shopping for school tomorrow.”
“Clothes shopping? You’re going to be wearing a uniform!”
Katie Reid, my closest friend since kindergarten. Short, chubby, with a blond Dorothy Hamill wedge cut. The worst thing about high school—worse than having to use a locker, worse than fearing the taunts of upperclassmen—was being separated from Katie. I was being sent one way, and Katie another. She was heading to St. Clare’s, the all-girl sister school to St. Francis Xavier. Unlike their male counterparts, whose only dress code was a collar shirt and a necktie of choice, the St. Clare girls wore white blouses and pleated plaid skirts. So what kind of clothes shopping could she possibly do?
“Shoes, socks, sweaters,” she told me, as if reading my mind. “And underwear.”
I suddenly became conscious of Chipper’s underpants bunched up near my armpit. “You can’t be late,” I told Katie again. “After this who knows when we’ll see each other again.”
“Don’t say that, Danny! We’ll see each other every week!”
I grunted. “I hate high school.”
“You haven’t even started it yet.”
“I know, but I still hate it.”
“Danny, I have to go. My mom is calling me.”
“Okay. Don’t be late.”
“Good-bye, Danny.”
I hung up the phone. The timer over the stove pinged.
“Cake’s done,” I called to my mother as I ran upstairs to my room, pulling Chipper’s underpants out of my armpit and stuffing them into my drawer. I threw myself onto my bed and lay there with my hands behind my head, staring up at the ceiling. On my wall were posters of Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. On my floor was a pile of nearly one hundred record albums, which had tipped over, sending Andy Gibb, Hall & Oates, and Peter Frampton sliding across the orange shag carpet. Orange was my favorite color. I’d chosen it because no one ever picked orange.
The window was open, and there was a slight breeze moving the flimsy brown and white checked curtains. I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew a car door was closing, and I could hear my aunt Patsy’s voice in the driveway.
I sat up, rubbed my eyes, and headed back downstairs.
Mom was propping an electric fan on the windowsill to cool off the room as Nana and Aunt Patsy came through the front door.
“Danny off the pickle boat,” Nana said when she saw me.
It was what she’d always called me. I had no idea what it meant, but ever since I could remember, Nana had been calling me “Danny off the pickle boat”—just before she’d grip my shoulders and leave a big, wet red kiss on my cheek. It was no different today. Her perfume, as ever, was heavy and spicy. Nana’s scent would often linger for hours after she left. Mom sometimes had to open a window.
Adele Mary Horgan Fortunato, better known, to me, anyway, as Nana. Stout and silly, a crazy little jingle perpetually on her lips. Danny off the pickle boat. Here comes Becky in her BVDs. Sing a song of six-packs and a pocket full of beer. Nana often made no sense at all, but she always made me smile.
Beside her stood Aunt Patsy. Her daughter. Dad’s older sister. Patricia Ann Fortunato. Never married. An old maid. And now Aunt Patsy had cancer. When Mom spoke of it to the neighbors, her voice always dropped to a whisper on the word. “Patsy has cancer. They had to take one breast and then part of another. It doesn’t look good.” And she’d make the sign of the cross.
Today Aunt Patsy looked very gray and drawn. She wore a bulky sweater even on hot days so that she could cover up her uneven chest. When she smiled at me, her teeth seemed too big for her face. “Happy birthday, honey,” she said. “Are you excited to be starting high school?”
“Yeah,” I lied, accepting the shirt box she was offering me, wrapped in green and blue paper. I knew what it was even without opening it. A white collar shirt from Sears. Probably a tie, too, for me to wear to school.
“Where’s Becky?” Nana was asking. “Beckadee, Beckadoo?”
“God only knows,” Mom said. “I can only hope she’s downtown, picking up the balloons I ordered for Danny’s party.”
“But her car’s still in the driveway,” Aunt Patsy observed.
“I know, so she must be off with Chipper. Maybe he’s driving her down.” Mom was unfolding a string of silver paper letters that spelled out HAPPY BIRTHDAY. “I haven’t seen her since this morning. I told her not to forget the balloons, and she’d better not! I’ll have her head!”
“Mom, please don’t pin up that HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign,” I said.
Mom looked at me as if I were mad. “Why not? It’s your birthday.”
“It’s dweebish.”
“You can’t have a birthday party without a HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign,” Mom declared.
“It’s for little kids, Mom.”
She sighed dramatically, folding the sign back up. “First, no pin the tail on the donkey. Next thing he won’t want a cake.”
“Where’s Becky?” Nana asked again.
We all looked over at her.
“Mommy, Peggy just told us,” Aunt Patsy said gently. I’d always thought it odd that a grown woman still called her mother “Mommy.” “Becky’s in town, getting the balloons for Danny’s party.”
“Oh,” Nana said. “That’s right.”
Nana had been getting forgetful. She sometimes confused my father with her late husband, Sebastian. Sometimes she repeated herself several times a day, asking the same questions over and over. Dad remembered his own grandmother, Nana’s mother, getting the same way. Eventually, they had to put her in the state hospital, where she died, crazy as a loon. I looked at Nana and felt very sad. I knew she was thinking about her mother, about the state hospital. She wasn’t so forgetful that she’d forgotten about that. She knew what was happening. Nana caught me looking at her and seemed startled. Then she winked at me.
It was getting close to three o’clock. I wished that Katie had been able to come over earlier. I headed back upstairs and sat on my bed, my back against the wall.
“This might be the last time we see each other,” I’d said to Katie almost every day since the end of eighth grade.
She’d always scold me. “Stop saying that. It’s not like we’re moving away. We still live in the same town.”
Should I have asked Katie to be my girlfriend then? If she were my girlfriend, then we’d have a connection, something to really bind us together. I sensed it would be good insurance to have a girlfriend upon entering high school. It would offer some kind of protection, I suspected, but just what kind, I wasn’t sure.
And yet I hadn’t asked her. It would have seemed odd after all these years. She probably would have laughed at me. Now, sitting on my bed, I wished I had.
My eye caught movement outside the window.
Chipper Paguni was pulling into his driveway in his rebuilt, repainted gold metallic 1971 Mustang Mach 1, with the black stripe down the hood. I leaned forward to get a better view. The door on the driver’s side popped open, and Chipper emerged in a white T-shirt and shiny black parachute pants. I knew he wasn’t wearing underwear, and my cheeks flushed a little as the thought crossed my mind. I waited for the passenger’s side door to open and for Becky to get out, but nothing happened. Chipper paused to inspect something on the side of his precious car—a dent? a ding? a scratch?—then headed into the house.
I was scared.
Had he seen me out by the pond?
And