The Reappearance of Sam Webber

When eleven-year-old Sam Webber's father disappears without a trace, he and his mother are forced to relocate to a tough neighborhood, closer to her job. Unfamiliar with his surroundings and intimidated by the students of his new school, Sam recounts the sometimes frightening, sometimes delightful details of his life with touching, humorous sincerity. Living in a tiny apartment, he is forced to deal with the legacy of depression that marked his father, and threatens to envelop him. The city remains a cold and unwelcoming place to Sam until he meets Greely, an elderly black janitor at his junior high. Through this unlikely friendship, Sam begins to heal, as well as confront the racism that surrounds his community, and his life. Tracing a year in the life of an exceptional young boy, newcomer Jonathon Scott Fuqua leaves an impression that endures like a watermark. A masterfully written novel full of beautifully drawn, unforgettable characters, The Reappearance of Sam Webber is only the first from a top writer whose talented storytelling will touch every reader.

My father, Big Sam Webber, disappeared the summer I was eleven years old. No one knows what happened to him for sure, if he was murdered, kidnapped, forgot who he was or just decided to run and never look back. When he was first gone, I hoped for murder or amnesia. I didn’t want to believe that he would choose to leave. But the evidence always pointed to flight, that he gave up on my mom and me.
The police found his rusted old car at Dulles International Airport, down in Washington, D.C. It was in hourly parking and had rung up a giant bill over a two-week period, an amount that would’ve left me and my mother broke if we’d had to pay it. Luckily, we didn’t. The police got it out, towed it somewhere, and blew dust all over it for fingerprints. Big Sam’s were the only ones found on the worn steering wheel and scratched door handle. Kidnapping wasn’t ruled out of the picture, mostly, I think, for my sake. He was what the police call a missing person, and he still is.
About a month after he disappeared, a pretty black police officer came by our house. She had a soothing smile and a gentle voice that whooshed out of her mouth like a scoop of sand. She asked me questions about my father. She wondered if Big Sam had ever mentioned leaving, if I’d ever gone to the track with him, seen him place a bet on something. Had I ever heard anyone threaten him, or did he sometimes seem lost?
I’d seen a little of all of those things, but nothing big enough to catch her attention. The thing is, remembering back to normal times made me feel horrible. And when we were done, she took me in her arms, held me against her so that my forehead scraped red on her shiny silver badge.
"It’s going to be okay," she promised me, as if she could see into the future.
Just a few months later, I found out she couldn’t.
When the savings were all used up, my mother sold the car. Then a couple of weeks after that, we started looking around for a cheaper place to live, somewhere closer to her job. We eyeballed a neighborhood called Charles Village, a few blocks off Baltimore’s main north-south drags, Charles and St. Paul Streets, beside the best bus routes in the city and not too far from the Rotunda, a fancy shopping center with a Giant Supermarket crammed on the side.
Other not-so-okay things happened, too, like the way my name changed. Before my dad left, everyone, including my mother, had called me Little Sam. Together, my father and I were Big and Little Sam Webber, like I was a small part of him and he was a larger part of me. But when he’d been gone for a while, my mom suddenly started calling me Samuel. I think the name Little Sam reminded her that there had been a big one out there somewhere, and remembering that turned her into a wreck. So I tried not to get too upset over the change, but it bothered me. The part of me I had always liked the best was suddenly the very worst portion of all. Still, for my mom’s sake, I got used to it as fast as I could. Everyone calls me Samuel or Sam now. I wouldn’t know what to say if someone called me Little Sam again.
When my father was still around, he was a Baltimore Gas & Electric employee, one of those guys who looks for weird-smelling fumes. He’d driven a car back and forth across the city all day, a little dusty-blue sedan, shoe-box shaped, with a bright BG&E logo painted on both front doors. It was a mess inside. It always had coffee and soda cups rolling around and crushed under the seats, plus greasy yellow McDonald’s cheeseburger wrappers floating about. He loved that kind of food. My mom used to say that if he could have his way, he’d eat every meal at a fast-food restaurant, which didn’t seem like such a bad idea to me.
Starting when I went into the first grade, my dad always tried to pick me up from school. No matter what his day was like, he’d swing by in the afternoons to get me and chauffeur me home. He worried that I was too shy, too small, and that bigger kids would pick on me if I was stuck taking the bus. He was right in most ways, too. I was shy, practically a runt, and oftentimes bigger guys tried to push me around. Even still, I knew I could do okay. But my dad never was convinced. See, he had been a huge kid. I’ve seen pictures of him, and his arms bulged like rubbery car bumpers. Being tough, he’d picked on runts like me when he was in school. He knew how cruel bullies could be, and he worried.
The truth is, my dad worried way more than normal. He suffered horrible headaches that his doctor said were caused by grinding his long flat teeth together. He chewed his cuticles raw, and cracked his knuckles about a thousand times a day. His worrying wasn’t just for me, either; he worried about my mother, too. During the cold months, he didn’t like her waiting in the dark for rickety crosstown buses. They didn’t come by nearly as frequently as the ones rolling up and down Charles and St. Paul Streets, and he thought that she was vulnerable to something bad, standing along the side of the road as she did. So even though he was usually exhausted and sad in the winter, he picked her up at Junie’s Florist, drove her home, then went downtown to drop off his work car. On the days he was feeling good enough, I begged to go with him, because it was nearly a perfect trip. Shimmering McDonald’s cheeseburger wrappers swirled about us—bright, wrinkly birds—while colorful paper cups stamped with flashy lettering slipped and rolled beneath our shifting feet. And together, amid all that movement, we scampered into the magical city—buildings lit, Baltimore’s skyline sparkling like a forest of Christmas trees, helicopters and jetliners streaking above.