All the Greys on Greene Street

by Laura Tucker

  Up, down. Up, down. “There has to be a reason, right? I mean, besides Vouley Voo.”

  I knew what he meant. When Manny Weber’s dad left his mom for our second grade teacher, he moved to an apartment about fifteen blocks away from where he used to live with Manny’s mom. Manny spent a lot of time wishing that his dad and Miss Delario had vanished into thin air, like the time that they took him uptown to Serendipity for frozen hot chocolate and Miss Delario told him he was welcome to call her Phyllis. But his dad had only moved to an apartment in the East Village without any furniture in it, and Manny still saw him all the time.

  “Maybe there was something he had to do,” I said, watching the receiver slowly spinning at the end of its cord.

  “Yeah. But what? What did he do that he had to sneak off like that, in the middle of the night?”

  I reached down to grab the dangling receiver, not bothering to keep the edge out of my voice. “Who said he snuck anywhere?” I slammed the phone back into its grimy cradle. “He went. To France.”

  Alex quit bouncing and raised one hand—half in surrender, half to shut me up. “Hey, Mom,” he said into the receiver. “Sorry to bug you at work.”

  I kicked the metal base of the payphone he was using.

  Linda said it was fine if Alex went to Richard’s as long as he remembered his pleases and thank-yous. While she was telling him ten thousand things about manners, I picked up my own receiver again and punched in a random combination of numbers, thinking about my dad while I was doing it.

  I knew it wouldn’t work; I’m not stupid. I hadn’t even put any money in. Even so, I felt a little jolt of hope in the half-second before the recording told me to hang up and try again.

  I hung up and stuck my finger into the slot.

  No dime. I found four once, though, so I always check.

  BIG IDEAS

  As soon as we were back inside the park, Alex took off at a dead run toward his beloved Terrorpole.

  Under no circumstances are you supposed to jump from the top of Terrorpole.

  Of course, Alex jumps.

  I wasn’t sorry to see the back of him. I was only sorry that I couldn’t tell him about the note so he’d know my dad hadn’t snuck off into the night like some criminal.

  Richard had gotten us a good bench, which was lucky because we weren’t the only ones in the park enjoying the sweater weather. Barefoot college kids played guitars and drums against the spray paint–covered arch. Harried moms ran after toddlers. The old people on the benches shook their newspapers out against the sun. There was a lot I’d have liked to sketch, but Richard already had a brand-new monster in mind. We were going to use it to launch the Taxonomy’s Transformation section.

  I learned pretty fast that it’s extremely difficult to draw one thing turning into something else. Luckily, Richard keeps a pad of paper for me in the worn brown-and-white PBS bag his mom gave him for the Taxonomy. The paper’s thin enough that I can trace through it, so I don’t have to worry about making mistakes. He tapes the finished drawing into the Taxonomy when we’re both satisfied.

  Still, even ten minutes in, I could tell that it was going to take me the better part of the pad to get this one monster right.

  Richard was methodically working his way through the new issue of his favorite magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland. He’d look over at the drawing every once in a while, to offer diplomatic critiques. “I like the way the scales look, all new and shiny and kind of wet underneath; it’s cool the way you did that,” he’d said, after I’d been working for about an hour. “But I was thinking the skin ripping would have a more ragged look to it. Not so much like a cut with scissors, but more like when you tear white bread?”

  I blew my bangs off my forehead in frustration; the thin paper was already close to translucent from so much erasing. Somewhat annoyingly, I also thought he might be right.

  “You know, I’d be happy to give you some drawing lessons,” I told him, only half joking.

  To my surprise, he looked tempted. Then he saw me noticing and shook his head in embarrassment. “That’s okay. It’s better when you do it,” he said.

  And then—probably to change the subject—he asked about my mom.

  I shook my head to mean no change and detached a new piece of paper from the pad so I could trace the parts of the drawing he’d liked.

  “Has your dad called?”

  In his slow, quiet way, Richard can be quite persistent, which is one of the good and the bad things about him. Today, it was one of the bad things.

  I shook my head again, keeping my eyes steady on the prominent bony ridges that would make up the monster’s cheekbones and forehead. If I got this part right, the drawing was going to be terrifying. “There have been a bunch of hang-ups on the machine at home, but I don’t know if it’s him. And nobody knows how to reach him; I asked. Not Apollo, not my mom, not Joyce.”

  Richard bent down the corner of the page before closing Famous Monsters. There was an ordinary woman in a pink sweat suit and sneakers on the cover instead of the usual gruesome monster face. The Incredible Shrinking Woman, the yellow headline shrieked, although the woman looked regular size. Of course, I couldn’t tell how big the robot was that she was standing next to.

  Richard watched me sketch for a while, and I distracted myself by trying to remember what bread looks like when it rips. It worked, until it didn’t.

  After a little while and in a much smaller voice, he asked, “Ollie? Do you think we should tell a grown-up? About your mom?”

  I dropped the pad and fixed him with a look so ferocious he had no choice but to drop his eyes. “No, I do not,” I said, my tone so sharp and final that the dachshund on the bench next to us startled up from his nap with a short bark of alarm.

  Richard slumped back against the bench. Heart hammering in my chest, I got to my feet and crossed the path to sharpen my pencil. I don’t like to waste Blackwing, but I stood there longer than I needed to, watching the cedar curls fall onto the heavy black plastic lining the can.

  If we got a grown-up involved, they’d have to do something, and whatever that was could be worse than what was already happening.

  The last time my mom went to bed, she’d had to go to the hospital.

  She’d told me she wouldn’t go back there. But if we told a grown-up, they might make her. And if that happened while my dad was still gone, then what would happen to me?

  I couldn’t take that chance. I needed a little more time to fix it first.

  I went back to sit down on the bench next to Richard and picked up the pad again. “It’s all going to work out,” I said casually. “Anyway, I was thinking I might stay with Apollo for a while.”

  Like it was settled already, like it was no big deal.

  Richard nodded, his lips pressed tight together, and we both looked down at the monster in my hands.

  My dad says that even a minute away from a drawing can be helpful when you need some perspective, and I could see right away that the nostril holes would be scarier if they were smaller. But Richard had been right: The skin did look better ripped.

  “Apollo has a True Lost Love,” I said, in a friendlier tone of voice. “He told me without telling me at dinner.”

  Richard let me change the subject. He likes Apollo. “You don’t know who it is?”

  “No idea,” I said. Apollo had had a million girlfriends in my lifetime, but none of them had stood out. Plus, he was still friends with most of them. Could you stay friends with a Lost Love?

  Richard’s magazine was open again. Something in there had caught his attention. “Get Alex to ask Linda,” he said absentmindedly.

  I always forget that Apollo knows Linda, mostly because it seems impossible that two people who are so completely different could know each other. But when my parents and Apollo and Linda were all at art school together, they were friends
. Linda became a real estate broker around the same time that my dad and Apollo started the art restoration business. The story is that she came to see their studio and figured out how to buy a loft the next day. A month later, she was selling them.

  If Apollo had met his True Lost Love while they were in art school, then Linda probably knew her, too. Plus, Linda liked nothing better than to talk about other people, especially if she could be disapproving about what she calls their life choices.

  “I don’t know. You know how he is about this stuff.” It is Alex’s opinion that love exists mostly to ruin perfectly good movies about car chases and bombs.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Richard said, lifting the magazine close to his face so that he could scrutinize a picture. I could feel one of his Big Ideas coming on.

  Richard’s Big Ideas are exclusively about monsters, and they always mean more work for me.

  I rolled my Blackwing back into the V of my thumb and scratched at the callus on my middle finger. Hoping to intercept the Big Idea, I asked, “Why do you think you’re so into monsters?”

  It didn’t work. Richard’s nose was about an inch from the magazine, and his eyes had narrowed in concentration. He wasn’t interested in the question. “My mom thinks it has to do with race and puberty. But I think I just like them.” He dropped the magazine to take another long, critical look at the drawing on the pad on my lap.

  Then, just as I’d predicted: a Big Idea.

  “Hey. Remember that lizard we saw that time at the Bronx Zoo?” Richard asked me, his voice rising at the end of the sentence the way it does when he gets excited. “What about, instead of fish-type gills that lie flat, ones that pop up? Like in a ruff?”

  I blew at my bangs again before ripping a fresh page from the pad.

  Later, to make myself feel better, I sketched the dachshund on the bench next to us. The guy he was with was very complimentary about the drawing, so I gave it to him.

  I consider myself to be more of a cat person, but that dachshund had an extremely intelligent face.

  WILD TIMES

  By five o’clock, the three of us were starving, even after a trip to Joe’s for a slice of Sicilian around two.

  On our way out of the park to Richard’s house, we slowed down to watch the guys break dancing on flattened cardboard by the fountains, and sped up past the guys who mutter. Then, crossing the street toward the library, I saw that same goofy, bright yellow cursive running along the bottom of a poster pasted to the side of a building across from the park: WILD TIMES!

  This painting was of a paper coffee cup, the kind you get at every deli in New York. It’s the color of the cornflower crayon, and has a Greek temple on the side and the words “We Are Happy to Serve You.”

  There was a wave of coffee coming out of the top of the cup. My dad had showed me a famous Japanese woodblock once with a wave like that one. The wave was smiling.

  The deli cup reminded me of my dad. He used to take me out on Saturday mornings when I was little so that my mom could sleep in, especially if she’d been up working late the night before. He’d get black coffee for himself and a corn muffin for me from the bodega on West Broadway.

  I’d run up the ramp outside Joyce’s gallery and then jump off the end as many times as I wanted to, while my dad leaned against the rusted metal door in his worn leather jacket, drinking his coffee. I always begged for a sip, and he always gave me one, even though we both knew I wouldn’t like it any more than I did the weekend before. I still don’t understand how something so bitter can smell so good.

  If Joyce and Peter were inside, they’d come out to chat, or we’d all go inside so my dad could see what Joyce was hanging. The vast gallery space echoed when they talked. I’d head straight to Joyce’s desk at the back, and the mug Peter kept filled with peppermints to help Joyce with her stomach. There was a swivel chair behind the desk that I could swing around in until I got dizzy, which made the white-painted pipes crossing the gallery ceiling look like they were moving. Sometimes I drew on the big rolls of brown paper they kept in the corner, or painted designs on my hands and arms with Joyce’s Wite-Out.

  Eventually, my dad would take the top off his deli cup so Peter could give him a warm-up from the Mr. Coffee on the windowsill. And his cup looked like the one in the poster.

  “C’mon, Ollie.” Cranky hungry, Alex poked me out of my daydream.

  I was hungry, too, but I wanted him to see the poster. “Did you see that poster? The one that says WILD TIMES? There’s one like that in the lot across the street from my house, except it says WAKE UP. I saw the guy putting it up.” I looked at Alex, who had gotten the same hard patches on his jeans during my mother’s poster phase. “He was wearing a suit. To do paste-ups.”

  Alex hadn’t helped us wheat-paste for long. When his mom found out what he’d been doing with us, she’d called my mom.

  “For God’s sake, Linda, they are not going to arrest a child for putting up a poster,” I’d heard my mother snap impatiently on her end of the call, but Alex didn’t help us any more after that. Which was too bad, because he liked being vaulted over fences a whole lot more than I did.

  “I didn’t see any poster,” Alex said, probably because of the fancy footwork he was doing alongside the curb.

  “Too busy with your hopscotch?” I asked. Not super nicely, if I’m being honest.

  Alex rose to the bait. “It’s called an agility drill? Football players do them?”

  Richard was walking more quickly than usual, probably because he was hungry, too. He’s the kind of only child who doesn’t like it when people fight, so he interrupted before I could point out some of the more obvious differences between Alex and a football player. “Those posters; it’s got to be the same guy, right?”

  Reluctantly, I left Alex alone. “Did you see it?”

  Richard shook his head, and I snuck a look over my shoulder, serious for a minute about making them go back to look. But after a day on the Terrorpole, Alex is basically only one missed meal away from devouring human flesh, so I let it go.

  Anyway, I didn’t need to see the poster again to know how it made me feel. The cup reminded me of the coffee-leather smell of my dad on those Saturday mornings, but the out-of-control wave made me think of my mom.

  WILD TIMES!

  Wild times are supposed to be fun. But they didn’t feel that way to me.

  A BIG FAT NOTHING

  We cut through Washington Square Village to get to Richard’s house. It’s not a real village; just a bunch of big buildings with a path running through them.

  Alex was tightrope-walking on a thick black chain hanging between two posts with a sign on it that said PLEASE KEEP OFF THE GRASS.

  Catching Richard’s eye and pausing for dramatic effect, I made my announcement: “Apollo has a Long Lost True Love.”

  Alex scowled and fell off the chain, windmilling his arms like a clown for effect.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just do,” I said, knowing that would annoy him even more.

  “Who even cares,” he muttered under his breath, scuffing his sneakers against the pavement.

  “We’re starting a club, to solve mysteries.” Richard stepped in. “This is the first one.”

  This was smart, even if clubs weren’t cool. The summer before, Alex had been obsessed with a series of books featuring a smart kid, an athletic kid, and a bossy kid triumphing over a bunch of criminals so dumb they’d made the ones in Scooby Doo look like physicists. (Richard thought the boys’ clubhouse, a trailer hidden in a junkyard, was the best part.) When he was reading them, Alex had become obsessed with finding a mystery for us to solve, but it’s hard to find a good one in real life.

  We walked through the courtyard to Richard’s building. Alex hadn’t said no yet. “It’s more of a squad,” I offered.

  “I’ll join your squad, but I’m not goi
ng to look for some chump Lost Love,” Alex said, holding his hand up for a high five from Isidro, Richard’s Saturday doorman. Isidro is always yelling at us to stay in school, even during summer vacation, but he’d laid off it a little after finding out that Richard’s mom was a professor.

  Richard pressed the elevator button. Alex shifted from one foot to the other and pressed it again. The elevator in Richard’s building takes forever. Most of the time, Alex can’t stand waiting and runs the six flights instead.

  Five seconds later, he pressed the button again.

  “How are you going to find her?”

  Richard looked around carefully before answering, in case of spies. “If you agree to participate, you’ll have the crucial role of the mission, Alex: handling the most important agent we have in the field.”

  Alex looked excited for two seconds until Richard told him who the agent was.

  “No way,” he said flatly. “Forget about it.”

  Truthfully, I didn’t blame him. You don’t get involved with a mystery investigation so you can talk to your mom, especially if your mom is Linda. But Richard was right: Linda was our best bet, until I could get in touch with my dad.

  Alex looked accusingly at Richard. “Why do you care who Apollo’s in love with?”

  “Oh, I don’t,” Richard said mildly, and I realized that was probably true. “You’re missing the point. It’s not about love; it’s about solving the mystery.”

  Richard let me go into the elevator first, like his mom was there to see. Alex was already in there, shaking his head and kicking the metal wall just gently enough so that Isidro couldn’t hear. I looked over as I got in, giving him one last chance to change his mind, but all he did was make a face even more hideous than his real one.

  Richard sighed, and the elevator door lurched shut.