By the end of February, Miles Stanton and Daniel Warren were officially partners at the Helping-Hands. They swam together for at least an hour two or three times a week. They played basketball and racquetball and handball. They went on an all-day field trip to the L.A. Zoo on one Saturday that was unseasonably warm and too perfectly glorious not to be doing something outside. They had shared hamburgers and fries at McDonalds and pizza with everything at Straw Hat.
And sometime during that interval, Daniel Warren had met Miles’ mother, Elayne.
Divorced for eight years, Elayne was bright, vivacious, intelligent, witty. And beautiful. Once free from a husband who had turned alcoholic and vicious at the same time, she had struggled hard to provide for her son and herself, and had done a remarkable job. She had waitressed at half a dozen restaurants, sometimes working two shifts to bring back enough money to keep their small household going. She had taught Miles self-reliance and responsibility-he had to have both in unusual concentrations, she knew from the beginning, because sometimes she had to be gone for hours at a time, even when he was only seven or eight years old.
He was self-reliant and responsible, all right. He also had no friends to speak of. He preferred staying in the apartment and reading or watching TV to rough-housing with other guys his age. Guys who had Dads that blustered through the door in the evenings and gave them hugs and tickles and took them neat places. Guys who had Moms that baked cakes and cookies and played games with them when it was too rainy to play outside or when they didn’t feel good.
In spite of Elayne’s best efforts to be both a Mom and a Dad, Miles effectively had neither. He was a true latchkey kid, and he responded to his enforced isolation by withdrawing into his own world of imagination. It was safer there than on the outside. No one could hurt you there.
For a long while, Elayne Stanton wasn’t particularly aware of how withdrawn her son was becoming. When she did finally notice, she didn’t know quite what to do. She was working double shifts again-the rent had spiraled another $75 a month, and the car was making funny noises that in her limited experience with mechanics usually translated into major bucks, and Miles was starting to outgrow his clothes almost before she could get them home from the store. He needed help, she realized, but she couldn’t give it to him.
Then, just after Christmas the previous year, she heard about Helping Hands. She checked it out, was pleased with what she saw, and decided that the Club might be just the thing for Miles. But it took a while for her to convince Miles to leave the apartment and try it out
When he went into the Helping-Hands building that first afternoon, his eyes were fixed on the ground and his shoulders were slumped so much that it looked like his raincoat would slide right off and lay in a bright orange puddle at his feet. To Elayne’s worried mother-eyes, he didn’t look like a little boy on his way to an exciting afternoon of male bonding; he looked like a condemned prisoner on his way to be involuntary guest of honor at an electrocution.
When he came out that night, though, everything had changed. His hair curled damp and tousled against his head. His cheeks flushed red with excitement. His eyes snapped with an electricity that she could not remember ever having seen before. And all he could talk about was Daniel Warren.
Daniel did this. Daniel did that. Daniel said this. And Daniel said that. Miles chattered so constantly about Daniel Warren that by the time they entered their tiny apartment that night, Elayne had both a headache and an frighteningly yearning desire to meet this man who had so abruptly become the solitary focus of her child’s universe.
Elayne met Daniel for the first time two weeks later. They had their first official date in the middle of March-they took Miles to a dollar-a-car drive-in to see Home Alone. Even though it was raining so hard that neither of them could see through the front window, and Miles fell asleep fifteen minutes into the film, they counted the date a huge success.
And a week after Daniel Warren’s thirty-second birthday, accompanied to the Chapel of the Roses in Las Vegas only by Miles and by a still stunned Amanda Warren, Daniel and Elayne were married.