Hit and Run (3 page)

“See you later, Mrs. Jhun,” I said.

“Jeez, what was that all about?” Vin asked when I finally crossed back over the street again.

“And
who
was that?” Sal asked.

“She was a friend of my mother's,” I said. “She's nice.”

“Speaking of nice,” Vin said. And he started talking about the girl of his dreams again.

Billy was sitting on the porch, drinking a beer, when I got home. Billy's on the small side, and skinny—mostly from not eating properly. His straw-colored hair was always flopping into his eyes. He had to shove it aside every few minutes with an almost permanently grease-blackened hand. The front of his jeans was also streaked with black, and there were black smudges on his T-shirt. The first time people met Billy, they always thought he was my big brother, not my uncle. He's only ten years older than me. He had been living with my mom when I was born and stayed with us until he turned eighteen, three years before Mom died. Mostly I thought of Billy as a brother, too—a big, messy, spoiled one. He was too lazy to bother much with being an authority figure.

I counted the empty beer bottles under his chair. “Tough day at the garage?” I said.

Billy's eyes were watery as he turned to look at me.

“You got that right, Mikey.”

My stomach rumbled. I'd had a doughnut and a carton of chocolate milk for breakfast and grabbed a burger and fries at Square Boy for lunch. But that was hours ago.

“Did you go grocery shopping, Billy?”

He gave me a look that said, Are you crazy?

“You're the one working at a grocery store.”

“Yeah, but you're the one with the money.”

Billy shot me another look. “I wish!”

I sighed. Things weren't looking promising. Again.

“So, you eaten or what?”

“I'm not hungry,” Billy said. “Besides, I'm going out. I'll grab something later.”

Great. My stomach was growling. And if Billy hadn't picked up any food, and if he was going out anyway, that meant that I was looking at a can of Beefaroni or some soup for supper, or, if I wanted to venture beyond heating and into cooking, scrambled eggs. I went inside, remembering how it used to be on Saturday nights or, even better, on Sunday nights, when I'd blow into the house after a day of football or road hockey or bike riding with Vin. I'd barrel into the front hall and my mouth would start watering as I inhaled the smell of a chicken roasting in the oven or cupcakes cooling on a rack on the kitchen counter.

My mom was a terrific cook. She didn't make buckets of money as a bookkeeper, but one thing I never had to worry about was being hungry. In summertime she
grew vegetables in the backyard. Only weeds grew there these days. She had a big freezer in the basement—empty now except for the plastic bags of ice that Billy liked to have on hand in case his friends wanted to party. Four years ago, though, it had been filled with vegetables Mom had grown and frozen, and with strawberries and raspberries from pick-your-own farms. She stocked up on chicken and ground beef whenever the stores ran specials. The same with bread. She made strawberry and blueberry and apple pies in batches and froze them. Boy, did I ever miss all that food. It sure wasn't the only thing I missed about her, but there were times when I would have given anything, anything at all, to be sitting down to her roast chicken and stuffing with homemade gravy, mashed potatoes, and peas.

Billy never cooked. His kitchen skills were limited to microwaving TV dinners and heating baked beans. Sometimes he even took them out of the can first. Sometimes he brought a girl home and sometimes the girl would cook something—maybe a batch of spaghetti and meat sauce or some fried chicken. But that was usually at the beginning, when the girl was trying to impress Billy. And usually the girl wasn't thrilled to find out that Billy was guardian to a fifteen-year-old nephew.

These days the fridge usually held more beer than food. But if Billy missed Mom's cooking, he never said so.

I opened the fridge. There was nothing inside. Well, nothing except a margarine tub that might or might not have any margarine in it, a carton of milk—I hefted it,
it felt close to empty—a couple of wilted carrots in the bottom shelf, a half-full jar of strawberry jam (which only made me think of the freezer jam Mom used to make), a shaker container of parmesan cheese, a couple of grayish pickles in a jar that I knew for a fact no one had touched in months—maybe even years. Not exactly the makings of supper.

I closed the fridge and opened a cupboard. Sugar Pops. I shook the box. Half full. A jar of now-completely-scraped-out peanut butter. A box of crackers. And a bunch of cans—Beefaroni, baked beans, spaghetti, peaches (Billy loved canned peaches in heavy syrup a million times more than fresh peaches). Vinegar. Dried spaghetti. A jar of no-name spaghetti sauce.

I took out the spaghetti and the spaghetti sauce and put some water on to boil. Twenty minutes later, just as I was ladling sauce over a plate of spaghetti and getting ready to shake some Parmesan over it, Billy appeared, sniffing the air.

“Hey, that smells good,” he said, hooking the plate out of my hand.

I served out another plate of food for myself, followed Billy to the front porch, and sat down on a folding chair beside him.

“You don't want to buy groceries, that's fine,” I said. “Just give me some money and I'll pick up some stuff. I could make a meat sauce. Maybe some sausages. Or chicken. You like chicken, right? I can fry some for us, maybe make some mashed potatoes.”

Billy grinned at me as he scarfed down his food.

“You're going to make some girl a nice wife one day,” he said.

“Earth to Billy, get with the times. Men cook too. The chefs at all the best restaurants are men.”

“I hate cooking,” Billy said. He looked mournfully at his empty plate. “Anymore in the pot?”

I shook my head.

“Yeah, well, I'm going out anyway. I'll get something to eat later.”

He set his plate on the porch and got up to go inside.

“Hey, put your plate in the sink,” I called. Too late. The screen door banged shut behind him. A few moments later he returned, flipping the cap off another beer bottle.

“You seen the toolbox lately?” I asked.

“It's probably in the basement,” he said. You asked Billy where anything was and he always said the same thing—probably in the basement. “Why?”

“Mrs. Jhun tripped on one of her front steps today. I'm going to fix it for her.”

Billy made a sour face. “What do you care about that old woman for? Jeez, I bet she doesn't speak decent English yet. None of those people do.” It drove Billy crazy when people came here from other countries and had the nerve to speak their own language. Everyone should learn English, he said. They shouldn't even be allowed in here until they could speak the language. To hear him, you'd think that learning a new language was
the easiest thing in the world. Billy's only attempt to learn another language was the French that he had to take in school. Mom told me that he had failed it every year he took it. It was part of the reason he never graduated. The rest of the reason was that he had failed math, science, English, and almost every other subject that was required. Billy always said he didn't care. He always said he made a good living as a garage mechanic—which was why we lived in the palace that we did. He always said that one day he was going to have his own garage.

“She speaks English just fine,” I told him. “And she was a friend of Mom's.” Like I had to explain to him. “And I feel sorry for her.”

Billy gave me another sour look. “Awww, you feel sorry for her,” he said. “And why is that? Because her husband was a complete idiot?” Billy had a list of reasons for this opinion. Mr. Jhun should have called the police when he heard something in his restaurant instead of going downstairs to investigate himself. Mr. Jhun shouldn't have kept so much money around his place. Mr. Jhun kept a good luck charm near his cash register—that always got a big laugh from Billy. “A good luck charm in a dump of a place on this part of Danforth,” Billy would say. “Jeez, doesn't the guy realize that all the really good restaurants are a couple of subway stops west of here?”

“The old lady's no genius herself, either,” he said now. “She didn't even have the sense to stay with her own people.”

“Shut up, Billy,” I said.

“Aw, poor Mikey.”

I stood so fast that I toppled the chair and stepped on the plate Billy had left on the floor. It cracked under my weight. I glowered at Billy, then kicked the stupid plate. It sailed out into the middle of the yard. When it landed on the hard-packed weed bed that Billy called a lawn, it broke into half a dozen pieces.

“Temper, temper, Mikey,” Billy said.

I felt like decking him. Instead I went out into the yard and picked up the pieces of plate. Dan and Lew showed up just as I was about to dump them in the garbage can at the side of the house. Dan Collins and Lew Rhodes were Billy's closest friends. Lew worked at the same garage as Billy and had a thing for Marilyn Monroe—don't ask me why; she had died way before he was born. But that didn't stop him from worshipping her. His favorite T-shirt had Marilyn's face on the front. A plastic Marilyn key chain dangled from the rearview mirror in his car. He had no luck at all with real women, though, according to Billy. Dan was different. I wasn't 100 percent sure what Dan did. If you asked him, he'd just say “This and that,” and flash you his movie-star smile. Billy said that Dan made out like a bandit with women on account of that smile. Women loved Dan, he said. Mom never had, though. I thought Dan and Lew were okay. True, you pretty much had to roll Billy, Dan, and Lew together to get a high school diploma, but they were doing just fine. All three of them had decent jobs,
they made decent money, they could always find a party, and they were a lot of fun.

“Hey, Mikey, how's it going?” Dan said. He grabbed me around the neck and knuckled my head. He'd been doing that forever, and he always laughed when he did it. He looked at the pieces of plate in my hand. “When they say flying saucer, they don't mean that kind of saucer,” he said. “Those babies don't fly at all, last I checked.”

“Still in school, kid?” Lew said. He'd been asking me that for the past month.

“He's only fifteen,” Billy called from the porch. “If he doesn't go to school, I'm the one who gets in trouble.”

“Billy in trouble?” Dan said. “Been there, done that, huh?”

The three of them went inside.

I picked up my plate and Billy's empties and took them into the kitchen. After that I rooted around in the basement until, miracle of miracles, I found the toolbox. By the time I was ready to go, the guys were all on the porch again.

“We're going out,” Billy said.

“You want to come with us?” Dan said. “I know this girl. She's got a kid sister. Really cute. Be just right for you.”

“He's already got a girl,” Billy said. He meant Jen. “And she's rich.”

In unison, Dan and Lew gave me a thumbs-up.

“You're going to be cool, right?” Billy said.

He asked the same thing every time he went out. If I had said something like, No, I'll probably burst into
flames if you leave, Billy would have done the same thing he did now. He grinned and started to turn before I could even nod. A split second later the door clicked shut. I sure wished I could have gone with them. I wished I could have gone
anywhere
, with
anyone
. Instead I grabbed the toolbox and headed over to Mrs. Jhun's house. On the way, I stopped at a hardware store to pick up a piece of wood.

Up until he was killed when he discovered a burglar in his place one night, Mrs. Jhun's husband ran a restaurant on Danforth Avenue five minutes from my house. It was one of those places that served Chinese and Korean food together with steaks and burgers—something for everyone. No matter which kind of food you ordered, the meals were always good. A visit to Mr. Jhun's restaurant was our end-of-the-week treat. By Friday night, Mom would say she was “all kitchened out.” She'd change out of her work clothes, we'd walk up to Mr. Jhun's place, and Mom would order stuff like steamed vegetables and rice. I mostly stuck to chicken fingers and fries, although I had to admit, I liked what Mr. Jhun did with egg rolls and wontons. Mom was a bookkeeper—a job I didn't understand until after she died. I thought it was something like a librarian. Mostly she worked in an office downtown, but she also did work on the side to pick up extra cash. Mr. Jhun was one of her clients.

When I showed up at Mrs. Jhun's house with my tools and my piece of wood, she looked so happy to see me that I thought maybe she hadn't understood me when I said I was coming back. Or maybe she hadn't believed me. She looked a lot better than she had that afternoon. She insisted on making tea and giving me something to eat before I started working. That was fine with me. I liked the kind of tea Mrs. Jhun made, and she served it with walnut cakes that didn't just taste like walnuts, they were actually shaped like walnuts. She told me that they were like Korean doughnuts—everyone there ate them. I could understand why. They were delicious.