Miracle on 49th Street (3 page)

S
he called Sam from the parking lot.

He asked how it had gone. She told him, finally saying that maybe things could have gone worse than they actually did, but only if Josh Cameron had told her she was grounded and taken away her computer privileges before he made his getaway.

Sam said, “He really thought you had made it up?”

“About my mom being my mom? No. About him being my dad? Yes.”

“He's a freak.”

Freak
being one of Sam's favorite and most frequently used words. There were good freaks and bad freaks, depending on the situation. A mean teacher could be a freak. Bad. A rock star or a ballplayer or an actor on a TV show could be a freak. Good. Parents could go either way, depending on the situation.

“Get back here as soon as you can,” Sam said. “Before my mom gets home from Paper and Scissors.” It was the art class for little kids that Sam's mom taught a few days a week at the Boston Public Library on Boylston Street, a few blocks from where they lived.

Molly said, “Has anybody called?”

“No,” Sam said, “we're still good.”

“No Barbara, calling to see if I really went there after school?”

“It's insane,” Sam said. “She actually trusts you.”

“What happens if she does call?”

“I've got the ringer turned off on the phone and a message that says that my mom's at work and that Jill the hated housekeeper took us over to the Public Gardens for a game of catch.”

Sam refused, under penalty of torture, to ever refer to the hated Jill as a babysitter. He had told his mom he was twelve now and didn't need a babysitter. So here was the compromise: Jill's two days of cleaning the apartment were the two days that Emma would work in the late afternoon. But, officially, Jill was there to clean and not to watch Sam because that's what housekeepers who were
not
babysitters did.

“Catch?” Molly said. “As in baseball-like catch? As in you and me? There's a better chance of me trying to teach you cricket.”

“My feeling, as you know, is that if you're going to make something up, make it a whopper.”

“Yeah, with cheese,” Molly said. “We have never once played catch in the park. Trust me, I'd remember.”

“True,” he said. “But they don't know that. I kind of like having old Barbara think I'm a secret jock, even with this bod.”

Sam Bloom was basically shaped like a frog, although Molly would never tell him that. Somehow he seemed to get wider as he went from top to bottom. But to Molly, he was a fairy-tale frog who turned into a prince every time he opened his mouth and either smartened her up or made her laugh.

“I'm on my way,” Molly said.

“Hurry,” Sam said.

Molly said, “Yeah, I'll tell my limo driver to step on it.”

She had brought forty dollars of her secret money, just in case she missed one of the buses on the way home or took the wrong one and needed to call a cab. “If I don't mess up, I can be there in an hour.”

“If you're not, I'll stall somehow.”

“Sam Bloom?”

They both knew that when she went first name and last name on him, she was more serious than a trip to the dentist's.

“Yes?” he said, trying to sound innocent.

“One whopper a day is enough.”

“Mols, if I am forced to tell another lie, all I can tell you is that it will fit the occasion.”

“That's what I'm afraid of.”

“Let me ask you something,” he said.

Molly realized that just talking to him on her cell was making her feel a little better already. “Shoot,” she said.

“Who's got your back more than me?”

“No one,” Molly said.

The truth was, nobody besides Sam Bloom had her back at all.

The Evanses lived in an old brownstone on a narrow cobblestone street. The actual address was 1A Joy Street. Molly now found that funny, just not ha-ha funny. She had told Sam once that if she did find any real joy at 1A Joy Street that she wanted to figure out a way to send up a flare.

Sam's apartment, closer to Kenmore Square than it was to the Public Gardens, was about a twenty-minute walk away, down Beacon. His father worked for Bank of America and seemed to be traveling all the time. His mom kept busy by working two days a week at Paper and Scissors, and another two at an exercise place called Exhale near the Four Seasons Hotel. Sam said it was full of women trying to look like his mom.

Sam thought it was one of God's jokes that a woman as pretty and fit as Emma Bloom would have a “lump” like him for a kid.

“You're not a lump, and don't let me ever hear you say that again,” Molly told him. “One of these days everybody's going to see how great you truly are the way I do.”

Truly.

A Mom word.

Sam Bloom was alone way too much until Molly came to Boston and she and her mom took a two-bedroom sublet in the same building where the Blooms lived, thinking they could extend the lease but never even making it to the end of it….

Sam was waiting for her in the lobby of his building when Molly finally got there about six-thirty. He said that as soon as Jill the hated housekeeper finished talking to someone else from the Planet Ditz on her cell phone, she'd walk the two of them to Molly's.

“Does Jill even know I haven't been with you all this time?” Molly said.

“Just because there are so many things Jill doesn't know, you mean?”

“I was too polite to put it that way.”

“Jill barely knows I've been with me the last few hours,” Sam said.

Jill came downstairs when they buzzed her, doing what she did every single time she had to walk Molly home—acting as if they'd interrupted her in the middle of brain surgery.

“Let's get this over with,” Jill said. “I've got some calls to make.”

“There's people you know you
haven't
talked to yet today?” Sam said.

She gave him a look like he was a fly she couldn't swat.

“Love the orange streaks in your hair,” Molly said.

“What
ever
!”

That was pretty much it for conversation the rest of the way. Before Sam left Molly at the front door, he whispered, “I'll call you when I get home.”

Molly whispered back, “I don't think a lot is going to happen between now and then.”

“You never know,” Sam said.

Molly walked inside 1A Joy Street. Or 1A Joyless Street, which is the way she really thought of it. Not because of the Evanses. They seemed happy enough there and did their best to make Molly happy.

It just wasn't happening.

Barbara Evans was in the front hall, portable phone in her hand, looking totally bored at whatever she was hearing on the other end, making a spinning motion with her free hand like she wanted the other person to wrap things up sometime before Christmas.

When Molly walked in, Barbara looked as if the cavalry had just shown up.

“Listen, dear,” Barbara said into the phone, “Molly just showed up, so I've got to run. I'll call you about the book fair tomorrow.” After she clicked off, she said to herself, “Unless I change all of my phone numbers first.”

To Molly she said, “Have a good time at the park with Sam?”

“It's always a good day when I'm with Sam,” she said.

“Now, you know I
love
Sam Bloom,” Barbara said. “But I do wish you'd expand your range of friends.”

Molly said, “Why?”

“As a way of expanding your range of interests,” Barbara said, though she never really explained what those interests should be.

“I'm working on it,” Molly said.

“And you know that without forcing the
sister
thing on you”—she made little bracket marks around the word
sister,
the way she always did—“I would love it if you and Kimmy would spend a little more time together away from school.”

Kimberly Anne Evans. Bill and Barbara's twelve-year-old daughter. And only child in the house until Molly showed up.

Kimmy, Molly had to admit, had been pretty great about Molly rocking her world this way, even though deep down she had to have liked things a lot better the way they were when there was only one little girl at 1A Joyless Street.

“Kimmy and I are cool,” Molly said.

“I'm just going to assume that's a good thing.”

“It is.”

“Now, about dinner,” Barbara said.

It was a game they played almost every night, as if Molly was helping Barbara plan that evening's menu. She'd ask if such and such a dish was okay, and Molly would say fine.

“Pasta with broccoli all right, hon?”

“Fine.”

“We've got some new chocolate low-fat ice cream that tastes just like the real stuff for dessert.”

Barbara assumed that everybody in the world counted calories as ferociously as she did.

“Can't wait,” Molly said and started up the stairs just as Kimmy Evans came bursting through the front door the way she always did, as though she was about to tell you there was fire coming from an upstairs window.

Molly was halfway up the stairs to her room when she heard Kimmy say the following to her back:

“Molly Parker, I can't
believe
you got to watch Josh Cameron practice without me!”

I
t had never occurred to Molly that somebody else from their school—it was called the Prescott School, but Molly thought of it as the Precious School—would be at Celtics practice.

Or that if they
were
at practice, any of them would notice Molly underneath her Red Sox cap.

Except.

Except Andrew Safir's mom had taken him after school.

He had spotted Molly somehow, way at the top of the bleachers on the other side of the court. He'd tried to find her when it was time to go on the court for autographs, but she was gone.

When he'd gotten home, he'd called Paul Reilly.

Whose sister Caroline immediately instant messaged Kimmy Evans and asked why Molly had gotten to go watch the Celtics practice and she hadn't.

Which is why Molly stood there now in the Evanses' front hallway, having been told to march down those stairs right now, young lady, and was totally and screamingly busted.

“You went to see
Josh Cameron
?” Barbara said. “On your own? Without asking? Why in the world would you do something like that?”

“I wanted to tell him about Mom,” Molly said.

“You couldn't ask me to do it? This wasn't something you felt you even had to discuss with me?”

Molly said, “You knew him in college, too. I figured that if you thought it was important—telling him my mom had died—you would've done it already.”

It wasn't much, but it was all Molly had.

Kimmy had already gone to her room by this point, whispering, “I am soooooo sorry,” as she walked past Molly.

Just Barbara and Molly now, Barbara not even wanting to take the scene into the living room. She wanted to have it out right here and right now. Molly half expected cartoon smoke to start coming out of her ears any second.

“So there was no need, in your mind, for us to even talk about this.” Barbara hugged herself, like that was going to keep her from exploding all over the front hall. She started pacing in front of Molly, talking to herself as much as she was talking to Molly. “Good God. Josh Cameron.”

“You sound madder that it was him than you do that I went up there without telling,” Molly said.

Barbara stopped. “What does that mean?”

“It means I'm not sure what I'm in more trouble about,” Molly said.

“You're in trouble for all of it!” Barbara said, shouting now. “I'm angry about all of it.”

Molly had never seen her this angry about anything.

“I'm sorry,” Molly said. “If I had thought—”

“You didn't think, that's the problem,” Barbara said. “Did you?”

“I just saw where it was Kids Day at the Celtics practice place, and I couldn't take the chance you wouldn't bring me.”

“So now you make up the rules for yourself around here?”

“I thought you said you liked Josh Cameron when you were all in college?” Molly said.

“No, I don't recall as how I ever said that, exactly.”

“You weren't all friends?”

“He was your mom's boyfriend,” she said. “I was her best friend. Let's just say we all made that work until he—until your mom went away. I hate to even say this to you, but it's something you're going to understand a lot better when you're older.”

“So you
didn't
like him,” Molly asked.

“It wasn't that I didn't like him,” Barbara said. “I just didn't think he was right for your mom.” She shook her head now. “Why are we even talking about this? The issue isn't what I did or did not think of Mr. Josh Cameron. The issue is you, young lady.”

It was Molly's experience that “young lady” was never, ever good.

“I'm just trying to understand.”

Barbara said, “Understand this: You don't just follow the rules you like around here and then make up the rest on your own.”

Molly put her head down, wanting to get off the merry-go-round now, just wanting this to be over. She had known Barbara would rock her world once Kimmy spilled the beans. She just never expected it to be like this.

“Do you have anything else to say for yourself?” Barbara said now.

Molly shook her head.

Barbara said, “You've passed on your message to Josh Cameron. You've had your little adventure. Let's just have that be the end of it, please.”

Molly thinking: If it wasn't just the beginning.

But keeping her mouth good and shut.

“How did you get there, if you don't mind me asking?”

“Trains and buses,” Molly said. “If you can get around London on the tube, you can get to Waltham, believe me.”

“You know I'm going to have to tell Bill about this when he gets home.”

Her husband. He had a big job with a Tokyo bank based in Boston, and because of the huge time difference between Boston and Tokyo, it sometimes seemed to Molly as if he were working twenty-four hours a day. But he was nice to Molly when he was around, even if he didn't go out of his way, the way Barbara did, to make the whole situation at 1A Joyless seem completely wonderful and normal. Molly respected him for it, actually. He didn't try to play the part of her dad. He had told her that once, not long after her mom had died, stopping in her room before she went to bed.

“I can't be something I'm not,” he'd said. “So I'm not going to even attempt to be the father you never had. The best I can hope for is to be your friend.”

Molly said that was fine with her. It was the closest thing to a heart-to-heart talk they'd ever had. Ever since then, Molly always sort of thought that she and Bill Evans were pretty squared away on things.

She wasn't really his daughter.

She wasn't Barbara's daughter.

She wasn't Kimmy's sister.

That was the deal. And being a real family wasn't ever going to
be
the deal, no matter how hard Barbara tried.

“The two of us will decide what an appropriate response to this should be,” Barbara said. “It's not even this crazy…adventure. It's the lie, Molly. I just can't tolerate lying.”

“I know,” Molly said. “That's the part I'm sorriest about.”

Almost over now.

She even started inching back toward the stairs.

Barbara walked across the hall and gave Molly a hug, then quickly pulled back. “You're a member of this family now,” she said.

Now
there
was a whopper.

“I know,” Molly said.

“You're here because your mom and I both wanted you here,” Barbara said. “I promised her I would take care of you. But I can only do that if you let me.”

Molly looked down at her Converse basketball high-tops, the same ones Josh Cameron wore, with the green Celtics trim on them.

“It won't happen again,” she said.

Not exactly a whopper.

Maybe a chicken nugget.