“I mean…”
“Never mind. I’ll just lie here all day, perfecting my sarcophagus imitation.”
Hurt, Mo turned toward the door.
“Please,” added Mercedes, “could you kindly take that stink bomb with you?”
Stepping onto Da’s porch, the first thing Mo saw was Mrs. Steinbott standing on her lawn clutching her big pruning shears. What if she concluded Mo was stealing the wonderful present for herself? She might call the police, which she regularly did on the Baggott boys. Or attempt to stab Mo through the heart with those colossal shears, the way she’d once dispatched a UPS driver who got the wrong address. People said.
Mo slid the pink jar into the top of her shorts and pulled her T-shirt over it. As she crossed the street, Pi Baggott rumbled up on his board.
“Wazzup.” His skin was a map of scars and scrapes. His full name was Pisces, but instead of a fish, he longed to be a bird. No matter how often he wiped out, he was back on that board, trying to fly.
Speaking of boards.
“You got a new one,” she said.
Pi was the kind of person who always had something in his hands, something he was fixing or improving. While Mo could never stop considering and wondering and stewing over life’s endless complications, Pi inhabited a fret- free zone. Not that he was thoughtless. Just that the part of him that did his thinking seemed to be located in his hands, not his brain.
“I found it down the ravine. I can’t believe what people throw away. All it needed was new wheels.” He flipped it over to show her how he’d removed the axle nuts and replaced the old wheels with shining new ones. He’d scraped off the old decals, too, and sanded it smooth as glass.
“It’s better than new,” Mo said.
“Try it.” He set it at her feet and held out his hand. “I’ll hold that.”
“What?”
“Whatever you’re smuggling under your shirt.”
By now Mrs. Steinbott was beckoning impatiently from her porch.
“You!” she called. “Get over here!”
“Hey,” said Pi. “Is that bloodsucker bothering you? Want me to hose her for you?”
“It’s okay.”
“Just let me know.” He jumped back on his board. “Or if you ever want to borrow my board.”
“Skateboarding’s not for me.”
Pi looked puzzled. “How do you know that?” He rolled away, popping a smooth, sweet ollie.
“You!” repeated Mrs. Steinbott. She leaned over her porch railing. Mo crossed her arms over the bulge beneath her shirt. “What did she say?”
“She said…wow. She’d never seen the like.”
Mrs. Steinbott continued to fix Mo with an expectant look, as if there must be more.
“She said…” For some unearthly reason, Mo longed to tell her crazy neighbor whatever it was she longed to hear. If only she could guess what that might be. From the foot of the steps she gazed up while Mrs. Steinbott gazed down, the two of them yearning toward each other, their longings crisscrossing above the glorious, indifferent roses.
“She liked it,” Mrs. Steinbott prompted.
Mo clutched the jar with one hand and slid the other behind her back, crossing her fingers. “She really did.”
Mrs. Steinbott nodded. Exactly the answer she’d been looking for. Settling back in her chair, she picked up her knitting needles and commenced clicking away, her eyes on Da’s front porch, as if it were an empty stage and she were waiting for the play to begin.
Magic Hands
“MO!”
Mrs. Petrone, power-walking past, paused to unhook the earbuds of her iPod. She was always testing new beauty products on herself, and today her hair was gelled up into a sort of picket fence. In the heat, her round face was shiny and pink as her track pants.
“Isn’t it about time for a visit to my shop?” The way she eyed Mo’s hair, Mo knew it wasn’t really a question.
The next thing Mo knew, she was in Mrs. Petrone’s kitchen, which smelled like strong coffee and coconut shampoo, not to mention was delectably air-conditioned. For as long as Mo could remember, Mrs. Petrone had cut her hair. Her cheery kitchen had shelves full of cookbooks and a special album of cards and letters from the grateful families of people whose hair and makeup she’d styled at the House of Wills. “You made Grandma resemble an angel,” one letter said. “We hardly recognized Uncle George, and that is a total compliment,” read another.
“Business is slow,” she told Mo, lining up her bottles and combs and scissors. “People don’t die in the summer if they can help it. Winter, that’s a different story.”
When she washed your hair, Mrs. P was more or less a hypnotist. You never had to be nervous she’d dig into your scalp, or tug too hard, or do anything but massage firmly yet gently, so before you knew it, she’d thrown you into a sort of trance.
“
She didn’t ask Mo how she wanted her hair cut. She knew-not too short, not too long, just right. Mo’s eyes drifted shut. The chair cupped her like a big, warm hand. Mrs. Petrone talked and talked, her voice a lullaby. Murmuring how when she was a young girl, her hair was so long she could sit on it, how every night her mother brushed it one hundred strokes, how those were some of the happiest moments of her life.
“That was a lifetime ago, but I remember it like it happened yesterday,” she said. “But oh, don’t ask me where I put my keys!”
She set down her scissors and pulled the lid off a big red tin on the counter. A plate of golden pizzelles, dusted with sugar, appeared on the table in front of Mo. The cookies were thin and crisp, fragrant with vanilla. All at once, Mo felt sick.
“Go on-I remember how you like them.”
But here Mrs. Petrone remembered all wrong. Mo could no more eat a pizzelle than a fried worm. Just the sight of one filled her ears with the terrible wrenching wail of sirens.
Sirens! They blared on Paradise all the time. Mo had hardly noticed them that summer afternoon. She’d been too happy, thinking of ice cream, imagining her mother’s smile when she saw the rocks Mo had collected.
That was almost the worst part. It was too terrible to think that she’d heard those sirens and never guessed. Heard them and ignored them, blissful and ignorant as a baby. That afternoon, someone drew a cruel line down the center of the world and left Mo on the wrong side.
Now she gripped the arms of her chair.
“Dottie’s the one who loves pizzelles,” she managed to say.
“Dottie looks more like your mother every day. That head of hair, wild and red as a little fox!”
Mo couldn’t remember how she and Dottie had wound up at Mrs. Petrone’s that afternoon-had their father brought them here, after the hospital called? Had Mrs. Petrone come and fetched them, squashing Dottie to her big, cushiony chest? Sometimes Mo thought that, if only he’d brought them to Da’s instead, things would have turned out differently. Da would have warded It off, she’d never have allowed It to cross her threshold.
But Da’s husband had died. Her daughter had gone away and not come back. Four of her toes had wound up in the hospital incinerator. Maybe even Da couldn’t have protected them.
“You bring that little sister over, and between the two of us we’ll hold her down and give her a nice cut.”
Dottie hadn’t understood. She’d watched cartoons till her eyes fell out and eaten one pizzelle after another, scattering sugary golden crumbs everywhere. Mo had sat frozen on Mrs. Petrone’s scratchy living-room couch, the
