'Tis the Season (13 page)

Filomena swung open the front door while Dad was getting together some tools and stuff he'd tossed into the car under the hatchback. She had on loose-fitting overalls and a turtleneck sweater that was so thick Billy figured she must have dressed in layers, too. Her hair was pulled back into a braid that made it look like a black rope hanging down her back. “Isn't it a gorgeous day?” she said, smiling so wide Billy felt her smile like a naked lightbulb inside his chest, hot and bright.

She was right. It was a really nice day, the sky blue the way it rarely was in late November, and the air dry and sharp. It was the kind of day you'd want to go apple picking, although it was too late in the fall for apples. He hoped his father would let him play in the woods a
little—without Gracie tagging along. She could really ruin a guy's time in the woods.

Filomena turned from him and Gracie to his father. Billy noticed that the way she looked at Dad wasn't the way she looked at him and Gracie. Her smile for Dad was different. It was a little softer or something. When Dad looked at her he seemed different, too—less sure of himself, but kind of hopeful, as if he thought she might give him a slice of pie.

For some reason, the way they stared at each other made Billy feel good and bad at once, like something could go really right or really wrong between them.

“I've got the paint and brushes out back,” she said. “And I've got some old sheets you can use as drop cloths if you need them. My mother had everything inside the house covered with drop cloths.”

Billy remembered all those white cloths. They'd resembled ghosts lounging on the furniture.

“And I was thinking—” she finally turned to Billy and Gracie “—maybe the kids could help me bake some cookies.”

“Yeah!” Gracie shrieked. She shrieked just as loudly when she was happy as when she was angry. He wished she had a volume dial so he could turn it down.

He didn't want to help bake cookies. He'd eat them, sure, but he didn't want to hang out in the kitchen with Gracie and Filomena. It wasn't that he had anything against baking—it could be fun, especially if you were baking something like cookies, where there might be a bowl to lick, or icing or chips or sprinkles. But he'd been grounded all week because he'd climbed out his window, and to have to spend Saturday cooped up inside with Gracie…“Can I help you, Daddy?” he asked.

His father grinned as if he thought Billy had chosen to help paint the porch because he wanted to, not because he was trying to avoid getting stuck in the kitchen with his baby sister. “Sure. Follow me.”

Billy trooped around the house with his father. He knew where the back porch was; he'd climbed on it and tried to peek through the windows, and the Sunday afternoon Gracie had followed him there she'd tried to peek through the windows, too. Whatever had been blocking them on the inside was gone, and Billy could now see the kitchen through them. It wasn't like his kitchen, or his friends'. The oven wasn't built into a wall but stood on the floor, and the cabinets had glass in the doors so you could see right through them, and all the appliances—the stove, the refrigerator, the dishwasher—were white. The floor was a black-and-white checkerboard of tiles, and a long table stood in the middle of the room, with tall wooden chairs around it.

Billy bet the room smelled like apples. Or maybe he was just imagining everything smelling like apples because it was that kind of day.

“So what are we supposed to do?” he asked.

His father tossed him a pair of work gloves. “These'll probably be too big on you, but I want you to protect your hands,” he said. “What we're going to do is take these scrapers—” he handed Billy a flat-edged tool that looked like a short-handled spatula “—and rub them along the boards like this.” He put on a pair of canvas-and-leather gloves, knelt down on the porch and ran the edge of the tool down the board. It peeled loose chips of paint off the wood.

“We're scraping off the paint?”

“Not all of it. Just whatever is loose enough to come
off. You don't have to use much pressure. Why don't you give it a try?”

Billy slid his hands into the gloves. They were way too big, and they held the shape of the hands that had been in them before. Dad's hands, probably. Billy's fingers felt as if he'd slid them inside warm, round tubes, and the gloves swam around his palms. But he could still hold the scraper tool.

He knelt down on the porch and rubbed the scraper along a board. Some of the paint flaked right off. Some of it stuck on hard. “Like that?”

“Exactly like that,” Dad said. “But you know what? Why don't we do this systematically. Start right at the edge—” he pointed to one side of the porch “—and work your way across. Then when you've got a bit done, I'll follow with the sandpaper.”

“What are you gonna do with the sandpaper?”

“Just smooth it down a little more. That'll help the paint to go on nice and even.”

“How do you know this stuff?” Billy asked, running his scraper along the board and discovering it was actually fun. A lot more fun than baking would have been.

“I know
everything
,” Dad said, but Billy could tell from the way he made his voice sound all deep and serious that he was joking.

The back door opened and Filomena peered out. “Are chocolate-chip cookies acceptable to everyone?” she asked through the screen.

“Sounds good to me. What do you think, Billy?”

“Sounds good to me, too,” he said.

“That's two votes for chocolate chip,” Dad reported to Filomena. Billy glanced up to see them gazing at each other that way again, sharing one of those smiles that
seemed to shut out Billy and the porch and the entire universe. It was as if everything stopped when they smiled at each other, the crows shutting up, the breeze dying down, Billy's own breath snagging in his throat, unable to escape. Then Filomena closed the door and his father sighed.

Billy resumed scraping the boards. His father picked up a square of sandpaper, extended it past the end of the porch and pulled down on it, tearing off a neat strip. Then he crossed the porch to where Billy was working, got on his knees and began sanding the part where Billy had scraped off the big stuff. The sandpaper made a hissing sound.

Something was going on between Dad and Filomena, something more than her baby-sitting for Gracie and him. Billy had sort of sensed it during the two dinners she'd had at their house, the way Dad let him and Gracie leave the table and watch TV even though they were grounded, the way Dad's voice changed when he talked to Filomena—soft and tender, without any anger or laughter in it. It was the voice Dad used when he was having important discussions with Billy, when he was telling Billy he loved him.

“Do you ever miss Mom?” Billy asked. The question just sort of popped out. Billy hadn't even realized he was thinking of his mother. He'd thought he was just thinking of Dad and Filomena.

Dad didn't answer right away. He didn't even look at Billy. He just rubbed the sandpaper along the boards. “No,” he finally said, then thought some more and added, “I miss having someone to share the work with—the chores, the responsibilities, the shopping. And I miss having someone to share the good things with, too. When
you score a soccer goal, or you get everything right on a spelling test, or when Gracie does something special.”

“Gracie never does anything special,” Billy muttered. That got his dad to look at him. He grinned to show he was just kidding.

Dad smiled but didn't play along. He rubbed the sandpaper hard on the boards, in a constant
shh-shh
rhythm. “Sometimes I'm just so proud of you and Gracie, and I want to share my pride with someone. If your mother were still around, I'd be able to share it with her. But other than that, no. I don't miss her.” He sanded for a minute. “Do you?”

“No,” Billy said. One of his gloves had gotten kind of bunched up, and he had to use his teeth to adjust it, because with the gloves so much longer than his fingers, his hands were too clumsy for anything except using the scraper. When he resumed scraping, he tried to picture his mother. She'd left over two years ago, and he remembered her, but not too clearly. Sometimes it felt like she'd never been in his life at all.

“How come she left?” he asked.

His dad gave him a sharp look, and Billy wondered whether he was going to ask why he was even talking about her. Billy himself wondered about that. All he knew was that something in the way his dad and Filomena kept looking at each other had gotten his mind stuck on the subject.

After a moment, his dad glanced away. “She left because she thought she found something better.”

“Better than us?”

“She was mistaken, Billy. There is nothing in the world better than raising you and Gracie.
Nothing
.”

Billy glanced at him. He was rubbing the sandpaper
on the porch so hard he was beginning to sweat, even though the air was cold. After a moment he pulled off his jacket, tossed it onto the railing and then went back to sanding.

Billy was glad his father thought there was nothing better than raising Gracie and him. He was really, really glad his father loved him, even if his father worked too hard sometimes and seemed too tired and got mad at him when he wanted to stay up late and grounded him when he did something bad. If a kid was going to be stuck with only one parent, his dad was a good one to have.

It was still probably a lot better to have two parents, though. “If Mom came back, would you forgive her?” he asked.

Evan stopped sanding, leaned back and thought for a minute. “Yeah, I'd forgive her. Forgiveness is important. It heals the heart.”

“So, you'd let her come home and be our mommy?”

“She'll always be your mommy, Billy. But if you're asking me if I'd take her back as my wife, no.”

“I thought you just said you'd forgive her.”

Dad gave him a funny smile. “I think I've already forgiven her, Billy. You can't live your whole life being bitter and hurt. It's much better to let go of all that. But no, I wouldn't want her to be my wife again. I guess you could say I found something better, too.”

“What?” Billy asked, not sure if he was ready to hear his father's answer.

“I've found that it's better not to be married than to be married to someone who would make the choices your mother made. Marriage is a great thing, Billy—but it can be a terrible thing if the people are wrong for each other, or if they haven't grown up enough to know what they
want.” He pulled off a glove and ran his hand through Billy's hair. “I'm sorry you and Gracie had to learn these things so young. I'm sorry your mom left us. But I'm not sorry I'm here and I've got you kids and we're a family. You and Gracie are the best things in my life. Better than your mom ever was.”

Dad's words made Billy feel warm inside, not the way Filomena's smile had made him feel warm, but a deeper heat in his gut and along his spine, in his toes and his fingers, which were sweating inside the gloves. “I guess this would be a good time to ask for a raise in my allowance,” Billy said.

His father threw back his head and laughed. Then he shoved his glove onto his hand again and checked out the area Billy had finished scraping. “You want a raise, you'd better work a little harder,” he advised. “I'm doing the hard part here and I've practically caught up to you.”

Laughing along with his father, Billy moved down the porch and started scraping a new section. For a kid who was grounded, who couldn't get together with his friend Scott today the way he would have liked, or hop on his bike for a spin through the neighborhood, or talk Dad into taking him and some friends to the high-school football game, but who, instead, was stuck scraping paint off his new baby-sitter's porch, he was feeling really good. He was feeling even better because Dad hadn't asked him why he'd wanted to talk about his mother.

It was a good thing he hadn't asked, because if he had, Billy wouldn't have known what to say.

 

T
HE COOKIES
were delicious—warm and soft, the chips still gooey from the oven's heat. After the kids had eaten
a few, Filomena gave them a deck of cards and told them to play in a small sitting room off the living room. Evan had the distinct impression she'd sent them away so she could be alone with him, just the way he'd sent them off to watch television so he could linger over dinner with her.

“I hate to say this,” she murmured, staring through the back door while Evan filched another cookie from the plate, “but the porch looks worse than when you started.”

“It's fine. It just needs to be swept, and then I'll slap down the first coat of paint.”

“How many coats will it need?”

“Two ought to do it. The weather is supposed to hold, so the second coat can go on tomorrow.”

“I'll paint that coat. You've already done so much….”

“Yeah,” he said with a laugh. “I made it look worse.” He wanted to wrap her braid around his hand and give it a tug. He wanted to wrap his arms around her, to see how much of what he saw was bulky clothing and how much was her. He wanted…