The smile flickered from Margalo’s face. She narrowed her eyes and wrinkled her forehead, like someone working on a math problem. She was trying to place this kid with the baseball mitt. Then she remembered. Her forehead relaxed. Her smile did not return.
“You’re Margalo,” Nicky said stupidly. “Do you remember me? I’m …”
“I know who you are,” Margalo said softly. She took a deep breath. She locked her blue eyes on to Nicky’s face. She held out the Spaldeen. Nicky opened the glove. Margalo dropped the ball into the glove.
Nicky thought Margalo was waiting for him to say something.
So he said, “Nice day, isn’t it?”
She exhaled.
“I am a numbskull,” he thought.
Margalo said, “I better be going.”
Nicky didn’t say anything.
Margalo said, “You should get back to your game.”
“Game?”
Nicky followed her eyes as she lowered them to the baseball mitt, which held the Spaldeen. He said, “Oh, yeah. There’s no game. I was just playing with myself.”
“Numbskull, numbskull, numbskull,” he thought.
“Well, good-bye,” Margalo said. She edged backward, half turned away, all the while locking her blue eyes on to Nicky’s face.
She said, “Do you have any …” She blinked against the strands of hair in her eyes.
She pursed her lips.
“Good-bye,” she said, nodding firmly.
Nicky wiped his right hand across his shirt, adding a bright red smear of blood to the maroon smears, and waved meekly.
“My Goddess, what have you done to your hand?” Margalo gasped. She stepped quickly to Nicky. She looped her hair behind her ears. She cradled his wounded hand.
“It’s really bleeding. What did you do?”
“I fell,” Nicky said. “Making a catch. A diving catch. Think I hit some glass or something. It’s nothing.” He was trying to come across tough and stoic, a regular John Wayne. “I broke my ankle once, you know.”
“Dumb, dumb, dumb,” he thought. Nicky could feel his IQ plummeting in the presence of this girl.
Margalo pressed her fingers to his palm. Nicky winced and sucked in air.
“I think there’s glass in there,” Margalo said gravely. “Come with me. That might need a stitch or two. It surely needs cleaning out.”
Nicky withdrew his hand. “No, really, it’s nothing.”
“Don’t be silly. Come with me.” She moved toward the black iron gate to the Only House With Trees, motioning for Nicky to follow.
“You live here?”
“Yes, I live here. You didn’t know that?”
“Yeah, I knew that,” Nicky lied. He shrugged. He examined his hand. “I think I’ll just go home.”
“Look. My father is a doctor,” Margalo said, as if that settled that.
Nicky didn’t say anything.
“Please come with me,” Margalo said softly, sweetly, with a slight smile that gave a glimpse of perfect white teeth.
And that was that.
Nicky followed Margalo through the gate, past the tall, thick green hedges, onto a gray cobblestone path, into the grounds of the Only House With Trees. Nicky’s head swiveled as he walked toward the sprawling, clapboarded house. He passed a sundial; a gazebo; a wrought-iron black bench; a cement fishpond, drained and collecting orange leaves. There was a statue, right out in the open—a stone cherub playing a small harp near some bushes. Nicky passed under the trees. Tall, old, healthy trees with thick, corrugated trunks. Nicky gawked up at the canopies of lime green and orange and red.
The path led to a magnificent wooden door, high and wide with a brass knocker the size of Nicky’s head. The doorway was guarded on each side by stone lions as tall as Nicky. He looked at the stone lions. The lions looked back with suspicious eyes.
“We’ll go around to the kitchen,” Margalo said.
Margalo cut to the right. Nicky followed, sneakers crunching on a gravel path. He watched Margalo walk. Her hair was longer than last time he saw her—it reached halfway to her wide leather belt. A peace symbol was sewn onto the back pocket of her faded, flared jeans. He forced himself to look away from the peace symbol. He stared at the back of her head, at this young woman who smelled of green apple shampoo, the fourth thing that ruined his childhood.
They reached a short set of steps that led to a standard-sized door with a small, round window. Margalo pulled open the door. Nicky could not believe the door to this house in this neighborhood was left unlocked.
He followed Margalo through a darkened breezeway into an airy room. Margalo turned a switch and the room was bathed in soft, yellow light. It was a kitchen, roughly the size of the entire Martini apartment.
“Over here,” Margalo said.
Margalo walked Nicky to one of the sinks and pushed up a stainless-steel lever to turn on the water, which came on with a mighty rush. (The water here did not have to climb five stories to reach the faucet.) She tested the temperature with two fingers and turned down the water pressure. Margalo gently held Nicky’s slashed hand and guided it under the warm water. Nicky jumped at the sting, not wanting to jump. He watched the side of Margalo’s face as she examined his cut. He inhaled the scent of green apple in her hair.
“I think I have all the glass out of this,” she said. “I don’t think it needs stitches.”
Stitches—merely the sound of the word made Nicky queasy.
Margalo snapped a clean kitchen towel out of a drawer. She pressed the towel against Nicky’s palm.
“Hold that there,” she ordered. “I’m going to see if my father is home. He can take a look at this.”
Margalo left the room, moving deeper into the grand home, turning on lights as she went along.
A stately red dog trotted loftily into the kitchen. The dog sniffed Nicky’s ankles, nosed a water dish, and trotted out. The dog brushed past Margalo in the doorway.
“Martha,” Nicky said out loud.
“You have a good memory,” Margalo said. Now her hair was pulled into a ponytail. She said, “My father is not here.”
Nicky shrugged. “Thank you,” he said. He tried to think of something more to say. Something snappy and clever. But what? He and Margalo had one thing in common.
Nicky said, “Roy …”
“No,” Margalo said. She held up both hands, like a basketball player on defense. She averted her eyes, shook her head from side to side, ponytail wagging. “No, no, no, no.”
“No?” Nicky said.
“No.”
Nicky said, “But Roy …”
“NO,” Margalo said. She touched Nicky’s forearm. Her eyes were shiny.
“No,” she said, softly. “Please. No.”
Nicky shrugged. “Okay.”
“I can’t hear about Roy. I can’t hear how he is, what he is doing.”
Margalo drew in her bottom lip. Her eyes went somewhere far away. “I have not. We have not communicated, not since he left.”
“He hasn’t written you?”
“We have not communicated.”
“Oh,” Nicky said. “Oh. Well, if you care, he’s okay.”
“Enough,” Margalo said. She wiped the backs of her hands along both cheeks.
Nicky’s bottom lip stuck out. He was bewildered, and his customary response to bewilderment was retreat. He said, “I guess I better get home,” hoping she would beg him to stay.
“Yes, you had better,” Margalo said.
She walked Nicky out of the kitchen, through the breezeway, to the outer door. He stepped out into the evening, onto the gravel path. Margalo stood in the half-closed door.
“So long,” Nicky said.
Margalo said quietly, “Good-bye, Nicky.”
Nicky walked along the path, now lit by unseen amber lights. Dead leaves crackled beneath his sneakers. The door hinge squeaked behind him.
“You have no idea how much I care,” Margalo said softly, through the closing door.
Nicky hurried across Summit. He considered climbing the stairway to Groton Avenue, the shorter route home. But he felt the dull throb in his hand and thought better of it. The stairway lamplights were broken and the stairs were dark. Anybody could lurk there.
He was ten paces from Eggplant Alley when he heard a familiar truck engine and a familiar horn blast and a familiar voice that hollered, “Nicky, hey Nick-EE! Is that you? Thank God it’s you.”
Dad pulled alongside in the delivery van. He stopped in the middle of Summit, engine running. Dad crouched in the big doorway of the Yum-E-Cakes truck.
“Nicky, where in the name of Francis Albert Sinatra have you been? Are you trying to give us heart attacks? What’s that on your shirt? Is it paint? It looks like blood. What’s that on your hand? Are you all right? Don’t we have enough to worry about with Roy without you disappearing on us?”
Nicky stuck with the story that he was bouncing a ball against the PS 19 wall (which was true). And he lost the ball down Summit (which was sort of true). And he had lost track of time looking for the ball (which was pretty much untrue). And he sliced his hand on glass (which was true) while looking for the ball in the gutter (which was a lie). There was no way he would mention the twin evils of the hooligan mugger and the hippie Margalo. That would cinch it. His parents would never allow him out of the apartment again.
Nicky lay in bed that night, his hand aching, the scent of green apples in his nostrils. That girl had unnerved him. As he fell asleep, Nicky made a promise to himself. He promised that if Margalo came walking down the street toward him ever again, he would simply run away, as fast as his feet could carry him.