trip on them in the middle of the night on her way to the bathroom.
He pitched his shirt across the dressing room and missed the laundry basket, then faced her with his hands on his belt.
“Mike?”
“What?” His belt buckle banged the door as he hung it from the bathroom doorknob.
“You really have to start reading fiction.” And she threw the pillow at him.
The month Mike appeared on the cover of Business Week with the caption “It Only Looks Easy,” (“it” referring to the rise of the sport of snowboarding), Mickey, their fourth child, tried to ride his Transformer car down the stairs and had to have seventeen stitches in his forehead. Behind the accident were Scott and Phillip, caught standing in the corner of the upstairs landing and whispering sworn vows to not tell Dad what they did.
Mike had grown up with an older brother and clearly understood sibling dynamics. Brad duped him enough times to make him remember all the bruises and challenges and dirty tricks. The antics between his older brother and him were a rite in natural family order.
But it was his father’s reaction that changed the dynamic from brotherly prank to damage. Every time Brad got the better of him, Mike could see he became more and more of a fool in his dad’s eyes. Sometimes the darkest legacy between brothers was more about emotional scars than the physical ones.
Through the coming years his own kids made his life fuller, even though they fought over Monopoly money, the biggest slice of cake, who would sit in the middle, which bedroom was better, often with Scott and Phillip so involved in arguing with each other they never realized Molly just waltzed in and took what she wanted when they weren’t looking.
Occasionally they managed to get even with her, like when they taught her to snap her fingers backwards or filled her bed with ants. But for Mike she was a butterfly who seemed to light upon the ordinary things in his world, making them seem rare and special. Her Mollyisms could paint the unexpected into a regular day.
“Dad? Do you know where rainbows come from?”
“Ireland?” he’d asked.
“No, silly.”
“Leprechans?”
She had giggled in that way little girls did, a simple sound that gave him a great sense of joy.
“Light refracts through the water droplets,” she’d said. “And because water droplets are round, they cause the light to bend. A rainbow is really a full circle of colored light but the ground stops you from seeing the other half of the circle.”
“Where are the pots of gold?” he asked to tease her. But he knew the real pot of gold was walking along side him, her red hair in long braids, the little girl who snapped her fingers backwards, explained scientific facts, got even with her brothers by rolling their boxer shorts in itching powder—payback for the ants—and constantly reminded him what a wonderful thing the imagination was.
They were walking toward Alioto’s for oysters that day she told him about the rainbows and he stopped for a second. “Look at that, shortcake.” He pointed to a white seagull feather on the ground. “Do you know what that is?”
She reached down and picked up it up. “This is a feather.”
“It’s also a message. A white feather is a gift from someone who loves you. Someone in heaven. When I was about your age, not too long after Poppy, my grandfather, your great-grandfather, died, I began to find white feathers in my shoes, my school notebook, stuck to my bicycle handle. One day my grandmother saw me pick up one and she was the one who told me they were from him. Signs that he missed me, she’d said.”
He didn’t tell his daughter, looking up at him with her wide-eyed expression and wonder at a perfect white feather, that his father had told him to forget all that rubbish. Poppy was dead and the feather was only some seagull molting.
For Mike, his children—watching them grow up, the boys who pulled funny but awful pranks on each other, his imaginative daughter and her stories, and Mickey the fearless, who would try anything because his brothers did it—made Mike understand what his own father has missed.
Early on, Mike made his decision about what kind of father he wanted to be: a father who kept the peace and used bargaining chips, who went out of his way to make everything even for his children as much as possible.
He gave the older ones both the same bike on the same Christmas. Each child always had the same number of gifts, even the same dollar amount spent; it was a pattern that lasted until the two oldest boys were teenagers, when his work ethic came into play and he made Scott and Phillip earn the right to use the car or boat keys.
But for most of their lives, he had chosen to be a father who measured the cake into even sections before anyone ever cut it. Unlike March, who from the time when the kids were young, would let them battle it out or choose to make her life easier by picking the winner with some trumped-up reason the boys always bought into without a lick of resentment.
But then along came Mickey, the youngest and his namesake, who grew up trying to find a place amid all the strong Cantrell personalities. He was close to his mother in a way lost to Mike. To his sister Molly, he was half pet and half annoying little brother, the one who chanted stupid kissing rhymes out the window during her teenaged years whenever a boy came to pick her up for a date. He was challenged by a pair of brothers who were more than a decade older, and who he worshipped at the same time he constantly tried to keep up with them.
To level the playing field full of powerful 9.75 siblings, Mickey had to be a 10.0. He learned to throw caution and thought and fear out the window and “just do it.” Following his brothers boarding down the toughest mountain faces made him fearless before he ever started school, and eventually turned him into a hotshot, the Cantrell who sought the limelight. In almost every moment of family video, Mickey’s antics dominated most of the camera time.
Being the youngest he had to work hard to fight for a place in his family. It wasn’t easy to come after a sister like Molly and his older, dynamic brothers, who taught him he could only earn their attention by breaking all the rules.
Suddenly there was no way Mike could even the playing field for his youngest son. Mickey spent more moments in the emergency room than all the other kids combined, was suspended from kindergarten, held back a year, but then went on to skip the third grade. In junior high, he was the only honor roll student suspended, after he managed to sneak into the administration building and change the school bell system so the bells rang every two minutes. The limelight was important to Mickey, whether the light was positive or negative.
Mike had never been or wanted to be the kind of father who inspired fear in his kids, but Mickey tested his well-thought-out father plan to the limits. There wasn’t a book on parenting or child psychology in existence to help him prepare for raising his youngest son, or to make him understand Mickey’s surprises that were always waiting around the corner for him.
March gave Molly her old Brownie camera when she was barely ten and bought her a good thirty-five millimeter when she was in junior high and planning a trip to Washington DC with her class. By high school, Mike had built a darkroom for Molly in the back corner of one
