The Big One-Oh (11 page)

“Mmm,” Garry confirmed. “Scars. And a large stab wound. Who knows?” he shrugged. “Maybe I'll finally scare someone.”

Mom nodded slowly as she backed away, “Oh. Okay. Well, good luck with that.” And then she went into our house.

“I thought that went well,” I said to Garry.

“Y'think?”

“Yeah. At least up to the part about the stab wound.”

As soon as I got into the house, Mom made me sit down at the kitchen table and write out a list of the people I had invited to my party.

“Seven,” I said as I finished. “That's not a lot.”

She wagged her head as she looked over the list. “I just wish you had talked to me before you did this.” Then she looked up. “But the cat's out of the bag, so we'd better get cracking. Did we decide on a theme? Because the last I heard, it was cowboys, and . . .”

“No!” I stopped her. “Not cowboys.”

“Then what?”

I hesitated. Something told me that I couldn't just blurt out about the House of Horrors.

“There are . . . several ideas on the table,” I said carefully.

“Get rid of all but one,” she said. “And then go see Vince.”

Uh-oh.

“Can't I go to another cake store?”

“Do you know how much he's saving us by doing your cake?” Mom said sharply. But she could tell that I was upset, so she pulled out a chair and sat down with me.

“Look, Charley. I know how you feel about Vince. But he's just a lonely, divorced man, looking for a friend. Like I am. Offering to make your cake . . . that's just his way of reaching out. So. Will you go see him?”

Mom tilted her head in that way that says,
“Please?”
So I nodded.

“Thank you,” Mom whispered. She stood, kissed me on the forehead, and started out of the kitchen.

I stopped her with, “See? Garry's not so creepy.”

She took a breath and held it as she tried to decide what to say. “Honey. He made a nice gesture. But he's still a profoundly strange man.” Then she left.

But I smiled. Because I could tell that she wasn't scared of Garry anymore.

Not like before.

 

 

“If I had money, I would go to some bakery where they didn't know me and order the cake I want,” I was saying to Garry that evening. I had seen him out in his backyard, washing the tools that he uses to make his
effects,
so I went outside and climbed onto the roof of Boing Boing's doghouse.

I know, I know. Mom had said that she didn't want me going over to Garry's. But she didn't say I couldn't talk to him over the fence.

“But this guy . . . Vince?” Garry was saying as he hosed off his gear. “Maybe he's tired of cowboy cakes, too. Maybe he'll like your theme.”

“But what if he
hates
my theme, and he calls Mom, and she says ‘no'?”

“When were you planning to tell her?” Garry asked.

I hadn't even thought of that. “I don't know, I don't know!” I wailed as I shook my head in despair. “Why is life so hard?”

Garry snickered.

“No, really!” I insisted. “I'm afraid to tell Mom. I'm afraid to tell Vince. Maybe I should just forget the whole thing.”

“Don't!” Garry said quickly. He looked me in the eye. “Do
not
let fear rule your life, Charley. I made that mistake.”

“When you quit?” I asked.

“When I . . .
left,
” he said softly, and then he looked away.

Even in the fading evening light, I could see that Garry was thinking about North Carolina again, so I jumped down off Boing Boing's roof and left Garry alone with his thoughts.

Once I finished my homework that evening, I got down on the floor of my room and, from under my bed, I pulled out the plastic storage bins containing my collection of
Monsters & Maniacs
. With Boing Boing sleeping in my lap, I carefully studied every cover of every issue I own, trying to find the perfect picture to show Vince so that he could have the baker and the frosting guy at The Paradise Pantry put it on my birthday cake.

I narrowed the choice down to two:

The cover of Issue 48 (“The Car of Tomorrow . . . It Seats Four AND
EATS MANY MORE!!!
”) has always been one of my favorites. It's a picture of a family being chewed up and swallowed by a car's hood (because the car runs on human flesh instead of gasoline, see?). I swear you can practically hear the people screaming.

But I couldn't decide between that one and an old classic: Issue 12, one of the first
Monsters & Maniacs
I ever owned. Even though the story isn't one of the creepiest (“My Daddy
IS A MUMMY!
”), there's something about the way the bandages are rotting off the smiling corpse on the cover that still gives me chills.

Both pictures are so awesome that I couldn't make up my mind. So, the next morning at school, I put it to a vote.

“Which one would look better on top of a cake?” I asked Cougar and Scottie, holding up the comic books for their consideration. I had made them follow me to a deserted end of the schoolyard so that no one else would learn about the final choice.

But instead of taking this decision seriously, Scottie and Cougar looked at each other and cracked up.

“What?” I was irritated. “What's so funny?”

Scottie shook his head. “It's just so lame, man!”

“What is?”

“This whole House-of-Horrors thing, Doofus!” Cougar cackled. “I mean, you're
telling
people that you're gonna scare 'em, and then you're actually gonna
try
to scare 'em? Good luck!” he said as they started to walk away.

“Well, you don't have to come!” I shouted at their backs.

“Are you kidding?” Cougar didn't even bother turning around. “We wouldn't miss it for the world.”

 

 

I caught the Mealiffe Avenue bus after school, because The Paradise Pantry is too far to skateboard to. As I sat on the bus, my knee kept bouncing up and down; I had decided to go with the flesh-eating car as my birthday cake choice, but now I was just really, really nervous about how Vince would react.

The bus dropped me off right in front of The Paradise Pantry, which, I have to admit, is a lot fancier than the Happy Giant Supermarket where I shop. They've got white and blue striped awnings out front, and the staff all wear white shirts and blue aprons and smile a lot.

When I walked in the front door, I asked a cash-register lady where I could find Mr. Champagne, and she pointed me back toward Frozen Foods. I took a deep breath, and I started to walk.

While I had been on the bus, I had planned how I would handle this moment. I was going to find Vince, walk right up to him and give him a really squeezy handshake. I thought that he might like that, especially because he taught me how to do it. I was running this scene over in my head, when I turned a corner and I saw Vince. And I froze. Right there in Frozen Foods.

Because he was with somebody. Not just
with
somebody.

He was hugging her.

A lady with a shopping cart. A shopping cart with a little girl in the kid's seat. He was hugging the lady, and they were giggling, and she was pretty.

Then a man carrying a crate of tomatoes walked past, and he joked, “Hey, Vince! Is that your way of keeping the customers happy?”

Vince stopped hugging the lady, turned to the Tomato Man and laughed, “Eddy, c'mon! You've met my wife.”

I heard it with my own two ears.
“You've. Met. My. Wife.”

If the floor could have opened at that moment and swallowed me, I wouldn't have minded.

I guess I gasped, because that's when Vince looked up and saw me standing there. Close enough to have seen and heard everything that had just happened. And the way his jaw dropped, I could tell that I had seen something I wasn't supposed to.

I think Vince started toward me, but I'm not sure. The next thing I can honestly remember was being outside, running down the sidewalk as fast as my legs could carry me.

 

 

I ran for blocks and blocks. Miles, probably. The whole time I was running, I was hoping I could run far enough that I'd never have to go back and tell Mom what I'd seen, or—worse yet—go back and pretend that I hadn't seen anything at all.

But my stomach started to ache, and my backpack, with my skateboard and comic books inside, was banging real hard on my spine, and, eventually, I slowed down. I wandered around until I stopped shaking inside.

Then I took a deep breath, and I headed home.

When I walked into the kitchen, Mom was standing at the sink, staring out into the backyard. She didn't turn around to greet me.

Then I noticed that Lorena was sitting in silence at the kitchen table in her Chick-A-Dee uniform, and she was a mess. She had smears of mashed potatoes and gravy on her blouse; her mascara was running down her cheeks; and she had gobs and gobs of coleslaw in her hair.

I waited for one of them to speak, but nobody did. Finally I turned to Lorena.

“What happened to you?”

She sneered. “Brad grabbed my butt again. So I stabbed him in the hand with a fork, like you said.”

“Seriously?” I was actually sort of pleased that
Monsters & Maniacs
had provided Lorena with a real-life solution.

“Then I threw a Cluck Bucket at him. So he threw a supersize soda at me. And a carton of coleslaw. Before you know it . . .” She waved her hand at all the food she was wearing. “And then he fired me.”

“Wow,” was all I could manage.

“Men are such scum,” Lorena groaned as she put her head down on the table.

That's when Mom spoke for the first time: “Tell me about it.”

At that moment I realized that she knew. About Vince.

She turned to me. “Vince called. After you left.” She shook her head sadly. “I thought he was single.”

And that was that. We didn't talk any more about Vince. Or Lorena getting fired.

Instead, Mom did what she usually does when she's upset. She went upstairs and changed into her doing-chores-around-the-house clothes. Then she dragged the folding stepladder out to the back porch, where a section of roof gutter had been needing repairs for months.

And, as I chopped and stirred in the kitchen, I could hear the whine of Mom's electric screwdriver long after it got dark.

 

 

There's a soup I make with canned corn that Mom calls “Charley's Comfort Chowder,” so I made a pot of that, even though nobody felt like sitting down to dinner that evening. When it was ready, I took a cup of it out to Mom.

She was way up on the stepladder. I had to wait for the screwdriver noise to stop before I said, “I made Comfort Chowder. You hungry?”

She shook her head “no.” But she didn't go back to working; instead, she sighed and said, “I feel so . . .
stupid
, Charley.”

I nodded. “Mmmm. I feel that way a lot.”

She smiled a teensy smile.

I had planned to wait until morning to bring something up, but the moment seemed right, so I asked: “Can I still have my birthday party?”

Mom looked surprised. “Why wouldn't you?”

“Because,” I shrugged. “Because we don't have a free cake anymore.”

“Then you'll just have to make one. I bet your friends will be impressed.”

I appreciated her confidence in my cooking skills, but I could never create the
Monsters & Maniacs
cake of my dreams.