A Member of the Family

John Avery Whittaker can hardly sit still at the airport. He has not seen his grandson Monty in three years, and Tom Riley, waiting beside him, has not seen the boy since the day he was born. While they watch the gate, Whit passes around a stack of new photographs that his daughter Jana took at her place in Pasadena. There is the swimming pool, there is Jennifer with a friend, and there, at last, is Monty himself. Tom studies the picture and gets an idea. His Little League team, the Coyotes, has one playoff game left and needs an outfielder badly, and since most of the Coyotes are nine years old, just like Monty, the boy would fit right in.

Monty arrives carrying a bag full of movies. He wants to know whether his grandfather has a VCR, and whether Odyssey has cable, and he seems a little disappointed to learn that Whit has neither. Someday, Monty explains, he is going to make movies himself, probably as a director. Whit tells him gently that Odyssey is as up to date as the next town, but that there are far more interesting things to do there than sit in front of a television. On the drive home, Tom repeats his invitation to join the Coyotes and adds that the real point of the game is to do your best and have a good time. Then he launches into a long, cheerful complaint about the Little League awards show, praising a teammate named Heather Bullock as the finest little loser he has ever seen. By the end of the ride, Monty has decided to pass on baseball for the summer.

The first evening does not go smoothly. Monty turns up his nose at pizza and salad, eats a great many brownies, argues when he is told he has had enough, and turns the television up so loud that Whit can barely hear a telephone call from the Los Angeles airport. The call brings bad news. Monty left a jacket in an airport restroom with one hundred dollars in the pocket - money he had withdrawn from his own savings account for his eight weeks in Odyssey. The jacket and the money are gone, and Monty's mother is away at a banking seminar and cannot send more until the following Friday. When Monty demands to know whether his grandfather is going to give him an allowance, and demands it rudely, Whit sets down rule number one of the house: no disrespectful talk. There are rules here, he says, the same rules Jana and her brothers learned to live by, and there will be consequences if they are broken. A moment later, when a shoe thumps against the bedroom door, Whit adds rule number two.

The next morning Whit takes Monty to Whit's End, the shop named for the family, and offers him a job: flatten the empty boxes in the storeroom, carry them out to the dumpster, and sweep the floor carefully. Three dollars, enough for a matinee ticket, and far more than the work would pay anywhere else. Monty is outraged at the idea of working for money at all, but agrees. Alone in the storeroom, he calls his mother on the store phone instead, tells her that Odyssey is terrible and that his grandfather is the meanest man he ever met, and begs her to come and get him. Then he leaves the sweeping undone and sets out to open the cash drawer and take himself to the movies. A young employee named Jimmy, who has heard nothing but Monty's coming for three weeks, helpfully shows him how the register opens.

Whit finds out, and Monty is spanked for the first time in his life. Afterward, with the boy insisting that his grandfather must hate him, Whit tells him a story about a little boy who was given a puppy and a red leather leash, and who talked himself out of his promise to keep the leash on. The puppy ran free and had a wonderful time, right up until it chased a delivery truck into the street. It was not the truck driver's fault, Whit says, and it certainly was not the puppy's. The boy had thought that loving the puppy meant giving it what it wanted, when the most loving thing would have been to give it what it needed. Rules, Whit explains, are not something he invents to spoil a summer. They come from God, and if he truly loves his grandson he will keep them himself and see that Monty keeps them too. He takes no pleasure in tugging the leash, but he will do it as hard and as often as he must. And if Monty can learn to trust him and be honest with him, Whit promises, the two of them can have a genuinely good summer together. Monty says he will try.

One week later, Whit and Tom are in the kitchen performing emergency surgery on a champion's cake that rode to the house upside down, patching the red icing letters until they spell Coyotes again. In the living room sits a whole team of league champions waiting for a slice, Monty among them, and Tom marvels that Whit has turned an ornery brat into a nice young man and a fine outfielder. Whit will not take the credit. Monty has always been a nice young man, he says. He just needed some of the dust blown off him.

Then the doorbell rings, and it is Jana. Monty had forgotten all about the phone call he made from the store, and now his mother has driven two hundred and fifty miles out of her way to rescue him from a grandfather he no longer wants rescuing from. Monty pleads to stay. Jana, hurt and unthanked, is in no mood to hear it. Frightened, Monty goes to Whit and asks to be spanked again, confessing what he did. Whit tells him no, sends him back to his cake, and steps outside to face his daughter - who wants to know, in a voice that is anything but grateful, exactly what he has done to her son.