My Most Excellent Year (18 page)

Hucky was a last-minute addition because he’s not even all-the-way sure of Tick yet, let alone strangers. My brother was right. Communicating with him was like trying to get a reaction out of the drapes.

“Honey, did anybody ever tell you that if you were any cuter, you’d be a cartoon?” asked Aunt Babe, buckling his seat belt and re-tying one of his sneakers.

Silence.

But this is a tough group to stay shy around, and Hucky was no exception. Everything turned around at lunch when he stole an anchovy off my brother’s plate, realized what he’d gotten himself into once he’d started chewing it, and then got angry at the plate for fooling him. Literally. I mean, he stood up, stuck out his bottom lip, put his hands on his hips, furrowed both eyebrows together, and glared at it. This was how Aunt Babe and I learned that it’s not a good idea to laugh when you have a mouth full of food, because we sprayed everything within range. (The people in the next booth
hated
us.) You could tell that Hucky didn’t know whether to be flattered or insulted, but as soon as he realized he was in his own spotlight, he figured out pretty quickly how to play a room.

“Show me your mad face,” Aunt Babe kept begging.

No.

“Please?”

Okay. Here. I’m doing it. Now laugh again.
We did. I mean, you couldn’t exactly help it.

During dessert Hucky taught us how to say “mad face” and “show me” in ASL, and we even found out that there’s a sign for “gink”—probably the same one as for dork, cheeser, and anything that ends in “hole.” Actually, Tick’s gotten pretty fluent with his hands. I couldn’t tell you for sure how he’s managing to pick it up so quick, but after you’ve seen how Hucky stays glued to his side while they’re walking down Congress Street together, it isn’t too hard to understand the why. Especially from my brother’s point of view. Does he have any idea how much he and Hucky could have been six-year-old twins? Or is that my job to notice these things? They’d have shared the same way of pretending that nothing’s wrong, and they’d have both lived in the same bubble that nobody else was allowed inside of. It may just be a coincidence, but most of what Tick talks about these days is his mother. And it doesn’t make him sad anymore either. Yesterday he told me the story about the time she wanted to surprise Pop by making lobster bisque for his birthday but didn’t realize when she got them home that the lobsters were still alive. When she came back to the kitchen after a long phone call, they were gone. Pop found one of them behind the dryer, Tick turned up another one in the geraniums, and his mom used to say that the third one was still growing somewhere in the basement. I feel like I know her the same as I would have if she’d always been a part of my life.

Once we’d discovered his mad face, Hucky was the center of
everybody’s attention for the rest of the afternoon—and he played the part like he’d been waiting to do it all his life.
Hasn’t
any
body appreciated this kid before? How could they
not
??
Whether we were chasing him through Faneuil Hall while he tried to hide-and-seek from us, or watching Aunt Babe plop him onto a shiny blue bicycle at Toys “R” Us, or seeing his face light up like a supernova when she bought him a production shot of Julie Andrews as Mary Poppins at Cinemabilia, you had to wonder how he got to be such a regular six-year-old without being able to hear. Or maybe being deaf doesn’t matter after all.

“Who’s your favorite friend at school?” I asked, while Tick translated.

“My ‘loving girl.’”

“What’s her name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who
is
she?”

“
She sat down next to me on the bench. So I kissed her on the head and then I farted.”

After twenty-one purchases and dinner at Legal Sea Foods (where we all gave our crab legs to Tick and Hucky so they could fight each other with them), the “surprise” at the end of Aunt Babe’s list turned out to be tickets to a preview of
Hello, Dolly!
at the Harborside Arena—which she somehow managed to keep a secret from us right down to the wire.

“You’ll have to guess,” she insisted, turning right onto Saint James Avenue.

“Movies,” said Tick.

“Fireworks,” said Augie.

Ice cream cones!
signed Hucky, once he’d figured out what was going on. We’d already snaked through half of Boston’s curvy downtown streets—still clueless—when Aunt Babe suddenly yanked the steering wheel to the right and pulled our green Hertz Saturn into the theatre’s parking lot. Out of four people in the car, one of us went nuclear.

“Oh, my God,” I shrieked, when I saw the marquee. Aunt Babe winked at me in the rearview mirror (letting me know that this was a special present from her to me), while Tick and Hucky turned to each other in the backseat.

What’s going on?
signed Hucky.
Where’s my ice cream cone?

“Sorry, dude,” groaned Tick in reply. “It’s one of my brother’s musicals. But we can go to sleep in there if we want to.” I’m pretty sure that Hucky understood the “go to sleep” part.

Hello, Dolly!
turned out to be the perfect ending to a day that deserved it. The Arena is one of the biggest theatres in Boston, but Dolly Levi didn’t have any trouble filling either the stage or the house. The sets were pink and white, and the lights made everything look like cotton candy and Valentine’s Day. But I think I got my biggest kick watching Hucky. He was too short to see anything from his seat, and he squirmed out of Aunt Babe’s lap (Hucky doesn’t do laps), so he stood between me and Tick for the entire performance with his eyes riveted to the stage and his mouth hanging open. Especially during the title song in the second act—with thirty waiters dancing around the orchestra pit and Dolly coming down that long red staircase—when he actually stood on his tiptoes in order to get a better view.

Look! Look!
he signed to Tick.

“I know, I know,” mumbled my brother. “I’ve lost you to the Dark Side.” When the nine curtain calls were over and the house lights finally came up, the vote was pretty unanimous: three raves and one favorable. Aunt Babe told us how impressed she was, Hucky finger-spelled
W-O-W
, and even Tick had to throw in the towel.

“Not bad,” he conceded, as we were making our way up the aisle. You have to understand what this means coming from my brother, who thinks Rodgers and Hammerstein is a furniture store. “‘Not bad’—T.C. Keller” is an ad quote that would have kept it running on Broadway for twenty-three years.

And Aunt Babe had planned it all just for me.

I mean it, Betty. As soon as I’m old enough to have a driver’s license, Tick and I are moving to Washington.

As time goes by,

Augie

Dear Jacqueline,

Consider yourself fortunate that Jack’s most serious offense was not getting rid of his girlfriends’ panties before you found them under the love seat. Tacky, but at least ironic. Instead, you might have been married to Franklin Roosevelt, who ended a Depression, revived the economy, won a two-ocean war, and used the Constitution to light his cigarettes. Without even
blushing
:

Even Eleanor was shocked. And she already
knew
he was a schmuck.