Home for the Holidays (5 page)

“Just keep your fingers crossed for me. After all the sweat I've put into it, I'd hate for anything to go wrong now.”

Tommy had trouble falling asleep that night. He wasn't used to sleeping in a strange bed. He wasn't used to being out of Brooklyn. It was so …
quiet
here. No cars. No car horns. No car alarms. No sirens. It was creepy. Maybe you got used to it after a while.

He couldn't stop thinking about Nicky's giving him such a nice present, and his giving Nicky nothing at all. He couldn't stop thinking about telling Nicky that his mom hadn't given him anything, either. He tried to remember the look on Nicky's face. Had he been surprised? Had he been laughing? Did he think Tommy had a bad mother?

He hadn't seen any of that in Nicky's face. Nicky had just smiled and said, “Fugheddaboudit.”

He was a good guy, Nicky. And a good friend. Thinking that made Tommy feel even more ashamed of himself, though.
You should get your good friend a good Christmas present
, he thought.
If you had any money, that is.

The next morning, Nicky got Tommy dressed in snow clothes and had Clarence drive them to Glen Forks. Clarence had loaded the Navigator with sleds. Nicky's mother had made sandwiches and filled a thermos with her own homemade vegetable soup. Grandma Tutti had filled a basket with her own homemade cookies. Clarence dropped the boys and their picnic basket at Glen Forks before driving on to Nicky's father's office.

Nicky took Tommy to his favorite run, a short steep hill that ended in a long flat area. Nicky said, “You can lie down on the sled on this one, and drag your foot for the brakes. Take it easy the first time down, so you see how fast it is, okay?”

Tommy nodded.

“Do you want me to go down first?”

“What for?” Tommy said, and threw himself down the hill.

Tommy was a speed demon. Soon he was showing Nicky new tricks to do with a sled.

“Watch this,” Tommy said, and began building a kind of ramp. On his next run down the hill, he shot up the ramp and sailed into the air, then crashed half buried in a snowbank.

He emerged, grinning, and said, “You gotta try this!”

Nicky and Tommy sledded until they were exhausted. After a lunch break, Nicky said, “Let's build a snowman.”

They made his eyes and mouth out of small stones, his nose from a crooked stick, and his hair from a crown of leaves. Nicky said, “He looks a little like—”

“Lookout!”

Too late. A flying snowball caught Nicky in the back of the head.

“Quack, quack!” a voice called out. “Nice duck, Borelli!”

It was Dirk Van Allen, with three of his rowdy pals.

“These guys are asking for a beating,” Tommy said, and began to walk toward Dirk.

“No,” Nicky said, “it's just a snowball fight. Come on! We'll cream them.”

“Then look out!”

Too late! Nicky got hit again, in the chest that time.

Tommy scooped up a handful of snow and formed a snowball. He cocked his arm and threw—
bam!
His first snowball caught one of Dirk's friends square in the ear. The boy looked shocked, then angry. He scooped up a snowball.

It was war. Nicky and Tommy hid behind their snowman, who soon lost his nose and his crown of leaves. Tommy took one hit to the chest, but he landed quite a few on the enemy. Then he prepared a giant snowball and said, “Watch this. Big Bertha. Bombs away.”

He cocked his arm just as Dirk hurled a snowball that flew like a rocket. It cracked into Tommy's chin and knocked him to the ground. Nicky grabbed a handful of snow and prepared a counterattack. Tommy didn't get up. Nicky said, “Come on! They're charging us!” but Tommy didn't answer. Nicky dropped his snowball and fell to his knees. There was red all over the snow. At Tommy's side was a sharp stone that Dirk had buried inside his last snowball.

Nicky reached inside his jacket for his cell phone and quickly dialed. “Clarence! We need you back here now!”

It took an hour in the emergency room and four stitches to close the gash on Tommy's chin. By the time they got home, it was late afternoon. The light was going. Tommy was wrapped in gauze. The doctors had given him a shot, so he sounded fuzzy when he talked. Nicky's mother put him straight to bed.

Then she marched Nicky to the kitchen and said, “I've got to call Tommy's mother and explain what happened. What in the world were you doing throwing rocks?”

Nicky said, “We weren't. We were throwing snowballs. Then Dirk Van Allen buried a rock in a snowball and hit Tommy in the face.”

“It must have been an accident,” his mother said. “I can't imagine Peter Van Allen's son doing something like that on purpose.”

“Give me a break, Mom,” Nicky said. “He's the biggest bully at C.P. He always does stuff like this.”

“We'll discuss this when your father gets home,” she said. “In the meantime, I'll need his mother's telephone number.”

Nicky was happy to learn that Tommy's mother hadn't answered the phone. He'd been afraid she'd insist on Tommy coming home right away. But when Nicky's mother had called, there had been nothing.

“Isn't that strange?” she asked. “There wasn't even an answering machine.”

“I think they're kind of poor, Mom,” Nicky said.

“Too poor for an answering machine?” she replied. “Ridiculous!”

Nicky's father wasn't happy with the story when he got home that night. “That's a dirty trick,” he said over dinner. “I'll talk to his father.”

“You should do more than that,” Uncle Frankie said. “Somebody ought to teach that kid a lesson.”

“That little boy needs a smack in the head,” Grandma Tutti said, and waved her wooden spoon.

“Well, I assume his father, after I speak with him, will discipline him for throwing rocks at other children,” Nicky's father said.

Frankie looked at Nicky, who shrugged.

“Yeah, right,” Frankie said. “His dad won't do nothing. This isn't the first time he's done something like this, right, Nicky?”

“He's been like this since preschool.”

“He's a bully,” Frankie said. “So he's a coward. All bullies are cowards. They're afraid of everybody, so they make themselves feel strong by finding someone who's afraid of
them.”

“Listen to Sigmoid Freud,” Grandma Tutti said.

“I'm just saying,” Frankie said. “Until that kid gets a wake-up call, he's not gonna stop beating on Nicky.”

“Well, he's not going to get a wake-up call from my son, or from you,” Nicky's mother told Frankie.

“Like I said, I'll talk to his father,” Nicky's father said. “I'll get it straightened out.”

Nicky wondered if he would. He knew he and Tommy were in the right, and Dirk Van Allen was in the wrong. But he remembered the way his father had kissed up to Mr. Van Allen at the dinner party. Like Frankie said, it was business.

The next morning, Tommy's jaw was sore and his chin was bruised, but he wanted to go to the skate park just the same.

“I'm fine, Mrs. Borelli,” he said.

“I don't know,” Nicky's mother said.

“He doesn't eat like he's sick,” Grandma Tutti said. “Five pieces of bacon! Plus pancakes.”

“I'll keep an eye on him, Mom,” Nicky said. “Can't we just go for an hour?”

“As long as you both wear gloves and the wrist guards.
And the helmets. And stay warm. And speak to your mother.”

“Yes!” Nicky said. “I'll ask Clarence if he can drive us.”

“And you try your mother again now,” Nicky's mother said.

There was no answer at the Caporelli home. Nicky said, “Is that weird?”

“No,” Tommy said. “No one ever answers the phone there. It could be a bill collector or something. So, can we go, or what?”

The skate park was mostly covered, so the ramps and half-pipes were clear of snow. Nicky started Tommy out on the flats and gradually moved him to the slopes. Tommy was a natural skater. Within an hour, he was riding like a pro.

“You should take it easy,” Nicky said. “Doesn't your chin hurt?”

Tommy reached up and poked his bandage. “I forgot about it.”

“Well, you wouldn't want to fall on it, right?”

“Who's gonna fall?” Tommy said, and shot down a ramp.

Around three o'clock the boys bumped into two of Dirk Van Allen's friends—the ones who had stood by and watched Dirk pelt Tommy with the rock.

“Nice bandage,” one of them said. “Did you fall off your board?”

“Very funny,” Tommy said. “Come over here and I'll give
you
something to put a bandage on, too.”

“Forget it, garlic breath,” the boy said. “We don't play with pepperonis like you.”

The two boys skated away. Tommy started after them. Nicky grabbed his arm.

“Forget it, Tommy,” he said.

“Forget it? Did you hear what they called me?” Tommy said. “Back home, guys get killed for saying stuff like that.”

“Down here, they get laughed at—or just ignored,” Nicky said. “Let's do the half-pipes again.”

Grandma Tutti was cooking when the boys got home that afternoon. Marian Galloway was there, along with Mrs. Feingold and Mrs. Carpenter. Grandma Tutti was rolling out pasta dough and cutting wide strips of lasagna when Nicky and Tommy went into the kitchen for a glass of juice.

“How wide should the noodles be?” Mrs. Feingold asked. “One inch? Two inches?”

“Inches!” Grandma Tutti laughed. “Who needs inches? You make it just wide enough like this. But not too wide!”

“And how long do you cook the noodles?” Mrs. Carpenter asked.

“Until they're done,” Grandma Tutti said. “But don't overcook them.”

“More wine, Doris?” Marian Galloway said.

Upstairs, Tommy said, “I don't think those friends of your mother's are going to learn very much.”

“They should just be quiet and watch,” Nicky said.
“That's what I did, and I already know how to cook all kinds of things.”

“You like that? Cooking?”

“Sure,” Nicky said. “Why not? I like
eating.”

“I guess,” Tommy said. “Not for nothing, but it's kind of girly.”

“Says who?” Nicky said. “Almost all the famous chefs are guys. Like, uh, like Molto Mario, and … Chef Boy-ardee!”

“You're weird.”

“Yeah, I know,” Nicky said. “Listen, it's probably better if we don't say anything about those guys at the skate park today, you know? I don't want to get my uncle Frankie riled up.”

“I understand,” Tommy said. “If he heard that kid called me garlic breath, it'd be all over, wouldn't it?”

“Fugheddaboudit,”
Nicky said, and laughed.

That night, after dinner, Nicky and Tommy sat roasting marshmallows and making s'mores.

“This is great,” Tommy said. “I've never been camping before. This is what you do at Camp Whatchamacallit?”

“Camp Runnamucka. For that, you sleep in a tent and get bitten by bugs. And you do rowing, and canoeing, and hiking, and archery, and …”

“It sounds like the L.L. Bean Olympics,” Tommy said. “This is better.”

“Yeah, this is pretty good.” Nicky speared another marshmallow. “Also, there are these two parties coming up. One of them is the Snow Ball. It's a big deal in Carrington.
Dinner and dancing. Kind of formal, but kind of fun. Everyone brings a date. That's next Sunday night. And tomorrow night there's a party at my next-door neighbor's house. Wanna come with me?”

“Why not?” Tommy said. “So far, life in Carrington is pretty sweet.”

5

E
arly the following morning, Uncle Frankie came into Nicky's room and said, “Come on, kid. We're going down the shore.”

“Now?” Nicky wiped sleep from his eyes. “But isn't it snowing?”

“We're going to check out this joint your father has lined up,” Frankie said. “You wanna come with us?”

“Let me wake up Tommy,” Nicky said. “We'll come downstairs.”

Over breakfast, Frankie said, “Hey, Tommy. How's that chin?”

Tommy pushed gently on the bandage. “Not so bad,” he said.

Frankie laughed. “I should see the other guy, right?”

“Yeah, if Nicky had let me have a piece of him.”

“What a tough guy,” Frankie said. “So where is this place?”

“It's in Newton,” Nicky's father said. “Right on the sand, by the boardwalk. For the summer, you have to reserve a year in advance. In the winter, it's empty. So I rented the whole place.”

Nicky's father drove, with Frankie in the passenger seat and the boys in back. They took the interstate south, then a little highway through some marshy wetlands. Soon they were driving down a windswept beach road. Each beach town had its own boardwalk, lined with arcades, restaurants and snack bars selling hot dogs and hamburgers or fish-and-chips and ice cream. Everything was closed for the winter.

A hundred years before, the tiny town of Newton had been a weekend getaway for wealthy people. Stately homes stood over the dunes, looking out at the sea. One of them was now the Newton Manor B&B, an elegant three-story Victorian building that looked like a wedding cake.

“What's the ‘B and B’ part mean?” Frankie said. “Isn't it a hotel?”

“It means ‘bed-and-breakfast,’” Nicky's father said. “It's like a hotel, except they serve you a big breakfast, and the rooms are more like bedrooms in a house. Sometimes you share a bathroom with someone down the hall.”