But that day he found another surprise. Sitting at the edge of the roof smoking a cigarette was an olive- skinned, wavy-haired teenager. Thomas froze when he saw the boy, but it was already too late to run.
The teenager turned and said, “Hey, bro,” with a sing to his voice. “What you doin’?”
Thomas was shocked by the boy’s eyes. They were bright, light gray, like Thomas’s mother’s eyes.
“Nuthin’,” Thomas said. “What you doin’ here?”
“Run away from the foster home they had me in.” The boy slapped the beat-up brown suitcase that sat at his feet. “I climbed up the fire escape. You got the key to that door?”
“It’s just a latch on the inside,” Thomas said. “This is my clubhouse.”
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“You think you could let me stay in your club awhile, little man?”
Thomas realized that the sing in the boy’s voice was close to the accent that he heard when Mexicans spoke to him in English.
“What’s your name?” Thomas asked.
“Pedro.”
“Why you look like that?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know.”
“My mother’s a beaner,” Pedro said then. “And my father’s a spook. I don’t know where I got the eyes though. All I know is that the kids beat me up an’ down the street.”
“What’s a foster home?” Thomas asked.
“It’s where they put you when you ain’t got no mother and father.”
“But you have.”
“Not no more,” Pedro said. He took a long drag on his cigarette. “My mom died, and my dad live down on Figueroa.
He sells smack and some coke down there, and he don’t wanna know about me.”
“If you stay here,” Thomas said, “you can’t tell anybody else, okay?”
“Sure, man. I ain’t gonna stay too long anyway. I got a sister up in Seattle. I’ma go up an’ live with her just as soon as I get the thirty-five dollars for a Greyhound.”
Thomas brought Pedro down into the building and gave him candles that he’d taken from his father’s house.
“There rats in here?” Pedro asked, looking around suspiciously at the shadowy corners.
“Naw,” said Thomas. “There’s nuthin’ for rats to eat in 1 2 6
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here. As long as you don’t have any food there’s no rats or roaches. Just some spiders and moths and stuff.”
They settled in, and Pedro told Thomas about his sad life.
His mother’s family, who didn’t like his father, and his father, who was a good guy when he wasn’t high. And all the people who hated Pedro because he was a half-breed.
Thomas felt akin to the boy. He gave him a peanut butter sandwich that he’d made in his house. They talked for hours, until the school bell rang and Thomas had to go.
“When you coming back, Lucky?” Pedro asked his host.
“Not till tomorrow morning.” And he was off.
Wh e n Th omas g ot home, his house smelled of cooking.
“I’m makin’ chicken an’ dumplin’s,” May told him. “That’s your father’s favorite.”
The kitchen was spotless, and so were the living room and the hallway, Elton’s bedroom and May’s room too. She had picked up, swept, vacuumed, and scrubbed the whole house in the time Thomas was gone.
The cleanliness somehow elated the boy. He laughed and capered.
Later on May gave him string cheese and black cherry jam on dense pumpernickel bread. Then she made some not-too-sweet hot chocolate, and they sat at the table in the kitchen with her apologizing to him for the night she and Elton fought.
“You should never blame your father for that,” she said. “It was all my fault. A man can’t bear to hear about his woman bein’ off with another man. He got to do somethin’. He got to get mad.”
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Thomas was sitting on May’s lap when she told him this.
Then the front door could be heard banging open, followed by a man’s voice saying, “What the hell?”
Thomas leaped from May’s lap and ran to the back porch.
He jumped in the bed and hid his head under the pillow so as not to hear the yelling and crashing. He counted up to fifteen, and then he counted again. When he reached thirty and hadn’t heard a thing, he became even more
