Better to Wish

  Rose and Sarah piled behind Abby and gawked at the steps.

  “Did you build the staircase, Pop?” asked Abby.

  “Made the balusters. Every one of them. And they’re my own design. When the lady in the family saw them, that was when she asked me to build some furniture — two dressers and four spindle-back chairs.”

  Abby and Rose and Sarah walked along the front of the house, staying in Pop’s line of sight. Abby turned to her right. “You can see the lighthouse from here!”

  “I bet you can see all the way up to Bar Harbor,” said Sarah, shading her eyes and peering in the other direction.

  “Really?” said Abby, squinting into the sun.

  “Well, maybe not. But far.”

  “Girls!” Pop called then. “Time to go.”

  Pop drove the Nash into town. He hummed as he drove, and he tapped his hands on the steering wheel. The house had put him in a good mood and Abby hoped he would stay that way.

  Pop was a mystery to Abby. She had never met his parents, although she knew they lived in Connecticut. She wasn’t sure what had brought her pop to Maine, just that he had arrived in 1918, not long before he had met Mama. Abby didn’t like to ask him too many questions, because too many questions annoyed him. So she sometimes asked Mama questions about Pop, on the days when Mama didn’t seem too sad about the rosebushes and the babies who hadn’t lived.

  Abby squirmed in the backseat and traded places with Sarah in order to sit by the window.

  “Close your eyes!” shrieked Rose, who was sitting by the other window. “We’re going by the school. Nobody look at it!” Second grade had not gotten off to a good start for Rose.

  Abby dutifully closed her eyes, but opened them again so she wouldn’t miss the first sight of Barnegat Point’s main street. A minute later Pop turned left and there it was. The squat buildings — made of wood except for the bank, which was brick — sat close to the street, and Abby read the signs as they passed them: Drugs, Launderette, Peake’s Jewelry, Treat’s Market, Optometrist, F. D. Haworth’s (that was a clothing store), Strand Theater.

  “Pop?” said Rose.

  And Pop replied, “Don’t ask me again about ice cream or the answer will be no.”

  No one said a word while Pop parked the car. Then they piled out, and Abby looked up and down the street. American flags hung above most of the shops. Mr. Peake stood smoking a cigar in front of his jewelry store. A skinny cat peered out from under a truck, then darted into an alley, tail twitching.

  “I love Barnegat Point,” Sarah ventured, glancing at Pop, who said nothing.

  “Oh!” exclaimed Abby. “Sarah, there’s Marie!” Abby waved at a dark-haired girl sitting on a bench in front of the launderette. “Marie! Marie!”

  Marie grinned and waved back. The girls were in fourth grade together and Marie knew all the best rhymes for skipping rope, and had also taught Abby and Sarah how to French braid their hair.

  “Hi,” said Abby, running to her. “What are you doing here?”

  Marie angled her head toward the launderette. “Waiting for my mother.”

  “Do you —” Abby started to say, but a hand grabbed her elbow then and jerked her down the street. She looked up at Pop as he hurried her away. “What’s wrong?” she asked. Pop’s face frightened her.

  “I told you I don’t want you associating with those French kids.” He paused. “Or with Catholics.”

  Abby came to a halt and jerked away from Pop, but all she said was “Marie isn’t French.”

  Pop glared at her. “Don’t sass me. Her parents came from Quebec. They’re immigrants. They don’t talk English at home. And they’re Catholics. There’s no need for you to associate with them.”

  “But I go to school with Marie! She’s in my class.” Abby could hear her voice trembling. She marched ahead of Pop, who caught up with her quickly.

  “That’s bad enough. You don’t have to talk to her outside of school.” Pop glanced over his shoulder at Rose and Sarah, who were following cautiously. He lowered his voice. “And you don’t need to be spending so much time with Orrin either. I keep telling you that.”

  Abby felt anger surge from some unidentifiable part of her body, threatening to explode. She took a breath. “But he lives right down the street,” she said at last. “We’ve known each other since we were five.”

  “Still doesn’t mean you have to spend any time with him.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I’ve told you. His mother’s a foreigner. And a Catholic. And Orrin is born of her, so that makes him an Irish Catholic, too.”

  Abby stomped her foot. “But Orrin’s nice —”

  “I don’t care. Him and his people are spoiling the population. Maine should be white —”

  “Orrin’s white,” said Abby quietly. “So is Marie.” She shook her head and looked away from Pop. She felt suddenly the way she had felt when she’d seen Pop kick Sarah’s cat one day when he thought no one was looking.

  “Maybe so, but let me finish. They’re not American. And they’re not Protestant. Our people here should be all those things. You are, and be thankful for it. Another thing about Orrin — his father can’t keep a job. His mother doesn’t work either. No excuse for that. They’re able-bodied. Nothing wrong with either of them.”

  “But his mother’s Irish Catholic. I thought you said that means there is something wrong with her.”

  Pop looked sharply at Abby. “I hope you aren’t making fun,” he said.

  “No.”

  “Because Orrin’s mother could wash clothes or dishes. Something. There are plenty of jobs for the lower classes. She’s just lazy. So’s Orrin’s father. Now take me. I don’t come from much, but I work hard and my business is taking off. I’m making something of myself. I’m going to have a big business one day. Soon, too. There are better families than Orrin’s, Abigail, and better families than that girl’s.”

  “Her name is Marie.”

  “One more word,” said Pop. “Just one more word.”

  Abby closed her mouth. She slowed her pace until she was walking with Sarah and Rose, and Pop was walking ahead by himself. Sarah put her arm around Abby.

  Abby breathed in the salty air and the fishy smell from Treat’s, and the sugary smell from the bakery, and the warm sun smell. She looked up at the clear blue sky and ahead to where the road rose slightly and then seemed to fall away into the ocean.

  “Animal Crackers is playing at the movies,” said Rose, but she said it in a whisper in case the notion should annoy Pop for some reason. “Maybe we’ll get to go.”

  Abby glanced at Pop, who was entering the hardware store. “Maybe in a couple of years, when Pop’s as rich as he says he’s going to be.”

  “What?” said Rose.

  Abby shook her head. “Nothing.” She couldn’t explain Pop. Not to Rose and not even to herself. She wanted to punish him, but couldn’t think of anything that wouldn’t lead to Pop punishing her back.

  Pop came out of the hardware store carrying a paper bag full of nails and smiling, because the store was run by Mike Connell, who was white and a Republican and went to the Methodist church. “Who wants ice cream?” he asked.

  Abby wanted to jump up and down and cry, “Me!” but she was smarting from her conversation with Pop. So instead she walked sedately along the street with Sarah until they reached the drugstore, where Pop ordered four vanilla ice-cream cones. Then they walked through Barnegat Point, Abby and Sarah licking at their cones delicately, Pop eating his in great chunks, and Rose biting off the tip of her cone and slurping the ice cream down through the hole. Pop pointed out three of the larger houses in town and then began talking about the summer people again, and Abby stopped listening. She daydreamed about living by herself in the lighthouse and inviting Orrin and Marie to visit her whenever she felt like company.

  The afternoon, which had felt ruined, got better the moment Abby and Rose and Pop walked through the door of their cottage in Lewisport.
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  Mama greeted them with a smile, drying her hands on a dishrag. “Betty called while you were in town,” she said. “They’re coming over for supper. They’ll be here soon.”

  “All of them?” asked Abby, and her heart leaped.

  Behind her she heard Rose gulp in air, a sure sign she was about to start practicing her burping.

  “All of them,” said Mama.

  Long before the sun started to sink out of view, Abby and Rose, Blaine, Erma, Karl, and Dorothy (the cousins who were older than twelve), and Sarah, Emily, Douglas, and half the kids from Blue Harbor Lane, but not Orrin, who knew better, were playing baseball in Abby’s yard. Blaine had made himself the umpire and the coach and was teaching the younger kids how to pitch and hit and also how to burp and spit. Abby felt the last of the sun on her face, and the sticky, salty air, and had just hit Blaine’s baseball with a satisfying crack when Mama leaned out the door and called, “Girls, come help with supper, please,” so Abby, Rose, Erma, and Dorothy had to excuse themselves from the game.

  There was plenty to do in the kitchen, and Abby liked helping Mama and Aunt Betty, while Pop and Uncle Marshall sat in the front room by an open window with their cigarettes, letting the smoke drift out into the yard.

  Supper that night was a beach picnic, everyone helping to carry chicken and corn and pies and lemonade across the road and across the sand, settling on the beach that didn’t belong to them. Sarah’s cat, Patches, joined them for part of the supper, begging scraps of food until Pop swatted her rump and Patches hissed at him and ran back across the road.

  After supper, Pop disappeared into the storage shed and returned with the horseshoes and stakes. The boys played horseshoes on the beach while the girls and Mama and Aunt Betty cleaned up the kitchen.

  “I’ll teach you to play cribbage,” Erma said to Abby and Rose later. “I brought our board.”

  Abby, Rose, Erma, and Dorothy sat on the little front porch and studied their game by the light of a kerosene lamp. From the beach came shouts from the horseshoe players and the occasional cry of a gull. Mama moved quietly through the house, bringing tea to Aunt Betty, taking out the hidden tin of caramels, checking on the girls, and once, only once, looking out the back window in the direction of the rosebushes.

  When Rose’s head began to nod sleepily over the cribbage board, Mama picked her up from her chair and said it looked like the day was done. Aunt Betty called across the street to the horseshoe players, and soon Uncle Marshall’s car was driving slowly down Blue Harbor Lane, Blaine leaning out the back window and calling, “Abby, you’re the best girl pitcher I know,” which made her beam with pride.

  Long after Mama and Pop had gone to bed downstairs, Abby lay awake next to Rose, breathing in her sister’s smell of caramel and Ipana toothpaste and seawater and also rosewater, since Rose had stolen some of Mama’s so that she would smell nice for Blaine.

  Across the street, on the other side of the sea grass, the waves rolled onto the sand. Abby could tell, just by the way the air felt in the room, that a fog would come in off the ocean during the night and that by the next morning she wouldn’t be able to see the Becketts’ house next door.

  She turned over carefully and thought about Marie and about Orrin and the Umhays, and about what it must feel like to be foreign or dark-skinned or out of work when all around you, people like Pop were watching with smug eyes.

  “Abby … Abby? … Abby!”

  “What? Rose, I’m sleeping.”

  “But it’s morning. And there are only six days until Christmas. That’s less than a week.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, do you think Santa Claus will come?”

  “Today?”

  “No, on Christmas Eve.”

  “Yes.”

  “What if he doesn’t?”

  “He always does.”

  “Do you think he got our letters?”

  “I don’t know. Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  Rose sat up in bed. “Oh, I hope he got mine. I only asked for one thing, like Pop said. So I wasn’t being greedy.” She leaned forward and sniffed. “Mama’s baking!”

  Abby sat up quickly. “I smell gingerbread.”

  “Hey, it’s snowing!” cried Rose.

  “This is perfect. Christmas and snow and gingerbread.”

  “And presents,” added Rose.

  Signs of Christmas were everywhere. In the homes on Blue Harbor Lane, decorated trees stood by windows, and in Hammer’s, the general store, Abby and Rose had looked longingly at a box labeled THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS, which held twelve intricate glass tree ornaments.

  “Don’t touch!” Mr. Hammer barked every time he caught sight of Abby and Rose, even though they were careful to do nothing but look around the crowded store. Abby even clasped her mittened hands behind her back. At this time of year some of the shelves that usually held tools and fishing line and oilskin coats had been stocked with far more tempting items: peppermint sticks and ginger cookies and toys. There were teddy bears and Raggedy Ann dolls, as well as a play wristwatch (which was what Rose had asked Santa for) and a toy horse with a saddle (which was what Abby had asked Santa for).

  And there was a tea set, a tiny tea set almost like the one Rose had tried to win at the ring toss the year before. Abby didn’t think her sister had seen it, since Mr. Hammer displayed it on a shelf with stacks of sturdy, practical cups and saucers (in regular size), not with the toys. And this was perfect, because Abby planned to surprise her sister with the tea set on Christmas morning. She imagined Rose bouncing down the stairs before the sun had risen, unable to wait any longer, and running first to her stocking to make sure there wasn’t any coal in it, and then to the tree to look for her present from Santa. Under the tree she would see the little box with the tag on it reading TO ROSE, LOVE ABBY and she would tear the paper off and find a perfect china tea set.

  The tea set cost eighty-nine cents and Abby had been saving her money since the moment she’d spotted the teensy cups and saucers and teapot on Mr. Hammer’s back shelf. She’d had forty cents in her bank then, and ever since she’d been offering to mend clothes for Mama and to do chores for Pop. When she had seventy-nine cents saved up, she sold her shell barrette to Sarah for the final ten cents, making Sarah promise never to wear it in front of Mama or Pop. That had been yesterday, and now the eighty-nine cents (one dime, eight nickels, and thirty-nine pennies) were in her bank, which she had shoved into the back of her dresser drawer.

  Abby turned away from the window, dressed quickly in her warmest clothes, and ran downstairs to the kitchen, Rose at her heels.

  Mama was stirring gingerbread in a milky white bowl, and the kitchen smelled of molasses and cinnamon and ginger and cloves.

  “Can I lick the bowl?” asked Abby.

  “After breakfast,” Mama replied.

  Pop leaned in through the doorway. “I’m going to the workshop for a while,” he said. “When I get back, we can go look for a tree.”

  “Really?” said Abby. “Today?” Christmas and snow and gingerbread and a tree.

  And her secret plan.

  “As soon as I get back,” said Pop. And off he went, clapping his hat on his head.

  “Pop sure is working a lot lately,” commented Abby from her place at the table.

  “Business is doing well,” Mama replied, and she sounded proud. “We’re lucky. Lots of people are out of work, but your father is doing better than ever.”

  After Pop had made the furniture for the summer people from New York City, other people had begun giving him orders for furniture. He had a workshop in Barnegat Point where he now employed four very grateful men. Furthermore, in addition to the Nash, he owned a truck, and across each side of the truck he had painted the words Luther Nichols, Furniture Maker in very fancy letters.

  “Imagine,” Abby had heard her mother say to Sarah’s mother a few months earlier. “His own workshop with four employees. And he’s not just a
carpenter, he’s a furniture maker.”

  Sarah’s mother had replied, “He’s an artist.”

  Abby wasn’t sure about that, but she did know that Pop was a little freer with nickels and dimes these days. He had given Mama money to buy new shoes for Abby and Rose before their old ones had worn out, plus enough money for new winter coats. Then he had bought Mama a brand-new stove and a little iron bench for the yard. Before the weather had turned cold, Mama would sometimes sit out on the bench and look at the rosebushes.

  Pop had a bank account in Barnegat Point now, too. “Getting fat,” he had remarked one evening to Mama, and Abby, horrified, had thought Pop was insulting Mama, before she’d realized he meant that the bank account was getting fat, not her.

  “Mama?” Rose said now, standing up from the table to look longingly into the mixing bowl and sniff the gingerbread batter. “Why don’t grown-ups ask Santa for presents?”

  Mama smiled. “Because Santa is a toy maker and grown-ups just want boring things like stoves and sweaters.”

  “What do you want for Christmas?” asked Abby.

  “Oh, goodness. Nothing. I have you and Rose and your father. That’s enough for me.”

  “No, it isn’t. You want another baby,” said Rose, and Abby kicked her sister under the table. They were not supposed to mention babies around Mama.

  Mama turned away and looked out the window. After a moment she said, “A new scarf would be nice.”

  Abby brightened. That was perfect. She had secretly been knitting a scarf for her mother and it was nearly finished.

  She pushed her chair back and stood up.

  “Where are you going?” asked Rose as Abby began climbing the stairs to their bedroom. “Don’t you want to lick the bowl?”

  “You can have it all.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” Upstairs, Abby sat on the bed and dumped out the money from her bank. She counted it again. She had eighty-nine cents exactly. She found her plaid change purse, the one on the chain, and she poured her pennies and nickels and the dime into it. It weighed more than she had expected and was fatter than she had expected, too.