My Stepkids Think That I'm a Spy

The immigration agent

red-checked my name and no one else’s,

then handed back our declaration

and let us in.

 

The kids found this suspicious,

began to bat around some theories why.

They joked, at last, I was a spy,

though none too slick, I offered, if

an agent can so quickly

pick me from the line

waiting to clear customs,

 

but common sense could not prevail against

attempts to ascertain—

my secret now unearthed—

the present mission. Starter’s gun fired,

 

they were off and running

with detail upon apocryphal detail.

I wish I were, in fact, that cunning,

but those who know me know I’m not.

I bend to the naïve.

 

An act, they winked, as in their giddiness

they pretended, like advocates

of true conspiracies,

clues proved the opposite of what they did.

 

That’s called irony, I said,

but they went on inflating

a thin plot with rich talk of blinked,

Morse-coded messages I was

exchanging with the cabbie

in the rearview mirror:

much easier to smuggle

classified data out through Canada,

whose sickeningly nice people

were too polite to pry

into covert acts, for doing so

could be construed as rude.

 

As for them and their mother:

convenient cover,

props to play a regular Joe—

partner and stepkids in tow—

and not one bent on his country’s demise.

 

Struggling to contain their laughter

at the web of alleged deceit

spun from one red check,

they lost the thread,

and by the time we left the cab,

the running joke was dead.

 

But as a stranger in their midst, what leverage

absent kinship or dint of personality?

Small favors and small gifts

to build parental bonds

weaker than they might suspect

or intelligence agents can detect.

A guy who cooks for them now dad has died;

the well-known fact I am a spy.