Better to Wish

  Abby looked out the window at the snow. The smell of gingerbread drifted up from the kitchen and she felt her stomach flip-flop with excitement. It was Christmastime and she was about to leave on her secret errand.

  Getting out of the house was easier than she had thought it would be. She pulled on her outdoor clothes as fast as possible, called, “Going to Sarah’s,” over her shoulder, and ran out the door.

  The route to Hammer’s took her through the pine woods, where she breathed in the scent of a thousand Christmas trees and stopped to watch snow fall on the deep green branches. A chickadee swooped ahead of her along the path. Abby scuffed through the snow and stuck out her tongue to catch snowflakes.

  Eighty-nine cents, she thought. She hoped Mr. Hammer hadn’t raised the price of the tea set. Then she had another thought that made her stop in the middle of the woods and say, “Oh no!” aloud. She hadn’t been to Hammer’s in over a week. What if the tea set had been sold? What if someone was buying it at that very moment?

  Abby quickened her pace. She emerged from the woods on the other side of the little spit of land, turned left, reached Lewisport Road, and hurried by Mr. Harrison’s fishing shack, and the falling-down house where Toby Hopper lived with his big brother and no parents, and then the house that belonged to Mr. Hammer and his wife. Finally, just beyond their house, was Hammer’s itself.

  On this dark, snowy day the lighted window glowed warmly. Abby paused in front of it and pretended to inspect the electric train that ran around and around a jumbled display of cookware. She wanted to purchase the tea set as fast as possible, but she had to consider how to approach Mr. Hammer. She hated talking to him. He called her “little girl,” although he knew her name, and he never quite seemed to trust her. Abby was certain he was not going to be happy about counting out thirty-nine pennies, even if no one else was in the store.

  At last Abby opened the door and stepped inside, brushing snow off of her coat sleeves and shaking more snow off of her hat. She stuffed her hat and mittens in her pocket and looked at the counter where Mr. Hammer was standing behind the wooden cash register, ringing up a sale of flour and sugar to Toby Hopper. The cash register dinged, the drawer opened, and Mr. Hammer deposited Toby’s dollar bill in the drawer and handed him his change. Toby dropped the change down into his boot, glanced awkwardly at Abby, and fled from the store.

  “What can I help you with, little girl?” called Mr. Hammer as Abby made her way to the back of the store. “Don’t touch anything!”

  “I won’t.” Abby squeezed her eyes shut as she approached the shelf with the display of cups and saucers. Then she opened them slowly. There were the adult-size cups, the adult-size saucers … and the tea set in a box.

  Abby reached for it.

  “No touching!” shouted Mr. Hammer, who had crept up behind her.

  Abby jumped. “But,” she said, “but … I want to buy that. The tea set. It’s a present for Rose. My sister. And I have enough money. It’s all here.” She unbuttoned her coat and held out the fat change purse.

  Mr. Hammer paused. “It costs eighty-nine cents.”

  “I know. I’ve been saving.”

  “I’d better go count it.” Mr. Hammer slid the tea set off the shelf, turned, and threaded his way to the front of the shop. Abby followed him, stopping only once to look at the horse and saddle.

  When Mr. Hammer reached the counter, he placed the tea set on it and held out his hand. Abby emptied her coins into it. They spilled over the outstretched hand and onto the counter. Mr. Hammer muttered, “Jeez Louise,” and started counting.

  “Eighty-seven, eighty-eight, eighty-nine,” he said a minute later.

  Abby almost replied, “I told you so,” but she didn’t want to do anything to jinx Rose’s present.

  Mr. Hammer didn’t say another word, but he did wrap each tiny cup and saucer, the teapot, and its lid in tissue paper. Then he placed all the little bundles back in the box and handed it to Abby.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, and fled from the store.

  She met Sarah halfway through the woods, the snow falling thickly now, the late morning nearly as dark as evening.

  Abby thrust the box at her friend. “I got it! It was still there and I had exactly enough money. Thanks to your dime!”

  Sarah opened her mouth, and then closed it again, and in that instant, Abby’s excitement rushed out of her like air from a pricked balloon. One of the advantages of having a best friend was being able to hold conversations without words, and Abby and Sarah had been best friends for a long time. So Abby knew something was wrong even before Sarah said, “That’s great, but, Abby, your father is looking for you. He’s mad.”

  Abby took the box back and put it in her pocket. “Why is he mad?”

  “You said you were going to my house, so he went looking for you there, and I didn’t know where you were.”

  “Uh-oh. How mad is he?”

  Sarah winced. She knew Pop’s temper almost as well as Abby and Rose did. “Mad. Just go home.”

  Abby ran back through the woods ahead of Sarah. She met her father walking briskly along Blue Harbor Lane. He did not look happy.

  “Where were you?” he demanded.

  “I —” Abby began. She wanted badly to keep Rose’s gift a surprise until Christmas Day. “It’s a secret. But I didn’t do anything bad. Honest.”

  “You disobeyed me.”

  Abby didn’t remember Pop forbidding her to leave the house, but she said, “I’m sorry,” anyway.

  “And you lied,” Pop went on. “You told your mother you were going to Sarah’s.”

  “I’m sorry,” Abby said again. “I thought I would be back in time. And this is a really important secret. Not a bad thing. You’ll find out what it is. On Christmas Day.”

  Pop looked at her with hard eyes. “No. Lying. Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Abby’s punishment was that she wasn’t allowed to go with Pop, Mama, and Rose to choose the tree. But she found that she didn’t mind as much as she had thought she would. She sat by herself in the kitchen with Christmas carols playing on the Victrola, and she wrapped the tea set in red paper and tied the box with a white hair ribbon. Pop couldn’t stop her from doing that. He couldn’t control everything.

  When Rose opened the box on Christmas morning, she burst into tears and asked Abby over and over how she had managed to get the tea set from the mean traveling-fair man. And when Rose was a grown-up — this was two decades later — she passed the tea set down to her own daughters one snowy Christmas morning and told them about the traveling fair and Mr. Hammer and Aunt Abby’s secret plan.

  Abby woke with a start, and before she had opened her eyes, she thought, This is the last time I’ll wake up in this room. She decided to say her thought out loud: “This is the last time I’ll wake up in this room.”

  “No, it isn’t,” said Rose from beside her.

  Abby rolled over and looked at her sister. “I didn’t know you were up.”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “Are you sad?”

  “No, I’m happy! We don’t have to go to school today. Anyway, this is not the last time we’ll wake up in this room. You know this is going to be our beach cottage from now on. Pop said we can spend lots of time here in the summer.”

  Pop, Abby thought, was the only Nichols who truly wanted to move to Barnegat Point, into the second-largest house on their new street. He was proud of this accomplishment, but Abby didn’t want to leave Blue Harbor Lane, and neither did Mama. Rose was excited about the new house, but really, Rose was happy wherever she was.

  “I know,” said Abby. “But it won’t be the same. Our real house will be in Barnegat Point. We’ll wake up there most mornings — and what will I see when I look out my window?”

  Rose shrugged. A view was a view. She wasn’t sure why Abby cared so much about it. “I don’t know. What?”

  “Well, I don’t know either. But it won’t be the ocean. It
will probably just be the house next door.”

  Rose shrugged again.

  “Won’t you miss the ocean?” Abby asked. She couldn’t imagine living without the sound of the waves, a sound as natural to her as a heartbeat.

  “I guess. But, Abby, we get to live in town. In a big house! We’ll each have our own room. Even the baby will have its own room, after it’s born. And there are two bathrooms. And a dining room. And a parlor.” Rose paused. “What’s a parlor anyway?”

  It’s a room for people who want to show off that they’re rich, Abby thought. But what she said was, “It’s like a living room, but I think it’s fancier and you’re supposed to entertain guests in it.”

  “Well, whatever it is, I don’t care. We don’t have to go to school today!”

  Abby sighed. She knew that eventually she’d get used to the idea of the fancy house in Barnegat Point, but she would miss the cottage by the sea.

  “Girls!” called Mama from downstairs. “Hurry up now. Today is a big day!”

  The move to Barnegat Point was going to be easy. Abby remembered when the Becketts had moved into the cottage next door. Every stick of their furniture and all their belongings had been packed in a truck and it had taken hours to unload everything. But the Nicholses were leaving most of their belongings in the cottage that would become their beach house, and Mama and Pop had bought all new things for the house in town. Abby and Rose would need to unpack their clothes and organize their rooms, but that was about it.

  Abby, wearing a pale blue dress (a present for her tenth birthday) and matching blue socks, clattered downstairs in her lace-up shoes and found Mama standing at the back window, hands resting on her spreading belly, watching Pop as he supervised the digging up of the rosebushes, which would be making the trip to the new yard in Barnegat Point.

  “Eat something quickly,” said Mama, turning from the window. “Your father wants us in the car in half an hour.”

  Abby wondered whether Pop was more excited about the new house or the new baby. It was a thought she kept to herself.

  Fifteen minutes later, Abby said a secret good-bye to Orrin. She found him on the beach in front of his house, standing ankle deep in frigid seawater, staring at the horizon.

  “I’ll see you every day in school, you know,” she told him.

  Orrin nodded. “But still. Everything is going to change. Now we’ll only get to see each other in school. What are we going to do all summer?”

  Abby sighed. “We’ll figure something out. We’ll still come back here. We’re keeping our old house.”

  Orrin shrugged. “It won’t be the same.”

  “I know.”

  When Orrin said nothing more, Abby leaned forward, kissed him on the cheek as quick as the flash of a lightning bug, and fled from the beach. She was not about to let Orrin Umhay see her cry.

  Her secret good-bye with Orrin was followed by a regular good-bye with Sarah, and she started off by telling her what she’d told Orrin earlier: “We’ll still get to see each other in school.”

  Sarah was already blinking back tears. “I’m going to miss you anyway. You’ve lived three doors away from me for as long as I can remember.”

  “Well,” said Abby, drawing a handkerchief from her pocket and swiping at her eyes, “now you can come to Barnegat Point to visit me. And some days maybe you can come home with me after school. We can be town girls. We can go to the movies and get ice cream and look in the stores.”

  “But it won’t be as good as having you here all the time.”

  Abby reached for Sarah, gave her a fast, fierce hug, and ran down Blue Harbor Lane.

  “See you in school tomorrow!” Sarah called after her.

  Abby waved over her shoulder. And in no time, it seemed, Pop was swinging the Nicholses’ new Buick Roadster onto Haddon Road in Barnegat Point. Abby, even though she had been on Haddon many times, scrambled over Rose for a better look at the house that was now their home.

  “It’s so big,” said Rose softly.

  “I know,” Abby replied. And their new house (which was actually almost fifteen years old) was big. But it was not the biggest house on the street. And it certainly wasn’t as big as the summer houses on the beach, the houses for the people from New York and Boston. But still.

  Pop passed the house that was the largest on the street, the one with two turrets and three floors, and turned into the drive next door.

  You could fit our old house and Sarah’s house right down inside our new one, Abby thought, and still have plenty of space left over.

  Pop parked the Buick at the top of the drive, and Abby and Rose jumped out of the car and ran through the front door of the house. They were greeted by Ellen, a cheerful, rosy-cheeked woman, older than Mama, who was wearing a white apron over a gray dress. Ellen was their new housekeeper, something Mama said she would never, ever get used to.

  “You mean we won’t have to make our beds?” Abby had asked when Pop had announced that he’d hired Ellen — along with Mike, who was to help with the yard and the Buick, and Sheila, who was to help Ellen until the baby came. Then she would be the baby’s nurse.

  “I mean no such thing at all,” said Mama. “You girls still have your chores.”

  Pop had frowned at Mama. “For heaven’s sake, Nell,” he’d said. “I can afford help now. You don’t think Stuart Burley makes his kids do chores, do you?” Stuart Burley owned the two-turreted house next door. “Burley’s got help, just like us. That’s what people do when they have this much money. They hire help so their wives don’t have to cook and clean, and their kids can hold their heads up when they walk into town.”

  Mama had said nothing to this. But now she called Abby and Rose back outside. “Before you do anything else, girls, you need to unpack your clothes.”

  Pop threw Mama an angry look and turned back to Abby and Rose. “And then you have the rest of the day off.”

  “Gosh, we could have gone to school,” Abby said.

  Rose pinched her arm and Abby squeaked, but said nothing further.

  “Mike will bring your suitcases inside,” Pop added pointedly.

  While she waited for the suitcases, Abby walked cautiously through the rooms on the ground floor of the house. The front door opened into a hall, and through the first door on the left was what Pop said was the parlor, the entertaining room. It was furnished with pieces from Barnegat Interior, and with chairs and tables from Pop’s own company. Across the hall from the parlor was a similar room, just not quite as fancy, and in the back of the house were the kitchen, the dining room, and Pop’s study.

  “What do you think he’s going to study?” Rose asked Abby as they peeped through the door.

  “Nothing. It’s like an office.”

  “It doesn’t look like an office. It looks like a library. Except with no books on the shelves. I’ve never seen a desk like that in an office.” Rose eyed the rolltop desk that had also come from Pop’s company.

  “Well, it’s still an office.”

  Abby left Rose, walked back to the hall, and began to climb the stairs to the second floor. The staircase didn’t curve like a snail shell, the way the one in the summer house did, but there was a landing partway up where Pop said they should put a table with a statue on it. At the top of the stairs was another hall, and from this opened the doors to the four bedrooms — Abby’s room, Rose’s room, Mama and Pop’s room, and the baby’s room.

  Abby walked slowly into her room and across to the window. She stood with her eyes closed, then finally opened them and found herself staring at the side of the Burleys’ house and an upstairs window. It was a very nice house and window. But it wasn’t the ocean.

  Abby sighed. She bounced once on her new bed, trailed her fingers across her new vanity, sat briefly in her new rocking chair, and peeked into the empty closet.

  Rose appeared in the hallway. “Let’s see if we’re allowed to walk into town by ourselves,” she said.

  “All right. But we can’t ask un
til we’ve unpacked.” Abby knew Mama wouldn’t want her and Rose to have a treat until they’d fulfilled their duties. More important, Abby felt she couldn’t leave her strange new room until she had made it her own.

  Mama balked when Abby and Rose asked to walk into town without a grown-up.

  “It’s only two blocks,” Abby protested.

  “Children aren’t safe anymore,” said Mama, and Abby thought of the newspaper headline she’d seen the other day: Lindbergh Baby Found Slain. The baby, the son of the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh, had been kidnapped from his crib in the middle of the night on March 1st. On May 12th, the baby had been found not far from his home in New Jersey — dead. Someone had killed him. Mama had wept when she’d heard the news. And she’d said that children weren’t safe anymore, not even in their own beds. She had said that many times in the past few days, occasionally adding, “What is the world coming to?”

  “But can’t we just walk into town?” Abby asked again. “We aren’t babies. And we know where we’re going. Anyway, starting tomorrow we’re going to be walking to school by ourselves.”

  Mama finally relented, but only after Pop said, “We can’t coddle them forever, Nell.”

  “Thank you!” Abby and Rose cried before Mama could change her mind. They ran across their front lawn, stopping briefly to watch Mike, who was replanting the rosebushes, and who kept his eyes on his work.

  “Do you know the way into town?” Rose asked Abby as they passed the Burleys’ house.

  “Of course. Right up there is the main street,” Abby said, pointing. “The one with all the stores —”

  “Let’s go to the drugstore,” Rose interrupted, “and get ice cream.”

  “Let’s look around a little first. Gosh, I can’t believe we live in town now. And that we can just walk right to the drugstore or the toy store or the library whenever we want. We’ll walk into town every single day on our way to school and back.”