held Rodney’s hand, and they closed their eyes and began, quietly, to pray. We stood off to the side and waited for them to finish.

“Do you know her?” Matthew asked.

Rodney shook his head. “They said she’s from Georgia.”

“Do you want to come back up to the room with us? Dry off?” his father said.

“I could make popcorn in the microwave,” I said.

“Service is at six-thirty,” Rodney said, and he extended his hand. “See ya, Pop.” He gave me a hug, and laid his palm out flat for Logan to slap.

We had breakfast together the next morning, dinner the next night, and Logan spent two days at Sand Kastle Kingdom, shadowing his brother. Logan rode the rides for free, and won yards of tickets in the arcade that he traded in for homework snatchers, bouncy balls, a spider ring for me, a sand globe for his father, a detailed planet earth no bigger than a Ping-Pong ball, which Rodney hung from the rearview mirror of his truck.

Our drive back to Baton Rouge was quiet. Logan slept in the backseat under an LSU blanket he’d brought from home. We were leaving Rodney behind, but I didn’t want to gig Matthew about what couldn’t be changed. He’d raised his son to be a freethinker. The interstate was crowded with families headed to and from their vacations, and double-decker tour buses, and eighteen-wheelers that stayed too long in the left lane. I kept my eyes on the road, and missed the boy who was never quite but always my own.


Ehrhardt, Pia Z. “What Would You Have Me Do?” Narrative Magazine. Spring 2006.