Jake has decided to move with his father to Alabama. Tonight. No time for discussion.
Try to think of some positive images of stepfathers in literature, film, even television. I dare you. I would have said Joe Gargery, the simple blacksmith from Great Expectations, but he’s Pip’s brother-in-law, I eventually deduce, not his stepfather. Mike Brady from “The Brady Bunch” got on ridiculously well with his stepdaughters, but then that’s not the half of what was make-believe about Robert Reed’s portrayal of that character.
“It’s a thankless job,” the marriage counselor tells me, “practically impossible. You simply can’t be his father and shouldn’t try to be his friend.”
“What then?” I ask him. “I don’t do thankless jobs, as a rule.”
I hound the boy about why we can’t get along better. Jake and I have managed to string two or three good weeks together here and there, shooting hoops with his buddy Jared or sneaking a late night pizza past his mother. It lifts her spirits to see us this way, something Jake and I both want—we do have a love for her in common. But I go back to chewing my late-night cereal so loudly it wakes him from a deep sleep upstairs, and I can’t understand why he’s had to befriend and bring home every delinquent in the eighth grade. A bad day sets us back so far I despair of the whole enterprise.
“Look,” he finally says, “It’s nothing you did. I just don’t like you.”
Bob Cowser Jr.’s essays and reviews have appeared widely in American literary magazines. His first book, Dream Season: a Professor Joins America’s Oldest Semi-Pro Football Team, published in 2004 by the Atlantic Monthly Press, was a New York Times Sunday Book Review Editor’s Choice. Cowser holds a Ph.D. in creative writing from the University of Nebraska and is associate professor of English at Saint Lawrence University in Canton, New York.