by Jack Gantos
“How much are you paying?” I asked.
“Your next meal,” he replied abruptly, definitely not sounding like he had a pot of gold.
“Do I want fries with that?” I shouted to the shiny funhouse image of myself in the chrome paneling. “Why, yes I do!” I replied just as loudly. “Golden fries!”
“By the time I count to three,” he threatened, holding up three fingers. “One, two …” But then he quickly lowered his hand and buttoned his lip because Mom showed up.
“Hi, boys,” she said, smiling widely as she pushed through the swinging kitchen door. The lottery tickets swirled about her legs as she spun in a circle like a freshly perfumed fashion model. “How do you like my new maternity outfit?” She had on a pair of turquoise stretch pants and a fluffy pink sweater, which was short-waisted and exposed her swollen belly.
“Can you pull your sweater down?” I asked. “Everyone can see the tattoo around your belly button.” I never liked the lacey red words circling the rim of her belly button: Press here for more options. Last year she ordered me to do my homework and I gave her belly button a good poke and squawked, “What’s my next option?” In about two seconds I was locked in my bedroom with my homework.
“I happen to think this is a good look for me,” she said, tugging her sweater back down as she gave me a cross look.
Then she turned to Dad. “What’s your opinion?” she asked.
“You are my especial fashionista,” he exclaimed with his big eyes flashing up at her. “Now, come here,” he said sweetly, “and let me rub your tummy for good luck. Maybe you’ll be my Aladdin’s lamp and little Heinzie will pop out of your mouth like a genie and grant me three wishes.”
“Well, if that happens,” Mom said, adjusting her hair with nails that were shaped like pink hearts, “he’ll be my genie and those wishes will get me out of this”—she waved around at the diner as she searched for the right words—“this tin hot dog.”
“Let me rub your belly for luck anyway,” Dad cooed, “and I’ll send Joey out to buy a lottery ticket for tonight’s drawing.”
She inched forward on her high heels, and as soon as his open hand touched her belly he jerked back with a sudden inspiration. “Mercy!” he shouted as he slapped at the table for a scrap of paper, and with his eyes closed he furiously wrote down a string of numbers. When he opened his eyes he held up the paper and gave it a kiss. “The jolt I got just now,” he announced to us, “is exactly the same feeling I had when I won the big money that changed my life.”
“You’d better be right,” Mom said with a straight face, “otherwise you are acting pretty weird.”
Dad folded the little piece of paper up in a ten-dollar bill then leaned forward and seized my open hand by the wrist. As he closed my fingers over the paper ball he sang to Mom, “He’s got the tiny little baby in his hands, he’s got you and me baby in his hands, he’s got the whole world in his hands.”
I smiled. Granny always sang me that song when we curled up on the couch and took a nap together.
“Now don’t forget to buy that ticket with those exact numbers,” Dad reminded me. “In your hands could be the front door key to our new castle.”
“Yes, don’t forget,” Mom echoed as she picked dog hair off her sweater.
“Don’t worry,” I promised them, heading over to the house to get dressed. “I’ve got the whole world in my hands.”
As I walked down the highway toward the cemetery I kept feeling for the little paper that Dad had written his numbers on. My fingers sorted through the cigarette butts and bottle caps and crinkly candy wrappers in my pocket until I felt the ten-dollar bill all folded up in a tight square.
Just before I reached the cemetery I passed by the neighborhood discount store and saw a stack of boxes. There was a big one that had been used to pack plastic Santas you could plug in and light up in your yard. The wind had been blowing harder and I figured the cemetery would be cold, so I grabbed the box and carried it over my head like an upside-down canoe.
By the time I got to Granny’s grave the sky was overcast and I thought it might snow. Her stone was easy to find because it was a red granite stone another family had ordered for some other dead person but then they never picked it up. Who knows what happened? But because it had someone else’s name on it we could buy it at a “used” discount. The tombstone store chiseled off the old name and then flipped the stone around and carved PETUNIA ROSE PIGZA on the reverse side. I didn’t even know that was her full name until I first saw the stone. I only knew her as Granny Pigza.
I dropped the box down over the tombstone and climbed under. It was less windy but dark. I found a sharp rock and scratched on the cardboard until I carved out a small window. That’s when I discovered Dad had visited, too. He had taken some metal tool and scratched lines over Granny’s real name and had roughly etched in ELIZABETH PATRICIA HEINZ. I imagined Granny looking up through that stone as if it were her periscope on the world, and it was as if he had scratched her eyes out. I just hoped he hadn’t dug up her jar of ashes and transferred them into a ketchup bottle.
With my gloved hands I rubbed the stone up and down and knocked off all the bird mess and dirt that was stuck to it. Even though she was a few feet under the ground I felt we were connected. She was born a Pigza and died a Pigza. “You’ll always be the same Granny to me,” I said with my hands on either side of the stone as if I were holding her by the shoulders. “And I’ll always be Joey to you.”
Then I got to work. First I used spit and dirt to make cement and smoothed out the scratches Dad made. Then I pulled out all the supplies from my pockets and made a pile of cigarette butts, bottle caps, and colorful paper. I held the can of spray paint inside my jacket to keep it warm and took out the tube of glue.
“Someday,” I said to her, “I’m going to be buried next to you, jar to jar. You never ran off. You never changed who you were. You were always proud of yourself no matter what.”
Already I felt better. Talking to her was almost like old times except she wasn’t telling me to shut up like she did even when I was saying sweet things to her. I began to glue the cigarette butts end to end until I had the outline of a Christmas tree. Then I glued bottle caps on the tips of the branches, and folded up a red foil candy wrapper into a star for the top. It started to look pretty good but not as good as the tree Granny and I dragged home a few years ago. We got it for free because it was the night before Christmas and the tree sellers allowed anyone to have what was left in their parking lot. We didn’t have much to decorate it with because she had stored the tree decorations in a place she couldn’t remember. But then she had a stroke of genius. Since we had a dozen honey-glazed doughnuts we bought for Christmas morning breakfast, we stuck those on the branches. That was such a good idea that we raided the kitchen for other food we could turn into ornaments.
“We’ll have a few rules,” she insisted. “Nothing that will rot and smell, like sardines or strips of bacon.”
“Darn,” I said, and put the sardines back in the cupboard.
“No baloney,” she said.
“But Swiss cheese would work,” I pointed out, “because of the holes.”
“Okay,” she said hesitantly. “As long as you eat it in the morning with the doughnuts.”
That sounded good to me. She hung dry egg noodles on the ends of branches like curly icicles. In the back of a cupboard I found a baggie full of Cheerios that Granny said must have been “nasty old” because she used to bag them up for me to snack on when I was a toddler. She dug out some fuzzy LifeSavers from the bottom of her purse and I uncovered a tin of stale hot-mustard pretzels above the refrigerator. Granny topped it off with some balls of aluminum foil and pressed some gummy bears onto the sharp pine needles. When we were finished it wasn’t too bad-looking, and on Christmas morning we had plenty to pick and eat as we opened our presents, although the Swiss cheese got stiff and curled up.
I finished decorating the tombstone with the spray paint.
I pushed the box off so I could breathe and sprayed the decorations and the whole stone silver. It looked really beautiful. Then I pulled the box back down. Finally I reached into a secret zipper pocket inside my jacket and pulled out a small package. “Here is your Christmas gift,” I said, and placed it under the tree. It was an almost-full pack of real cigarettes I’d found in Dad’s dresser. I wanted to get her the chewing gum he used that helps you to stop smoking, but since she was already dead I thought she might as well get what she really wanted.
She always did the same for me. Each year Granny gave me a piece of paper and told me to write down what it was that I wanted for Christmas. “Just one thing,” she insisted. “You might luck out and get more than one, but you are not allowed to be greedy because some kids get none—so one is all you should expect.”
And each year I wrote down just one thing and it always turned up under the tree, just as she said it would. This year all I wanted from her was advice. I pulled a little paper out of my pocket.
“I only have one thing on my list,” I said. I opened it up and read, “Should I forgive him?” Then I folded the piece of paper up and tucked it under her gift.
“What do you think of that?” I said out loud. “I think that if I do it he’ll have all the power because then he won’t need me for anything else. What do you think?”
And then it was as if her voice rose up in me and I could hear her. “You got it all backwards,” she said in that smoky, harsh voice of hers. “He’ll get tired of waiting for you to forgive him and after a while he won’t care what you do. But if you forgive him, then it will put you in control. Think about it,” she said. “Who is the bigger person? The one who can forgive or the one who can’t?”
Just that one thought felt like a new beginning. She was right. It always made you stronger to be the “bigger” person.
“I have to go now,” I said to her. I leaned forward and gave the stone a kiss. It was as cold as the last time I kissed her cheek. “I miss you,” I said quietly. “I’m sorry all that smoking did you in. But I guess we have that in common, too, because now I have to send Joey up in smoke and become that other kid.”
When I crawled out from under the box the weather had changed. It was spitting snow. I looked across the cemetery at all the gloomy, slump-shouldered tombstones. It didn’t seem right how the living made the dead look so defeated. Just because a person’s life was over didn’t mean they ever regretted being alive.
For a moment I stood there like a rewed-up car out of gear. This was one of those moments when I wished I was my old hyper self again and could go darting between the stones as if outrunning my thoughts. Now I try to think everything through, and when I can’t seem to find answers to what I want to do next, or say next, or even think next, I feel just as dumb and dead inside as one more cold stone. That’s how I felt with the snow coming down. All my thoughts looked as if they were nothing but silent dots of snow falling from the sky.
I turned and looked one more time at Granny’s holiday stone. She may have been dead but her memory was alive. “Merry Christmas,” I said in a voice cheerful enough to make both of us feel better. “You are my tombstone fashionista!”
Then my gears began to shift and slowly I turned and walked away, pulling the box behind me until I came to the fence behind our old house where I dropped it. Through the curtained windows I could see moving shadows of the new renters inside. To me they looked like shadow puppets of our old selves and I tried to imagine what they might be saying, but the conversations between Mom and Dad didn’t always make me feel good so I just left.
I went out the cemetery gate and walked over to the Turkey Hill Mini Mart. As soon as I walked in I began to laugh because there was a display of Heinz ketchup. “Hi, brother,” I said to a bottle, and slapped it a high five. I knocked it off the shelf and had to catch it before it hit the floor. After I put it back I settled down and gave the cashier the ten dollars and a piece of paper with the numbers Dad wanted to play.
“You have to be eighteen to play the lottery,” he said, pointing to a sign next to the machine.
“I am eighteen,” I said. “My growth is stunted because of my mom and dad.”
“I hear you,” he said, and smiled. Then he took my money and punched in the numbers.
When the cashier handed me the tickets I shoved them into my pocket. Buying the tickets was the last thing I had to do but I really didn’t want to go home.
For a while I just walked around the neighborhood, passing all the places where I grew up and knew so well. It was pretty clear to me that I was someplace between leaving Joey behind, forgiving Carter, and becoming Freddy—but I didn’t know where that place was until I walked back along highway 30 and returned to the diner. I stood there and looked at it, trying to imagine how it would look when Dad finally got around to getting a proper sign and giving it the bee-color paint job. The lights were off. Snow had gathered along the top like the white on a skunk’s tail. And then I walked right up to the back side of it and pulled out my spray can and with the little bit left inside I just managed to write out, I AM NOT JOEY PIGZA.
The last dying hiss of the spray can was like the air going out of Joey. I guess that was his last gasp.
10
PAINT-BY-NUMBERS CHRISTMAS
After putting Joey into hibernation, I woke up each morning and made up who I was. I opened my eyelids and imagined my eyeballs flashing wildly in my head like tumbling lotto numbers, and when they stopped my best qualities might have won out and I could rise out of bed like the sweetest boy in the world, or my worst qualities might have gotten lucky and turned me into a crazy kid who banged around the house like a chicken with its head cut off just as Granny said. It was hard to tell who I’d be until I got going, and the best part was that no matter what happened, it was Freddy who was responsible. Joey was definitely off the hook.
On Christmas morning it was no different. I opened my eyes and just felt the good kid in me had hit his numbers. I had that winning feeling running through my body. I woke up before Mom and Dad, but instead of jumping from my loft I quietly slinked down my ladder without sneaking a look toward the predecorated Christmas tree Mom had bought at a United Way fundraiser. Since Dad and I had thrown away all our old Pigza tree decorations, Mom said she was now building “the new Heinz Family collection of keepsakes.” I slipped outside and trotted through the frosty air over to the diner. “Freddy is very quiet today,” I whispered to myself.
Out in the diner I got the griddle turned up and started the coffee then mixed up a batch of pancake batter. I put the bacon on and poured the maple syrup into a stainless pitcher and heated it up. “Freddy is a very organized fellow,” I said with my chin held high.
I set out two trays for the platters of food and coffee cups and plates and utensils and napkins. Then it occurred to me, “Freddy is forgetting the little four-legged creatures.” I tossed a couple of hot dogs on the griddle for El Gordo and Quesadilla. “So far, so good,” I said to myself.
Once I had the pancakes made and everything ready, it took me two trips to carry the trays across to the dining room in the house. By then Mom was up and had plugged in the thousands of sparkling white star lights so that the tree glittered as if it were dipped in diamond dust. She was sorting gifts and doing some final arranging around the tree as she hummed along with a tiny musical ornament that played “Jingle Bells.”
“Merry Christmas!” I yelled over at her.
She turned and smiled back. “Merry Christmas to you, sweetie,” she sang, and from that perfect moment on it was as if we were living out some happy-family Christmas play where we all knew our parts by heart.
“I have breakfast,” I announced, pointing to the trays. “See?”
“Freddy, you are an angel. Get me a cup of coffee and I’ll wake Charles up,” she said. “But no peeking, okay?”
“Okay,” I said as joyfully as one of Santa’s helpers, then began to pick up the tune from “Jingle Bells” wh
ile I set the table.
It didn’t take long for Dad to join us. He looked a little tired, as if he’d been up all night cleaning each little light on the tree while counting them for some lottery-number scheme. “Did Santa visit?” he asked, tying his robe around his waist. At that moment we all locked eyes onto the tree. Santa had been very generous. There were packages stacked up as tall and wide as the Great Wall of China, and nailed onto the old barn beam over the window were three long red stockings, each one looking as full and lumpy as a snake that had swallowed a zoo.
“Wow,” I said. “What a haul.”
“Looks like Santa didn’t save anything for other people,” Dad remarked.
“Santa went on a shopping spree,” Mom said, perky and full of joy. “Santa was having a very good year!”
“Freddy, bring the trays over by the tree,” Dad suggested. “We’ll eat under the stars and rip open some gifts.”
We did just that. First we started with the stockings. I got a pair of fuzzy slippers and a new wallet for all the money I was going to make, and a cookbook on how to whip up world-famous diner food and another book titled Homeschooling for Dummies. Dad got a crystal ball that you stared into and it magically revealed answers to your questions, and he got a set of tarot cards to predict the future and a guide to palm reading with one free palm-reading session with a real Gypsy. Mom got a carved monkey-paw back scratcher, a pair of noise-blocking headphones, and lots of skintoning lotion. We took a break to eat and then, at Mom’s request, we started working through that solid wall of gifts from her and Santa.
Out of soft packages and hard boxes came shoes, socks, underwear, T-shirts, belts, pants, shirts, sweaters, jackets, coats, gloves, hats, scarves, handkerchiefs, and more. At first it was fun to imagine wearing all new things but then it seemed odd because Mom got me and Dad the exact same things. The colors, the brands, the styles were exactly alike. Freddy didn’t know what to say. Dad was smiling from ear to ear, and then Mom said, “You two boys have so much in common.”