Imperfect: An Improbable Life (5 page)

His own mother was back in Flint, waiting for word of the birth. By then she’d been widowed more than a decade and wore just about every day of it. She’d done what she could with Mike, who came back from military school and hit the streets of Flint with a chip on his
shoulder. The life he’d had—the full, warm house, the sturdy father and mother, the comfort that tomorrow would be just like today—was gone. In its place was anger, and an unwillingness to stand with the others and take orders with the others and conform like the others.

Katie, one of Mike’s older sisters, called him “a heller on wheels,” and it fit, because Mike had an engine that wouldn’t stop and a taste for recklessness. He wasn’t a bad kid, just an unbridled one, and it wasn’t long before the family adopted the maxim “Only Mike,” a phrase often accompanied by agreement that it was a good thing everyone had escaped unharmed once again.

Meanwhile, as Mike found his way in it, the neighborhood was changing. After perhaps its most prosperous decade ever, Flint pushed through the 1960s dogged by signs of an economic downturn, white flight, and plain neglect. The city was beginning to fray, both in its structures and its relationships. While the community seemed to be lingering more and more on its differences—primarily along economic and racial lines—one of its strong commonalities was sports. Flint might have been known for its auto industry, but it was in its heart a sports town. The merging races and incomes and personalities generally put aside their territorial suspicions for a good game. And Mike was in, whatever the game, even as a young teen. He cared little for Flint’s economic direction, as long as the rims stayed mostly unbent on the Flint Central schoolyard, just a few blocks from Mike’s back door. He and his buddies played basketball in gyms all over town. Flint was the birthplace of community education, a plan to make the city’s schools centers for neighborhood activity and growth and vitality. One of the by-products of community education was unlocked gymnasium doors into the night and a well-lit place to play five-on-five. On their driveway, the cement
chipped and cracked and untrue, Mike’s brother Tom taught him to go to his left and to box out and to take an elbow without running inside to Ma. They’d bolted a backboard and rim to the garage, and they’d play Around the World until the sweat chilled their backs and it was time to go inside. These were the skills and attitude Mike took into the schools, usually against boys and men much older. Skin color and economic condition were meaningless. You could ball or you couldn’t. You could hold the court or you couldn’t. On other afternoons, Mike and his buddies would lay claim to a backyard and play tackle football until dinnertime and the shrill voices of mothers up and down the block thinned the teams to almost nothing. Often, the games played under the moon on one side of the field and a porch light on the other required more courage and toughness than anything going on at Memorial Park or Central High. Boys endeavored to become men out there—bloodied and scarred, pissed-off and having the times of their lives.

Mike stood in there every day, every night. Still, it would take an exceptional person to help Mike focus himself. The battle was most often within Mike. His older brothers were checking in on him from time to time, ensuring he didn’t stray too far. Outside the house, though, he was on his own. He was soon old enough and talented enough to play for Jack Pratt, part coach, part philosopher, and, in this part of Michigan, part deity. He coached every season of the school year. If you were an athlete, you belonged to Coach Pratt, body, mind, and conscience. By eighth grade, Mike was practicing with the varsity football team, playing halfback and defensive back for Pratt’s scout teams. By ninth grade, he was starting both ways. Mike, like the other boys, heard the sermons, sometimes in a group with his teammates, sometimes with Coach Pratt’s eyes boring into his own.

Believe in yourself and believe in your teammates. Believe in who you are, believe in who you can be, believe in becoming more
.

Pratt’s teachings extended well beyond the football field. He taught history, political science, and foreign relations. Yet, if you asked any of the boys who played for him, they would tell you his classes were about life. The way he talked, things made more sense when Coach Pratt said them.

Mike, above all else, was ready to believe again.

The thing about the kids at St. Matt’s was that most of them weren’t great players. They were a little on the small side, some even a little on the slow side. Yet they won games, lots of games, because Coach Pratt convinced them they would. When the boys filed into church every day, Coach Pratt would already be there, on his knees. But he didn’t talk a lot about God. Maybe he figured he didn’t have to, that God and church had religion covered, and that he’d take the other areas. When Mike was a sophomore, Coach Pratt’s wife died of cancer. Mike and his teammates, his friends, knew Coach Pratt was devastated. He could hide his pain in his work, in the way he conducted a practice and then ran a game, in his insistence that they believe in themselves. But his eyes told them he hurt, and then he’d put that to use, too. When the bad stuff happened, he’d always told them they had a choice of what to do next. Coach Pratt’s choice was to keep coaching his boys.

I
N THE BACKSEAT
Kathy gasped and Mike pressed the accelerator another half-inch. Strange, but all those years at St. Matt’s, Mike never missed his father at a basketball or football game. They were
big events at St. Matt’s. His buddies’ families were in the stands and afterward they’d all come down to visit, the dads all talking a little too loudly among themselves. His mom was there and that was enough. She’d rarely attended any of his brothers’ games, but knew it was important for Mike, so she’d bundle up and sit with the other moms and cheer when they did. Maybe there had been too many kids or not enough time, but now it was just her and Mike. Well, and sometimes Joe.

A portrait of Joe hung in the living room since shortly after his death. It was life-sized. Maybe bigger. And when Mike did something she knew his father would approve of—received a good grade, played a big game, anything—she’d grab Mike by the collar and march him to the foot of that portrait. She’d smile and get that look, and Mike would know exactly where they were headed.

“You come look,” she’d say. “Wouldn’t your father be proud of you!”

They’d stand together at the foot of the portrait until Frances was done staring. The older Mike got, the more he liked those moments.

Late in the summer before his sophomore year at St. Matt’s, Mike heard Sam Ragnone pull up to the curb in front of the house. Sam was a little older and had one of those cars that rumbled when it idled and roared when it left; you only had to hear it to know it was him. They were headed that evening to north Flint, then across town to a driver’s training class at Southwestern High, by which time there’d be at least six of them in Sam’s four-door Chevy. Sam did the picking up and dropping off, because the girls needed a ride and Sam had a car and an opportunity was an opportunity. The car was nearly full when Sam braked in front of a modest house on the north end to add his final passenger. A couple honks, the front door opened, and a
brunette slipped out and closed the door behind her. Pinning her hair back and pulling a sweater over her shoulders at the same time, she arrived at the car, smiled, and squeezed into the backseat.

It was the first time Mike Abbott had ever seen Kathy Adams. He didn’t talk to her all night.

K
ATHY WAS THE
oldest of Frank and Frances Adams’s six children, five of them girls. Her father and mother grew up ten miles west of Flint, out near Flushing and Swartz Creek, an area to which their parents—Kathy’s grandparents—had immigrated from Czechoslovakia around the turn of the century. On both sides, her grandparents worked small farms that grew corn, wheat, and soybeans, and raised cows and chickens. Amid the close community of Central Europeans, Frank and Frances met as teens, waited out Frank’s World War II service as a navigator and bombardier based in Italy, and were married shortly after he returned. Frank was twenty-four and Frances nineteen. They moved to Flint to find work. Frank took a job at Flint Home Furnishings on Kearsley Street downtown, and they started a family and a life that would be quite different from Mike’s.

Frank Adams sold furniture every day of the workweek from nine in the morning until nine at night and again on Saturdays. He was the kind of man who took a job and worked it until the day was done, and worked it until retirement, however long that was. Eventually he was reassigned to a store on Flint’s north end, in the suburbs, which wasn’t much of a drive, but when Kathy was eleven, Frank moved the family to the north end so he could continue his habit of coming home for lunch at noon and dinner at six, and then returning to work.

The first five children Frank and Frances conceived were daughters.
The boy arrived when Kathy was sixteen. Frank and Frances, their five girls and their son shared three bedrooms, two girls in one of the rooms and two sets of bunk beds in another. Frances kept the house pristine. She did the laundry on Mondays, the ironing on Tuesdays, and the baking on Wednesdays. She didn’t have a car, so she’d give Frank a list of items to pick up at the grocery store, and that’s what she had for the week. They worked hard and didn’t miss a day and that was the example they set for their children, who generally followed the same path of diligence and purpose.

E
VEN IN HER
present state—heart pumping, contractions building, wind blowing her hair this way and that—Kathy could read Mike’s anxiety from the backseat. When their eyes met in the rearview mirror she tried to settle him with her coolness, but knew it probably wasn’t working. His neck was taut, his eyes panicky. Truth was, though the drive and the drama weren’t exactly how they’d planned it, Kathy was as hopeful as Mike was skittish. While Mike felt he was falling off a cliff into fatherhood, Kathy already felt connected to motherhood. As irrational as it sounded to others, she trusted Mike. She adored him. If it was time for a family, then she believed they would make it work, maybe because she believed enough for both of them.

Mike was cute and cool and fun and had all these friends. Because of the driver’s ed carpool, and in spite of his attending St. Matt’s and her attending St. Agnes, they were running in some of the same crowd. One of Mike’s buddies had taken a liking to Kathy and began to call her. She’d be polite for as long as she could and then ask a lot of questions about Mike. Even when she saw a
Flint Journal
story about St. Matt’s football team, discovering with some horror that
Mike was a sophomore and so a grade behind her, she showed up to a St. Matt’s dance one Saturday night hoping he’d be there. When the Righteous Brothers song “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ” began to play, she asked him to dance. Years later, her sister Maureen with whom she shared a bedroom, would tell her she came home that night in love. Mike was the one, and would always be.

Mike, too, was beginning to be convinced. They were spending a lot of time together. One Friday night after a football game, Mike and Kathy had come back to Mike’s house. Mike, by then captain of St. Matt’s football team, and Kathy, in her St. Agnes cheerleader uniform, were alone in the laundry room and in full embrace when the light came on. Mike’s mother had caught them kissing.

“Michael?” she said.

“Yeah, Ma?” he answered.

“Don’t call me Ma,” she said.

“Mother,”
he said.

“I want to talk to you for a minute.”

Mike headed toward the kitchen, shooting Kathy a glance on his way out the door. His grin said he would take his mother’s scolding, indulge her, and be right back.

“Michael,” she said, “I don’t ever, ever want that girl in this house again … wearing that uniform.”

Mike smiled and hugged his mom. See, Frances Abbott was first a St. Matt’s girl.

Early in their relationship, Mike saw that Kathy was what he was not. Where he was impulsive, she was thoughtful. He lacked direction. She was earnest. He wasn’t sure what was next. She had a plan.

Kathy graduated from St. Agnes and, after considering nursing, went to college to become a teacher. Mike was nearby, finishing high school, considering whether he’d play ball in college, as Coach Pratt
hoped he would, or go to work for the family. The college coaches were making sense. Maybe he’d stay in the area, play football or basketball or maybe both.

By December, early in Mike’s basketball season, Kathy suspected she was pregnant. She didn’t immediately see a doctor and kept her fears to herself. A little more time, she thought; maybe she was wrong. In January, having kept her secret for nearly a month, Kathy went to her doctor and he confirmed what she knew to be true. She—and Mike—would have a baby. It was due in October. They had that much time to figure out what to do.

There was no wedding planned, nothing like that. Mike had six months of high school still. Kathy had barely started college. They had been raised in conservative families, educated in Catholic schools that held services every day. This wasn’t supposed to happen, certainly not to Kathy, who was so smart and had such a promising future.

Her father, who had been so very proud of her, said nothing, but stared through her. Kathy knew he was terribly disappointed and was thankful he kept it to himself.

Her mother was not so restrained. Kathy would have to move out. She could not grow pregnant in front of her impressionable sisters, and in a neighborhood where people would talk, and in a town where people would judge. She would have to give up the baby for adoption, because she was so young and Mike was even younger and abortion was out of the question.

“That’s what you should do,” she told Kathy. “You’re not married.”

That was that.

A little unsteady governing the smaller details that made up her typical day, Frances Abbott nonetheless was quite sturdy when the
occasional major issue arose. Mike, her baby, of “Only Mike” notoriety, had gotten his girlfriend pregnant. Frances did not ask why, did not tell him how irresponsible he’d been, did not allow him to feel alone. Instead, they turned to Katie, the oldest of Joe and Frances Abbott’s children. She lived with her husband, Mac, and three children in a small brick house in Bloomfield Township, not far from Detroit. Through the years, Katie had become accustomed to the breathless calls from Mike, the sound of him describing some crisis or another, asking what to do with Ma or this or that. Katie was cool and had a wonderful sense of humor and an adult’s perspective. This was big, Mike told her. He didn’t know what to do, where to go. Kathy had nowhere to live. Everybody was upset. Katie told him to stay calm and she’d call back in an hour or two. When she did, she told Mike to bring Kathy down, that she and Uncle Mac had cleared out a bedroom, that Kathy could stay there, and that he—both of them—should start thinking about keeping that baby.