Better to Wish

by Ann M. Martin

  “It’s a blizzard,” Abby whispered back. “A real blizzard.”

  A nor’easter, Pop had said the night before, when Abby and Rose were getting ready for bed. Blowing up the East Coast, just in time for Thanksgiving.

  All night long the wind had howled, and just before dawn the snow had begun blowing in great white sheets along Blue Harbor Lane.

  “How many inches do you think we have so far?” asked Rose. She was learning about inches and feet in first grade and was proud of her knowledge, especially since Pop was a carpenter. Inches and feet were important to him.

  Abby sat up, pulling a quilt around her shoulders, and rested her arms on the windowsill. “I can’t tell. The snow is already drifting.”

  “Give me the covers back. I’m freezing.”

  “We should get up and help Mama. She has a lot to do today.”

  “Do you think they’ll be able to come?”

  Abby could read her sister’s mind like the mentalist they’d seen once at a county fair.

  “I don’t know. Maybe not.”

  “But we can’t have Thanksgiving without Aunt Betty and Uncle Marshall!”

  Mama’s sister, Aunt Betty, and her husband lived ten miles away in Little Conway with their four children, who were all older than Abby, and who, for that very reason, Abby adored — especially Blaine, who gave her piggyback rides and had taught her to hit a baseball.

  “Well, we can’t ask them to do anything foolish,” said Abby sensibly, sounding a lot like Mama.

  “They have to come! They have to! Blaine is going to learn me to burp.”

  Abby narrowed her eyes at her sister. “Teach you to burp. And you’d better not let Mama hear you say that. Or Pop. Come on. Let’s go downstairs.”

  Abby scrambled out of bed and into a wool dress. The dress itched, but at least it was warm. She added wool socks and a sweater. And, because it was Thanksgiving, she brushed her hair fifty times and tied a red ribbon in it.

  “Brush my hair!” cried Rose.

  “No braids today?”

  “I want to look just like you.”

  Abby brushed her sister’s hair while Rose counted, and then she tied a pale blue ribbon into a careful bow. When the girls appeared in the kitchen, Mama turned away from the window and said, “Why, you look perfect! My two Thanksgiving chicks.”

  “But the snow,” said Rose.

  “Is exciting!” Abby finished up. There was no reason to upset Mama, not on a holiday, and not when Mama was smiling and had called Abby and Rose her Thanksgiving chicks. “Look, Rose.” She opened the front door and snow swirled inside.

  “Abigail! Close that!” cried Pop. “Right now. You’re letting the heat out and I’m not made of money.”

  Abby closed the door in a hurry. “Sorry, Pop.”

  Pop tapped his forehead. “When are you going to start thinking? Any fool knows enough not to hold the door open during a blizzard.”

  “I just wanted to see,” said Abby.

  “Then look out the window.”

  Abby sat at the kitchen table with Rose. Pop had already eaten his breakfast and was wandering around the house with his toolbox, searching for things to do, since another of his sayings was “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”

  Mama set bowls of oatmeal and glasses of milk in front of Abby and Rose. “Breakfast first, and then you girls can give me a hand with the cooking.”

  “But, Mama, do you think Aunt Betty and Uncle Marshall are going to come?” asked Rose.

  Mama glanced out the kitchen window, where the snow was falling thickly. Abby saw that it had already half buried the two little rosebushes. “I don’t know,” said Mama, turning back to the stove.

  “Maybe we could” — Abby struggled for the proper word — “postpone Thanksgiving.”

  Mama smiled sadly at her. “The turkey is ready to go in the oven, the piecrust is made, and the vegetables can’t go for more than a day or two without spoiling. We have to have Thanksgiving today.”

  “Well, anyway, I still think they’re coming,” said Rose.

  “Finish your oatmeal now,” said Mama. “We have a lot to do, storm or no storm. Abby, I want you to peel the potatoes and then help me with the pies. Rose, you can shape the biscuits. Goodness, the icebox is going to be full to overflowing. Thank goodness Joe King came yesterday.”

  Joe King was the iceman. He showed up regularly all year long to bring ice for the icebox. Even though Abby’s family drove a car, an old Nash with curtains in the backseat windows, Joe still arrived in a horse-drawn cart. He would hop out, use a pick to chip a block of ice off an even bigger block of ice, and haul it into the Nicholses’ house over his shoulder, his clothing protected by a rubber cape. Then he deposited the ice in a pan in the icebox. Sometimes in hot weather he would give Abby and Rose each a sliver of ice, which they held in their bare hands and licked like lollipops while the water ran down their wrists.

  Abby finished her oatmeal and cleared the kitchen table. Outside, the wind roared and the snow fell, and from the other side of the house came the sound of Pop’s hammer. Mama placed a bowl of potatoes in front of Abby and she tackled them with a sigh. Peeling potatoes was her least favorite chore, but Mama didn’t think Rose was old enough to handle a knife, so the chore fell to Abby.

  “We’ll turn on the Victrola,” said Mama. “We can listen to music while we work.”

  Rachmaninoff was playing in the background and Abby was peeling and Rose’s hands were sticky with biscuit dough and Mama was adding more kindling to the woodstove when the lights first flickered.

  “Uh-oh,” said Abby. She glanced outside for the millionth time and watched the snowflakes swirl through the gloom.

  “I think I’d better ring up Betty,” said Mama, and just as the words left her mouth, the phone jangled on the little table outside the kitchen. Rose leaped to answer it, but Mama got there first, and Abby listened to her mother’s end of the conversation. “Yes, yes, I thought as much…. No, of course not…. I know. The girls will be very disappointed…. All that food…. Well, there’s nothing to be done…. All right…. All right…. Happy Thanksgiving to you.”

  Mama hung up the phone and Rose burst into tears.

  “I’m sorry, Rose,” said Mama, and she put her arms around Rose’s thin shoulders.

  The hammering had stopped and Pop appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Was that Betty?” he asked, and the lights flickered again. They flickered on and off two more times and finally went out.

  “The electrical lines must have gone down,” said Pop. “I’m not surprised.”

  “This is exciting!” Abby declared. “It’s like the olden days! No electric lights.”

  “And all this food,” said Mama. “Enough for ten people. Well, there’s nothing to do but finish cooking it.”

  “Please, may I call Sarah?” asked Abby, who normally wasn’t allowed to do so, since Sarah lived just three doors away and Abby could run there easily.

  “I suppose,” replied Pop, and that was when Abby discovered that the phone lines were down, too.

  “Ooh, scary!” she said.

  “Ooh, scary!” echoed Rose, sounding more cheerful.

  Pop lit two kerosene lamps and Abby returned to the potatoes. “I’ve done half, Mama,” she said.

  “Better stop there. Put the others back in the bin. We won’t need nearly so many now.”

  Abby gratefully returned the unpeeled potatoes to the wooden bin and turned to the blueberry pies.

  “Are those blueberries the ones we picked with Orrin last —” Rose started to say, and then looked guiltily over her shoulder.

  “Hush,” Abby whispered urgently, but it was too late.

  Pop had turned away from the kitchen, but now he turned back and stood once again in the doorway. “What did you say, Rose?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Rose?”

  “I was just wondering if …” Rose glanced helplessly at Abby, who looked at Mama, who bowed her head.<
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  “Yes?” said Pop.

  “Well, I was wondering if those were the blueberries we picked last summer.”

  “I thought I heard Orrin’s name mentioned.”

  Rose stared out the window.

  “Because you know you aren’t allowed to” — Pop paused — “to consort with him.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Rose. “I mean, no, sir.”

  Pop hesitated, then walked away, and soon Abby could hear hammering again. Into the silence of the kitchen, she said, “Mama, should I make the fancy crust for the pies?” Without waiting for an answer she began slicing the dough into strips and patting it down on the filling in a crisscross pattern. “Just like at the bakery!” she announced.

  Rose let out her breath and Mama began to move dishes in and out of the icebox and in and out of the gas oven. The house smelled first like turkey, and then like turkey and cranberries, and then like turkey and cranberries and stuffing, and then like all those things plus cooling pies.

  Rose had just complained that she was bored when Abby heard a sound that was a little like thunder and a little like a crack of lightning, and she looked out the window in time to see a tree that had bent in the force of the wind suddenly snap in two, the top part falling behind the Becketts’ house next door. It landed gently, sending up great puffs of snow in a line stretching from the edge of the woods to the Becketts’ back stoop.

  Rose screamed and ran to Mama, but Abby stared at the broken trunk and the whirling flakes and felt her heart quicken. She watched as Mr. Beckett appeared on his stoop, looked at the tree, then up to the sky, shook his head, and closed his door again. The tree would remain where it lay, covered sometimes with snow, sometimes with sleet, sometimes just with frost, until April when Mr. Beckett would finally saw through the damp trunk.

  “What a Thanksgiving,” said Mama, holding Rose tight.

  “It’s a horrible Thanksgiving,” replied Rose.

  “Then let’s make it better.” Abby opened the kitchen cupboard and brought out the tin box of crayons and the scraps of butcher paper. “We should make place mats, Rose. And place cards, like for a fancy dinner in a rich person’s house.”

  Rose pulled away from Mama. “Okay.”

  Abby and her sister sat and colored by the light of a kerosene lamp, and sometimes Abby watched Rose’s face, and she thought about the late afternoon when Rose had been born and Mama, exhausted, had looked across the bedroom at the jar of flowers on the windowsill and seen the single rose that Pop had added to the bouquet and said to herself, “I’m going to name this baby Rose.”

  And so Rose’s entire name was Rose Nichols. But Abby had been named for her two grandmothers — Abigail and Cora — and so her entire name was Abigail Cora Nichols.

  Abby printed her name carefully now, her full name, at the bottom of the place mat she had made for Pop — a drawing of a beautiful living turkey in between an Indian and a Pilgrim.

  Later, when the place mats and place cards were finished and the kitchen table had been set and the dishes piled with turkey and stuffing and potatoes, Pop glared at Abby, whose fork was already halfway to her mouth, and said, “Let’s remember who provided us with this meal.” Then he bowed his head and Abby set down her fork and everyone joined hands. “Heavenly Father,” Pop began, “we thank You for Your bountiful blessings….”

  Once when it had been Rose’s turn to say the blessing, she had chanted, “Yum, yum, thanks for the food, God. Amen.” And Pop had whacked her bottom with a book.

  “Let’s tell Thanksgiving stories,” said Abby after Pop had said “amen.”

  “What kind of Thanksgiving stories?” asked Rose.

  “Things that happened a long time ago.”

  Pop told about the first time he had killed a turkey all by himself and how proud he’d been, but how his little brother had cried and cried at the sight of the dead bird and said he wouldn’t eat the turkey. And he hadn’t. (Abby thought this was a horrible story.)

  Mama told about her first Thanksgiving with Pop, before he had finished building their house, when they were living with Mama’s parents. “I stood up at the end of the meal and said, ‘Thanksgiving is certainly going to be different next year.’ And your pop said, ‘That’s right. We’ll be in our new house.’ And I said, ‘And there will be three people living in it.’”

  “And that’s how Pop found out that I was going to be born, right?” said Abby.

  “That’s right.”

  Then Abby told the story of the very first Thanksgiving ever, which she had learned in school, and finally Rose told a story about how she had once ridden a horse through a blizzard on Thanksgiving Day in order to deliver a turkey to a poor family whose tree had fallen down, and Pop said something about falsehoods, but he didn’t look too mad.

  “I think this was the best Thanksgiving ever,” Abby whispered to her sister that night, as they lay in their bed again.

  Beyond the window the moon shone and the stars shone and the last of the clouds were scudding across the sky, blown by a brisk, biting wind. Downstairs, the snow was piled right up to the windowsills, and Pop was going to have to shovel his way out the front door in the morning. But for now all the Nicholses were safe and warm in their beds.

  “The best Thanksgiving?” Rose repeated.

  “Well, the most exciting.”

  Abby knew she would remember this day always. And when she was grown, when she was a very old woman, she would tell the story of the Thanksgiving storm to her grandchildren and they would ask question after question about woodstoves and iceboxes and kerosene lamps and the Great Depression and wonder how Abby had ever survived the olden days.

  Abby sat between Rose and Sarah in the backseat of Pop’s Nash, giggling every time the car rode over a bump and they were jounced toward the roof. She leaned into the front seat. “Pop, can we get ice cream when we’re in Barnegat Point?” she asked.

  “I’m not made of money,” Pop replied, which didn’t mean either yes or no.

  A trip to Barnegat Point was always exciting. It was a real town with a main street and shops and a movie theatre and a bakery and a doctor’s office and a drugstore with a soda fountain — unlike Lewisport, with its general store and, well, that was pretty much it. Abby went to school in Barnegat Point. All the Lewisport children did, since there was no school in their village. But the Barnegat Point school was two blocks from the main street and Pop always dropped Abby and Rose off in a big hurry on his way to his carpentry shop. They rarely had a chance to walk around the town.

  Now Rose leaned forward. “But can we get ice cream?” she wanted to know.

  “We’ll see,” said Pop. “First I have to go to the house and check on the supplies that were delivered.”

  Pop had a job doing carpentry work on a big house that some people from New York City were building. It was going to be their summer home, and Pop had been hired to make all the cabinets and cupboards and bookshelves.

  “Wait till you see this place,” said Pop proudly. “It will be finished before winter, and it’s going to be grand. It has six bedrooms and four bathrooms —”

  It was Sarah’s turn to lean forward. “Four bathrooms? How many people are going to live in the house?”

  “Five, I think,” Pop replied.

  Abby and Sarah looked at each other. “Almost everyone has their own bathroom,” commented Abby.

  “Yuh,” said Pop. “They’re building the house right on the ocean, too.”

  “Our house is near the ocean,” said Rose.

  “This is different,” said Pop. “These people own the beach in front of their house, and they have a view of the harbor and all up and down the coast. And everything I’m building is very fancy — ornate — because that’s the way they like things. Nothing but the best. They’re going to have maids.”

  “Like Hannah Gruen? Nancy Drew’s housekeeper?” asked Abby, who had borrowed The Secret of the Old Clock from the library over the summer.

  Pop shrugge
d. “I guess. Now listen. When we get to the house I have to check on the materials, and I don’t want you girls to touch anything. You can look but don’t touch. And don’t go upstairs or anywhere I can’t see you, okay? This is a very fancy place.”

  Pop urged the Nash along the coast road until a large, half-finished structure came into view.

  “That’s as big as — as a castle!” exclaimed Abby.

  “Well, it’s a mansion anyway,” said Pop with pride.

  He turned off the road and parked the car in the drive behind the house.

  “How come the house is backward?” asked Sarah. “It’s facing the wrong way. It’s got its back to the road.”

  “Its front is facing the ocean,” Pop replied, happy to be able to answer the question. “That’s the way rich people like things. Facing the view.”

  “We face the ocean,” said Rose in a small voice.

  “Not the same thing,” Pop said flatly. “There’s a road between our house and that stretch of beach we don’t own.”

  Sarah climbed out of the car, followed by Abby and Rose.

  Pop stood and looked at the house, shaking his head with pride. “They asked me to build them some furniture, too,” he said.

  Abby was gaping at the grand structure, with its wings and porches and doors opening onto patios. “What … Who are these people?” she finally asked.

  “Nice rich family,” Pop replied. “Churchgoing Protestants. Republicans. Industrious. Born and raised here in the US. Family’s been here for generations. They know how to make money and they know how to spend it. They have taste.”

  Abby thought of the tiny house on Blue Harbor Lane and of her parents, who dispensed nickels so carefully. She thought of Mama making dresses for her and Rose because handmade was cheaper than store bought, and she thought of Pop and his carpentry jobs. Pop worked and worked and was also very industrious, but still money was scarce. What did that say about Pop and Mama? Abby wondered. But she knew better than to ask.

  Pop walked around to the side of the house, where a pile of lumber had been delivered. He bent and examined it, while Abby peered through an open doorway into the house. “Sarah!” she called. “Rose! Come here. You have to see this staircase. It curls around like a snail shell.”