Behind the fern, I started to shake. I sat on the damp earth and tried to catch my breath. The day was hot and getting hotter. The chattering of the jays had been joined by a chorus of summer beetles, their shrill drone common on scorchers such as this one.
“Come on, Becky,” Chipper was cajoling, and I peered through the fronds as he leaned forward over my sister.
Like my sister, Chipper Paguni was going into his junior year. All last year and the year before, I’d watched him from my bedroom window, emerging from the house across the street and heading down to the bus stop at precisely 6:45 a.m. Usually Chipper wore shiny black parachute pants and an untucked white collar shirt. His book bag would be slung over his shoulder. I imagined that rolled up inside the book bag was the necktie that was required by Chipper’s all-male Catholic high school. The tie remained unworn and unknotted until the last possible moment, when the bus pulled into the school parking lot.
Now I would be joining Chipper at that same school, wearing my own tie as I trooped in for my first day tomorrow morning as a geeky, green freshman. I had heard the stories of how the upperclassmen taunted the new boys. St. Francis Xavier was a hotbed of testosterone. Its slogan, “Be a man,” was enshrined over its front doors and embodied by its strutting, title-holding football team. This year, as a defensive linebacker, Chipper would probably see his first real action on the field, and I’d be required to sit in the bleachers and cheer him on. It was called school spirit. Whether Chipper would turn out to be a tormentor or a friend remained to be seen. I was hoping that his interest in Becky would work in my favor. But one could never count on such things.
Holding my breath, I watched as Chipper’s white buttocks rose in the air from on top of my sister.
I leaned in for a better view, but as I did so, my knees cracked again. I let the fronds swing shut but too late. I heard Becky ask, “What was that?”
My armpits suddenly poured sweat. Then I heard a splash.
I bolted. But not before, without even thinking about it, I snatched up Chipper’s underpants in my hand.
I was stuffing them up my shirt as I came skidding back into the house, the screen door slamming behind me. Suddenly my mother was two inches from my face, her hair wrapped around huge orange curlers.
“Did you find your sister?”
“No.”
“Mother Mary! One simple favor I ask of her and she disappears on me!”
I knew it wasn’t one simple favor. It was more like five or six or thirty. Ever since Becky had gotten her driver’s license three months ago, she’d been forced to act as Mom’s personal chauffeur, driving her to the grocery store, to the hairdresser, to the Wednesday night meetings of the Rosary Altar Society. That was the whole reason Dad had bought that used mustard-colored Vega, so that Becky could drive Mom around on her errands, freeing him from the chore. See, Mom didn’t know how to drive a car. “In my day,” she explained whenever someone expressed surprise at the fact, “not every lady got her driver’s license.” The truth was, Mom didn’t do well with technology, whether it was driving a car or adjusting the antenna on top of the television set or resetting the clock after a power outage. All those things she left up to my father. Once, when I was eight, Dad had tried to teach Mom how to drive. She’d stepped on the gas instead of the brake and charged straight over the sidewalk into Flo Armstrong’s peony garden, tires spitting soil. Never again did Mom get behind the wheel.
Margaret Joan Cronin Fortunato, better known as Peggy. Five feet four, big hands like a man’s, and breasts so large they sometimes made her seem as if she’d topple over frontward. It was easy to see where Becky got her measurements.
“She’ll remember,” I said, assuring my mother of my sister’s promise as I pulled off my muddy sneakers on the mat inside the front door. “The party’s not until four o’clock.”
“Well, it’s already twelve thirty and—Danny! Look at that mud! Were you at the pond? I told you not to go up there. Do you want to get poison ivy again?”
“I wasn’t at the pond,” I said quickly.
“Well, if you were looking for Becky, you should have gone to the pond. You know she’s always sneaking up there.”
I just sighed as my mother made the sign of the cross. She always did this when she was anxious, which meant she was crossing herself a couple hundred times a day. Ever since Becky had turned sixteen, Mom had been even more anxious, it seemed. She’d always doted on Becky. Becky was her little angel, whose annual dancing school recitals had always reduced my mother to a puddle of tears. “Isn’t she the most beautiful child ever?” she’d repeat over and over to herself, watching Becky pirouette on the stage. Mom always went easier on Becky than she did on me; on snow days when school was canceled, Becky got to sleep in, but I had to get up and shovel the driveway. “Because you are the boy,” Mom would say, and boys shoveled driveways and cut the grass and raked the leaves. Becky just dried the dishes after dinner. I didn’t think it was a fair balance.
When Becky turned sixteen, Mom freaked. Her little angel now had ideas of her own. Becky was getting “too serious” with Chipper Paguni, Mom argued. She had quit dancing lessons and spent all her time with Chipper. I always believed that Mom’s demands that Becky drive her everywhere were part of a strategy to keep her close at hand. And I suspected Becky thought so, too. Hence their arguments.
But all that was not to say that Mom paid no attention to me. On the contrary. Becky might have been her favorite, but I received my share of Peggy Fortunato’s extravagant solicitude. My fourteenth birthday party, for example, had turned into a state occasion. Mom had been up at five, washing the floor, vacuuming the drapes, wrapping Hershey’s Kisses in blue tulle, setting—and then resetting—the table. Just so five of my friends, plus Nana and Aunt Patsy, could sit around drinking Kool-Aid and eating chocolate cake.
“Well,” Mom said, throwing her hands in the air, “if you don’t have any balloons for your birthday party, Danny, you’ll know who to blame. Not me!”
She disappeared down the hallway.
From the kitchen I could smell my cake baking—yellow Duncan Hines, my favorite. Peering around the corner, I spied the jar of chocolate frosting waiting on the table, and beside it a bag of M&M’s, with which Mom would spell out my name across the top of the cake. The candles had already been laid out and counted. Fourteen of them.
I was really too old for kiddie parties like this. I’d tried to protest, but Mom had insisted. Only with great effort had I been able to persuade her not to drag out the pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey game. Certainly next year there would be no birthday party like this. High school kids didn’t have parties with Hershey’s Kisses wrapped in tulle. Next year my birthday party would be very different.
That was, if I survived high school to make it that far.
I dialed a number on the beige phone mounted to the kitchen wall.
“Katie?”
“Danny?”
“What time are you coming? Come early, okay? We can hang out.”
The girl on the other end of the line sighed. “I can’t. My