These are just the two little moments that didn't fit into the final draft of Wants and Needs.
Rusty wanted a puppy when he was four. He heard from the little girl who lived down the hall, the one with the pigtails and the pretty green eyes, that a dog was "man's bestest friend". He decided he needed a bestest friend during the day when Danny was away at third grade. A puppy would keep him company while the babysitter who ran up his mom's phone bill and ate all of his Twinkies "watched" him. He wanted a fluffy puppy with big eyes and blond fur that would match his hair.
He asked his mother for the puppy at breakfast. He gripped the spoon for his generic Lucky Charms so hard his small hand trembled. His pleading smile faded when she explained that a puppy needed food and love, and while he could give it the latter, they couldn't afford to buy the food it would need. His mother did, however, neglect to mention when he'd been a year and a half and she'd caught him eating the neighbor's cat food. Because he was older now and she was almost certain that he knew dog food was only for dogs and not for people.
"Mommy wouldn't buy me a puppy." He sobbed to Danny when he returned from school, the warm tears on his face mixing with the sticky chocolate around his mouth.
"The puppy would chew up your toys." Danny offered him the last Oreo in the pack. "Come on, the fair is down the street. I just got my allowance." Danny helped him down the stairs of the tree house and led him down the sidewalk.
"We need to hold hands." He announced when Danny tried to take him across the street. His mom had said that you always held hands with an adult when you crossed the street. Danny was eight, so he was almost an adult, he was a big boy who went to school and could read books that didn't have pictures.
"Okay." Danny's warm hand slipped hesitantly into his, and when they let go Danny had chocolate and Oreo crumbs stuck to his palm. They walked around the fair for an hour and Danny took his hand again to keep them from getting separated. Danny bought him a corndog and cotton candy and a caramel apple, but the best part of the afternoon was when Danny won him a little orange goldfish in a plastic bag. "Here, since you can't have a puppy."
His half eaten caramel apple fell into the dirt and he held the bag in both hands as he stared at his first pet. "What're you gonna name him Rusty?"
"Little Danny." He said proudly, hugging the small, water filled bag to his chest, now he would always have a Danny with him. He was too tired to walk the five blocks to his apartment, so Danny carried him on his back the entire way home.
He carried his fish everywhere with him for a month. Little Danny's bowl was next to his bed while he slept and on the table while he ate and in his lap when his mother read him stories because he wanted Little Danny to see the pictures too. The cool feel of Little Danny's glass bowl in his hands was a constant for thirty days.
His mom was washing his hair one night when she left to get the new bottle of shampoo out of the hall closet. He took the opportunity to climb out of the tub, hot water and soap bubbles dripping down his body and onto the floor as he grabbed Little Danny's bowl off the sink counter. He dumped Little Danny into the bath and got back in, happy to share the pleasant water and sweet smelling soap with his second best friend in the world. His mother returned a minute later to find Little Danny floating upside down in the tub and Rusty excited because Little Danny could "play dead". He started to cry when his mom told him his fish wasn't pretending.
He and Danny gave Little Danny a funeral the next day. They stood around the toilet and Danny gently dumped the dead fish in.
"You're 'posed to say somefing nice when somebody dies." He said, staring down sadly at his pet and favorite present that Danny had ever given him.
"Uh….Little Danny had a nice name."
"And he always eated his food when I feeded him." He watched Danny press the lever down, watched his fish swirl around the bowl before disappearing forever.
He couldn't use the bathroom in the apartment for a week afterwards, and he'd followed Danny for over a week. If something could happen to Little Danny, then something could happen to "Big Danny" as well.
He never went to his mother's funeral. Her funeral meant hearing apologies and condolences from strangers and distant family members. They weren't sorry, they couldn't be sorry, because she hadn't been their mother. But the true reason he didn't go was because he was afraid of what he would learn, what the people and the police officers would tell him. He didn't want to know the details of his mother's death, he'd heard whispers of "sexual assault" and he didn't want to know, knowing would only make his aching heart hurt more.
He snuck out of Danny's apartment at three in the morning the night after her funeral. The cemetery was calm and quiet, headstones sticking eerily out of the unusually bright and cheerful looking green grass. He found his mom's grave in the silver moonlight, the grass was damp against the seat of his pants as he sat and rested his back against the cold, hard tombstone. When he woke the next morning, Danny's jacket was draped over him, and Danny was sitting on a bench, holding a cup of coffee and a bag that Rusty knew contained donuts.
"Morning." Danny tossed him the bag, but he didn't feel like eating the chocolate treats inside.
"Hey." He stood and stretched, worked the stiffness out of his arms as he traced the letters on his mother's headstone. He memorized the feel of her name, just like he'd memorized her smile, the smell of her perfume, the sound of her voice, the warmth of her arms when she hugged him, and the soft brush of her lips against his forehead when he was half asleep and she was leaving for work. "You remember when…"
"Yeah." Danny nodded with a half smile on his face.
"She didn't care that I'd ruined my best pants, she wasn't even mad. She just gave me the last apple from the fridge and started sewing up the holes." He wished for the first time that he looked like his mother. If he did, he wouldn't have to memorize everything about her, because he could see it all when he looked in the mirror. He didn't want to bear resemblance to his father, the man who'd left before he was born with most of his mother's savings, the kind of conman Rusty never wanted to be. "I told her I hated her once, I didn't…."
"I know and she knew too Rus. You need to be at school in fifteen minutes unless you still don't want to go."
"I don't have my stuff." Danny held up his backpack. "Damn."
"I made your lunch too." It stung a bit when his name was written on the brown paper bag in Danny's handwriting rather then his mother's. Danny had packed him a sandwich, a bag of Cheetos, an apple, two bananas, carrots, a pudding cup, and a Twinkie. He took the Twinkie out and set it on top of the fresh mound of dirt covering his mom's coffin. He didn't have flowers, so it would have to do. "She was a good woman Rus, she loved you."
Danny slung his arm around his shoulders as they walked away, and the knowledge that someone would always be there for him made the future seem a little less frightening.
Let me know what you thought, I decided to post these moments because I found them oddly sweet.