The Briar Club — Chapter 1: Pete

Chapter 1

Pete

Dear Kitty, Does the name “Briarwood House” sound auspicious? We shall see!

I wish you were here. —Grace

June sunshine poured over the street, the sounds of a jazz saxophone drifted over from next door, somewhere on Capitol Hill Senator McCarthy was waving lists of card-carrying American Commies, and a new guest had come to the Briarwood boardinghouse. Her shadow fell across Pete where he knelt on the front stoop banging a nail into the flapping screen door, and he looked up to register a tall woman with a red beret over a tumble of golden-brown hair.

“Hello there,” she said in a soft midwestern drawl, nodding at the sign in the window. “I see you have rooms to rent?”

Pete scrambled upright, dropping his hammer. He’d thought he was being so alert: watching the street over his toolbox, eagle-eyed for any signs of a rumpus. Not that the square ever had much in the way of rumpus, but you never knew. What if some dirty no-good louse from the Warring gang shot up the Amber Club just off the square, making off with a bag of the long green? If that went down and the feds came sniffing, the word on the street would point to the shadowy figure across the way. You want the long and short, you talk to the shamus at Briarwood House. Nothing gets past Pistol

Pete. And then Pete would rise, flicking his cigarette and straightening his battered trilby . . .

But instead a woman had walked right up to him while he was tacking down a screen, and he’d nearly dropped his hammer on her ribbon-laced espadrille.

“Mickey Spillane,” she said, nodding at the paperback copy of I, the Jury he’d set aside on the front stoop after his mother swooped in with a reminder about the screen door. “Your favorite?”

“I, uh. Yes, ma’am. I’m Pete,” he added hastily. “Pete Nilsson.”

Her wide mouth quirked, and she stooped to pick up his hammer. “Then maybe you could tell me how a lady can get a room here, Hammerin’ Pete.”

Just like that, Pete fell in love. He been falling in love an awful lot since turning thirteen—sometimes with the girls in his class at Gompers Junior High, mostly with Nora Walsh up in 4A with her soft Irish vowels, occasionally with Arlene Hupp and her bouncy ponytail in 3C—but this dame in the red beret was something special. She was maybe thirty-five or something (old enough to have an interesting past), with a worn suitcase swinging from one hand and a camel coat belted around the kind of figure Detective Mike Hammer (Pete’s hero) would have described as a mile of Pennsylvania highway.

And she’d called him Hammerin’ Pete. He junked Pistol Pete on the spot, wishing he could cock his trilby back on his head and drawl Let me show you the joint, ma’am but unfortunately he wasn’t wearing a trilby, just an old Senators cap, and from inside the house his mother’s voice snapped “Pete, who are you gabbing to? Have you finished with that door?”

“Someone’s come about the room, Mom. Mrs.—” He looked back, realizing he hadn’t asked the woman’s name.

“March.” Another of those slow, amused smiles. “Mrs. Grace March.”

Pete’s mother popped out, face pink and irritated over her quilted housecoat, and she gave the newcomer a once-over even as she introduced herself. “Mrs., you said?” Clearly trying to appraise if there was a wedding ring under Mrs. March’s white glove. “I run my boardinghouse for ladies only, if you and your husband—”

“I was widowed last year.” Mrs. March sounded remarkably composed about that fact, Pete thought.

“Children? Because it’s a small room, no space for more than—”

“No, only me.” Mrs. March stood swinging her suitcase, and Pete could tell his mother didn’t much like being half a head shorter than this prospective tenant.

“Well, I suppose you can leave your luggage in the kitchen and come up to see the room.” There was a tone in his mother’s voice that Pete heard quite a lot, halfway between grudging and avid—grudging because she didn’t trust new people, avid because new boarders meant money—and he knew he shouldn’t have uncharitable thoughts about his mother, but he wished she would sound a little more . . . well, welcoming when she asked someone into their home. Don’t you want the boarders to like you, Mom? he’d asked once, hearing her harangue the renter in 3B for leaving water spots in the sink, and his mother had tutted, Only patsies worry about being liked, Pete. The only thing that matters is whether they pay their rent on time. He hadn’t really had an answer to that—or rather, he knew better than to voice one. If he did, Mom would just let fly with a tight-lipped Well, don’t you sound just like your father when you take that tone. Hammerin’ Pete was a match for any hard case in the District, but one just-like-your- father from Mom and he shriveled like he’d been slapped in the puss.

“Would you like a cup of coffee, ma’am?” he asked, opening the door for Mrs. March, and his mother shot him an irritable look.

“How kind”—another smile from the new arrival—“but I believe I’ll just see the room.”

It’s not much of a room, he wanted to tell her as she followed his mother up the stairs. A storage closet up at the top of the old brownstone, off the fourth-floor landing: Pete’s mother decided this year that she could cram a boarder in there, and Pete had spent his last break emptying out the junk, nailing down loose floorboards, and lugging up the tiny icebox so she could advertise there was a kitchenette. But he couldn’t honestly believe anybody would want to live in such a shoebox.

“She’ll take it,” his mother said ten minutes later, sailing down the stairs flushed and jubilant. “Six months paid up front, too, and she looks like a lady. Not that you can tell, these days. Here, before you take that up . . .”

Popping the clasps on Grace March’s suitcase.

“Mom!” Pete hissed, feeling his ears burn. “I hate it when you do this—”

“Don’t be squeamish. You want a dope fiend or a floozy in the attic? Or a Communist. Better to snoop now before she digs herself in.” Mrs. Nilsson flipped through the tidily folded blouses and skirts with rapid, expert

fingers, poked at a big glass mason jar apparently stuffed with nylons, examined the toiletries. Pete stood gnawing his lip, remembering how the English teacher at Gompers Junior High had said that the Latin root of the word mortification was “to die” and Pete could see why, because he was so mortified right now he wanted to drop dead here on the worn linoleum of his mother’s kitchen. Please don’t find anything, he prayed, watching her sift through the new boarder’s underwear (silky pink and peach stuff, he couldn’t help but notice with a burn of shame). The fourth-floor room had already nearly been rented out to a pleasant-looking spinster with a Jersey accent, but when Mom rummaged through her suitcase she found a package of what she called Those Things (the kind of rubber things the boys at Gompers boasted about stealing from their older brothers) and there had been an ugly scene before the woman from Jersey was kicked out, all before she even moved in, and without getting her just-paid deposit back, either.

Pete was already hoping Mrs. Grace March would be sticking around for a while.

“Well, take it on up.” Mrs. Nilsson closed the suitcase, looking vaguely disappointed there hadn’t been anything more sinister than a pink needle case. “Hurry back down, now. I need you to weed the tomato patch after

you take your sister to the library.”

“Yes, Mom.” Pete sighed.

“You’re a good boy,” she said, giving his ear a pinch as he hauled the suitcase toward the first of three flights of stairs.

The door off the right side of the tiny fourth-floor landing stood ajar, but Pete knocked anyway. “Mrs. March?”

“Oh heavens, drop that Mrs. March business,” her voice floated out. “I keep looking around for my mother-in-law, and not having a mother-in-law anymore is one of the few advantages of being widowed.”

“Yes, Mrs. M— Um, Mrs. Grace.” He hauled her suitcase inside, embarrassed all over again by just how tiny the room was. A narrow twin bed against one wall, a rickety little bureau that doubled as a coffee table, one shabby armchair . . . and his mother might call it a kitchenette, but it was really just an icebox the size of a packing crate, with a hot plate balanced on top. Worst of all were the walls: chipped, tilting inward under the slanted roof, painted a faded but still bilious green. You agreed to live

here? he thought—but Mrs. Grace was ignoring all that. She’d hung up the camel coat and unlaced the espadrilles, padding about in an old floral- printed skirt and what looked like a man’s shirt tied up at the waist, and she was heaving up the sash on the window at the end of the room so she could look out at the square below.

“Did my suitcase pass inspection?” she said without turning around, and Pete wanted to die all over again, but she aimed a mischievous smile over one shoulder. “There’s a glass mason jar in among my unmentionables. If I haul it out, can you tell me where to fill it up?” She was glancing around the room, which conspicuously lacked a sink.

“The bathroom’s on the landing. Sink and, um, toilet, anyway.” He felt his ears go red again, saying toilet to a lady. “If you want a bath, you’ll have to go to the third floor.” Where three women already competed for the tub and mirror between seven and eight in the morning. “A word of advice,” he found himself saying. “You do not want to get between Claire from 3B and Arlene from 3C when they start going at it over whose turn it is for the bathroom.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Mrs. Grace, having unlatched the suitcase, shook the mason jar free from a jumble of nylons and blouses. “Would you mind filling that up for me? Hot water, please.”

When he came back lugging the sloshing jar, she had unearthed a handful of tea bags, which promptly went into the water, along with the contents of a dozen little sugar packets clearly scavenged from a diner. “Sun tea,” she explained, seeing Pete’s puzzled expression as she carried the jar to the window and pushed it carefully through to sit on the sunny stone ledge.

“Let it steep on a hot porch or warm windowsill for three hours, and you’ll never taste anything better. Old Iowa farm recipe.”

“Is that where you’re from? Iowa?”

“Originally.” She stood back, admiring the sun tea sparkling in its jar, but didn’t volunteer anything else. “Who’s the musician?” she asked, tilting her head as a mellow sax riff on “Sentimental You” waltzed through the window on the warm breeze.

“That’s Joe Reiss, next door. He plays at the Amber Club down the street —he’s always practicing.”

“How many boarders live here altogether?”

“Eight, if Mom’s got a full house.” He stuck his hands in his pockets, trying a tentative smile. “You’ll meet the rest at breakfast. That’s between

seven and seven thirty every morning,” he recited. “Breakfast comes with your rent. Though a lot of our boarders prefer to get breakfast at the Crispy Biscuit on the other side of the square,” he felt compelled to add, in all honesty. His mother tried her best, of course she did, but her leathery scrambled eggs and undercooked bacon (slapped down on the dining room table at seven on the dot and removed at seven twenty-nine and fifty-eight seconds) weren’t exactly . . . well, the pancakes at the diner on Briar just couldn’t be beat, that was all.

“You’re quite the man of information, aren’t you?” Mrs. Grace took out a pack of Lucky Strikes and shook one out.

“My mother doesn’t allow smoking,” Pete couldn’t help saying.

“I know.” Calmly, Mrs. Grace struck a match, lit up, took a long inhale of smoke, and blew it out the open window. “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

“My mother knows everything,” Pete said feelingly. You could never hear her coming; in those house slippers she could pop out of the shadows like a jack-in-the-box. Always when you’ve left your coat on the floor, or are just thinking about putting your feet on the sofa, Pete had heard one of the boarders say. Nora Walsh from 4A, the pretty one with light-brown hair that gleamed in the sun. And Nora wasn’t wrong: a coat on the floor or a shoe print on a sofa was the kind of thing Pete’s mother couldn’t stand—ate her nerve ends raw, Mickey Spillane would have put it. “My mother’s had a difficult life,” he said loyally. “She just gets a little tense about rules. You know, times being hard and all.” Times were hard: the war only just receding into the past and the atom bomb waiting to blow the world to kingdom come and now Commies running all over making trouble. At least Senator McCarthy said so.

“It’ll be our secret.” Mrs. Grace tapped ash out the window, smiling.

Even her eyes got in on the smile—golden-brown eyes, like her hair, and they had a way of staying half-lidded, as if she were looking at everything with sleepy amusement. “So, why is this place called Briarwood House?”

“Because we’re on the corner of Briar Avenue and Wood Street.” It sounds more refined, his mother had said when she hand-lettered the sign: BRIARWOOD HOUSE: BOARDING FOR LADIES. We’ll get a better class of boarder that way. But the house was just a house, Pete thought—a tall narrow brownstone on the nicer edge of Foggy Bottom, not some country manor

out of a book like those Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries he’d read last summer.

“How long have you had boarders here, then?”

Pete looked at his shoes. “Since my dad left.” He waited for her to pounce on that. Adults always did. But Mrs. Grace just took another long drag off her Lucky Strike, looking around her new home: the lime-green paint, the slanted ceilings, the postage-stamp-size window seat. “It’s not much,” Pete felt compelled to apologize, but she shook her head.

“All of this”—she gestured with her cigarette, encompassing the sunny windowsill, the skeins of jazz, the clatter of feet on the stairs—“it has potential.”

“It does?” Pete felt like he heard that word a lot, generally when adults were telling you why you couldn’t do something now, maybe later. Look at your peach-fuzz chin in the mirror, and imagine the potential that one day you might need a shave; look at the cars cruising past and imagine the potential of someday driving one. To Pete, the word potential really just seemed to mean a long way off. Maybe never.

“This whole house has potential,” Mrs. Grace said, sounding very definite. “And so do you, Hammerin’ Pete.” She gave another smile, stubbing out her cigarette on the stone window ledge beside the mason jar.

“Now scoot. Come back in about three hours—I’ll be unpacked, and you’ll get a glass of sun tea that’ll make you swear you were in heaven.”

But Pete was pretty sure he was already there. He swung out of 4B whistling, and he didn’t stop even when he looked through the half-open door of the landing bathroom and caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror over the sink. Hammerin’ Pete . . . maybe when he was the toughest gumshoe in town, he’d carry a hammer through his belt: the hammer that took a smash to the Warring gang, brought down the biggest crime family in the District. By then he’d be thirty, not thirteen; he’d have a dashingly blued growth of stubble instead of pimples; he’d have a battered trilby slashing across a cruel cliff of a brow, not a Washington Senators baseball cap.

Yes, he could almost see it. Because he had potential. The new boarder said so.

Grace’s Sun Tea

6 to 8 bags of your favorite tea

Honey or sugar 1 lemon, thinly sliced

1. Fill a glass jar with 1 gallon of cool water, preferably boiled.

2. Add the tea bags, cover, and set the jar on a sunny porch or windowsill. Leave in direct sunlight for 3 to 5 hours.

3. Discard the tea bags, then sweeten the tea to taste with honey or sugar. Add the lemon slices, then refrigerate.

4. Enjoy on a summer day with a new friend, while listening to “If I Knew You Were Coming I’d’ve Baked a Cake” by Eileen Barton with the New Yorkers.

Dear Dad, Pete wrote. He was supposed to be doing his homework at the hall table, not to mention helping his little sister with her reading—his mother planted him there every evening to hand out the mail as the boarders came home—but Lina kept wriggling away from her book, and under his math exercises Pete was scratching out a letter to his father. Trying to, anyway. Lina won’t stop listening to The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet on the radio at top volume. Is that why you won’t come home?

He scratched that out. Lina’s listening to Ozzie and Harriet and practicing her reading. She’s getting pretty good!

“What’s that say?” Lina pushed her grubby finger at the third line of her book.

“Sound it out, Lina-kins. H-o-p— What does that say? And then the rest: s-c-o-t-c-h.”

She stuck her lip out. Nine years old, and she read at the level of a seven- year-old. It didn’t help that she had a lazy eye—strabismus, Pete reminded himself to call it—but it wasn’t that severe, the slight wander of her left eye off-center. There were glasses that could help, their doctor told them, but Mom said no. Too expensive.

“I’ll give you a hint,” Pete coaxed as Lina continued to pout. “It’s a game, and you play it all the time. Come on: hop. Now what’s the rest?”

“I don’t knooooow . . .”

“I hear we’ve got a new boarder!” Felicity Orton from 2A waltzed in with a swish of crinoline under her rose-pink skirt, balancing a mixing bowl on one hip and baby Angela on the other. Their newest boarders; Pete’s

mom had sniffed that they must have practically moved here straight from the hospital maternity ward. “4B finally rented out?”

“Yes, Mrs. Fliss.” Fliss was the English nickname for Felicity, she’d told Pete her first day here, English accent burnished a little after nearly seven years in the States, but still very princessy and exotic to Pete. At least now it’s Mrs. Fliss—Miss Fliss was just frightful! Pete had stood there trying to remember that quote about a rose by any name smelling just as sweet, but by the time he pulled it together in his head, she’d been gone. “Would you like your mail?” Pete asked now, passing over the packets he’d sorted earlier. “Letter from San Diego.”

She smiled to see her husband’s handwriting on the envelope, juggling the baby so she could tuck it into her pocket. “What I’d like is to use your oven!” Everything she said seemed to be painted up with exclamation points and deep dimples. “I thought I’d make a welcome plate for the newcomer—you think she likes sugar biscuits? Cookies,” she corrected herself. “You Yanks say cookies, not biscuits.”

Lina popped her head over her book. “I like sugar cookies,” she volunteered, eyes glommed onto Mrs. Fliss as sticky as Elmer’s Glue.

“First cookie’s for you!” Mrs. Fliss promised, but Pete heard the slight sigh behind the bubbly cheer. If you got Lina stuck on you, she was apt to stay stuck for the rest of the day, glowering and sulking if you tried to peel her off. But Mrs. Fliss smiled brightly, dimples reappearing to bracket her pink-lipsticked mouth. “The dough’s all mixed, I just need ten minutes at one ninety. No, three seventy-five,” she corrected herself with a sigh. “All these years and I still think in Celsius. May I—”

Technically, boarders weren’t allowed to use the kitchen, but Pete’s mother relaxed her rules sometimes for Fliss, who was neat as a pin and always left cookies in thank-you. “Go on in,” Pete said, blowing a raspberry at tiny Angela to make her gurgle. The baby was always so pink and pretty in her little lacy caps; Mrs. Fliss was even prettier with her perky flipped hair and swishy skirts . . . She was married, of course (her husband was an army doctor finishing his stint out at the base in San Diego, which was why she was in a boardinghouse), but she smelled like sugar and cinnamon and she was always nice to Pete, so he couldn’t help but gaze after her wistfully as she clicked past into the kitchen.

Dear Dad—Would you come home if Mom were a bit more like Mrs. Fliss? Bouncy and sweet-smelling and never yelling?

Scowling, Pete pushed the letter aside for the time being and turned to his algebra homework. What did he need algebra for, anyway? Did Mike Hammer spend his time worrying about a + b = c when some sniveling louse did him dirty? No, he did not.

Something in the kitchen behind him went crash. “Just back up a little when we open the oven door, Lina—”

Pete heard his sister mutter, “It wasn’t my fault, Mrs. Fliss . . .”

“I hear the house bagged a new victim.” Claire Hallett from 3B breezed in, handbag thrown over one arm. Claire worked the secretarial pool at some senator’s office in the Capitol: sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued, big and brassy, bust straining her prim blouse, hips straining her prim skirt, bright red curls straining to escape their prim hairpins. “Who’d your mother con into that shoebox on the fourth floor?”

“Nobody got conned,” Pete said loyally. “Mrs. Grace says it has potential.”

“Potential what? Fire hazards?” Claire hooted.

“Don’t go racing your motor,” Pete grumped, pushing her mail at her, and she breezed off past old Mrs. Muller coming down the stairs from 2B. The old woman with the moth-eaten skirt and the face like an angry fist took her mail with a grunt, clipping off a curt Nem when Pete asked if she’d had a good day. That was Hungarian for no, Pete knew by now—Reka Muller rarely said a word in English, and any word she said in Hungarian was usually no. Then Arlene Hupp from 3C, who worked for HUAC and always had the latest gossip about who was sweating on a witness stand naming names.

“Communists, Pete.” Arlene shook her head, ponytail bouncing, latest issue of Counterattack poking out of her handbag. “Hollywood is just infested with them. You should see the report that just came out in Red Channels; I’ll leave a copy for your mother. Goodness, is someone making cookies? I’m on a new regime: no sugar, no dinner rolls—”

A crash of pans in the kitchen as Arlene took her mail and bustled off.

Fliss’s voice, sounding a bit impatient: “It’s all right, Lina, we’ll just reroll that batch . . .”

Lina’s sulky mumble: “It wasn’t my fault!”

The front door opened again, and glory be, here she was. Pete sat up straight, repressing the urge to smooth his hair. Claire Hallett was thirty and Mrs. Fliss was twenty-four and even his new crush, Mrs. Grace, had to be

nearly thirty-five, but Nora Walsh from 4A was the youngest boarder in the house: just twenty, and a seven-year age gap wasn’t really such a difference, was it? At some point in the next few years his skin would finally clear up, and then Nora—who worked for the National Archives and glided dove- quiet and movie-star graceful through Pete’s life in a series of slim tailored suits—would realize he wasn’t just Mrs. Nilsson’s Pete who hoofed the ice upstairs for the boarders’ iceboxes—that he was, in fact, a man. “Call me Nora,” she would breathe . . .

What would happen after that, Pete was less clear on. Females had recently become infinitely fascinating, but they were more to dream about than to throw down on a sofa like Detective Mike Hammer was always doing. (How to proceed, after the throwing?) “Hello, Pete.” Nora took off her summer straw hat, giving that smile that made Pete’s toes curl. She didn’t have Fliss’s deep dimples or Claire’s bright coloring—she was a tall girl with sort of quiet brown eyes and quiet brown hair—but her smile had a soft impishness that melted him like butter.

And that hair, always in a neat French twist at the back of her head, had glints of gold like gleaming beach sand when a wave combed it smooth.

“Algebra homework? In summertime?”

“I got behind last year,” Pete confessed. “My teacher said I should do some exercises over the summer to practice.” Nora made a face, and he dared ask, “Did you hate algebra too?”

“With the fire of a thousand suns.” She lowered her voice. “The new boarder, Mrs. March—she’s right across the landing from me on the fourth floor—you know she’s got a television set?”

“No!” Pete was agog. The house had an antenna, but Mom wouldn’t hear of having a television set. Too costly, she said.

“A television?” Lina popped her head out of the kitchen, nose smudged with sugar. “C’n I see?”

“You’ve need to finish your reading, Lina-kins,” Pete reminded. “Quit bothering Mrs. Fliss, now.” Sullenly, Lina thumped down beside him, flipping her book open. “Sound the words out one at a time,” Pete encouraged, but Lina just gave him her blankest look, limp hair falling out of its plastic barrette.

“Keep up with that algebra, Pete,” Nora said with another of her smiles as she swept up her mail. “You might end up an engineer someday—I saw

you build that garden fence for your mother in the backyard, not to mention setting up Lina’s swing. You’ve got an eye.”

Pete flushed. First Mrs. Grace said he had potential; now Miss Nora thought he had an eye. He wished she’d stay and chat more, but the object of his affections was already heading up the stairs on those long slim legs . . . Mrs. Fliss rushed out of the kitchen soon afterward, distractedly juggling the baby, two plates of cookies, and the letter from her husband.

He nearly asked her what was wrong, but she was already putting down one of the plates and bouncing off again. “A dozen for your mother, Pete, just as she likes!” A clipping from a San Diego newspaper fluttered out of the envelope she’d just jammed into her pocket, and Pete picked it up: “Northern, Southern Koreans at War,” the headline blared. “U.S. Sponsored State Invaded by Red Forces . . .”

“Mrs. Fliss,” Pete began, but she was already disappearing up the stairs.

He sighed. He’d been hoping to play pat-a-cake with baby Angela and ask if Fliss’s husband had seen any movie stars in California—a question much more interesting than Korea, wherever that was. But Mrs. Fliss was already gone, and Pete sighed again, folding three cookies absently into his mouth.

None of the boarders ever lingered to talk. Hellos in the corridor, a good- morning over the breakfast eggs, but otherwise it was all just ships passing in the night. Briarwood House didn’t seem to be the kind of place where people got chatty.

Another hour and his mother came clipping in with the shopping. Three pork chops; Pete noted wistfully how small they all looked. Mom was scrupulous; she and Lina and Pete all got exactly the same amount on their supper plate, and that was fair, of course. But he was just so hungry all the time ever since he’d shot up three inches in the last three months. He felt like he could eat all three of those pork chops. Mom would say he was being greedy; of course she was right. He’d somehow managed to eat half the cookies without even noticing.

Dear Dad—Do you still make your Swedish meatballs? I remember when you used to make up a huge pot every Thursday night when Mom went to her bridge club, and we’d spoon them over buttered noodles . . . Of course, there had been nights with his dad that weren’t so nice. The nights he sat staring out the window and couldn’t be roused to look at the newspaper or Pete’s homework or anything at all. It wasn’t always good when he was

home, Pete reminded himself, but somehow all he could think about right now was Dad’s Swedish meatballs night.

“Pete, did you weed the cabbage patch?” His mother counted the cookies on the plate, making Pete shift guiltily. “Only six? Usually she leaves twelve—”

“I picked half a basket of cabbage,” he broke in hastily. “Can we have cabbage soup?” He didn’t like cabbage so much, but it might fill him up enough to make the claw-rake feeling in his stomach go away.

“Don’t be ridiculous, I want you to take that basket down to the deli and see if Mr. Rosenberg will buy them. He’s not above stocking the occasional bit of produce, and good garden-grown cabbages go for six cents a pound.

Make sure he doesn’t jew you down to five. After that, swing past Moonlight Magnolias,” Mrs. Nilsson added, unpacking her shopping bag.

“I’ve spoken to the florist there about a job for you.”

“A job?”

“Sweeping up, delivering flowers, that sort of thing. They’ll have to cut your hours once you start school”—regretfully—“but it’ll bring something in for the house.”

Pete looked down at his algebra exercises, which an hour ago he’d been dying to shove aside. “I won’t have time to finish this before supper if I have to go to the deli and then the florist,” he mumbled.

“Well . . .” His mother shrugged. “So?”

“I might need algebra someday.” Because maybe he would be an engineer. Pete wasn’t an idiot; he knew he wasn’t really going to be the toughest shamus west of the Potomac when he grew up, and he probably wasn’t going to play second base for the Washington Senators, either (his other fantasy). “Dad always said when I went to Johns Hopkins like him—”

“Oh, sweetie. You aren’t going to college.” Seeing the look on his face, his mother came over and rubbed his shoulder. “You think I could afford that? A woman alone? Times are hard.”

“Dad worked his way through. I could . . .” Pete fumbled. Dad had always said he could do that. That he could do anything.

“We’ll need you here, Pete. Around the house, helping with the boarders.

I rely on you.” His mother pecked his cheek with a kiss. “Thank goodness you can leave school at sixteen. Or is it fifteen?” she wondered, turning back to the kitchen and cutting off Ozzie and Harriet on the radio. Lina started to whine. “Lina, you are getting on my last nerve—”

Pete sat for a while, and then he quietly packed up his homework half finished. Get going, he told himself in his toughest Mickey Spillane voice, or I’ll slap your fuzzy chin all around the block. He went to get the cabbages, but not without scrawling a last line on his letter.

Dad—Are you ever coming home?

June was heading for July, Senator McCarthy was still waving lists all over the capital, and Pete was lugging ice up to the fourth floor, his last chore of the night, pondering if trading Steve Nagy to San Francisco for Elmer Singleton was a good move for the Senators’ postseason chances, when he heard a noise: the blat of a television set.

“Mrs. Grace? Miss Nora?” The doors to the two apartments stood open, and both women stood before the television set in Mrs. Grace’s room. She’d wedged it on top of the minuscule bureau, and President Truman was on the screen suited and serious, glasses flashing. On Sunday June 25, Communist forces attacked the Republic of Korea . . .

“Come in, Pete.” Absently, Mrs. Grace waved him in. Her hair was tied up in a scarf, she wore dungarees and an ancient Iowa State shirt, and she was frowning at the television. “You might have already read that we’re at war, but the president just made it official.”

“We’re not at war exactly,” Nora objected, sneezing into a handkerchief.

“Aren’t they saying it’s a police action.” She’d been home from work all day with a cold; normally Pete would have been thrilled to see her in her cotton wrapper with her soft brown hair loose, but he couldn’t take his eyes off President Truman. Just a neat little man with glasses, the man no one really wanted because for so long the word President went automatically with Roosevelt . . .

By their actions in Korea, Communist leaders have demonstrated their contempt for the basic moral principles on which the United Nations is founded . . .

“He can call it a police action if he likes. We all know a war when we see one. People are just as dead whether it’s a war or a police action that kills them.” Mrs. Grace took a tumbler off the shelf over the bureau and drew a glass of sun tea from the mason jar. “Drink that, Nora, it’ll knock the sniffles right out of you—”

“Is that the television I’m hearing?” a voice called up from the third-floor landing. “What’s Truman gassing on about now?”

“Come on up,” Mrs. Grace called, and soon red-haired Claire Hallett was standing next to Nora and frowning at the television, and so was Arlene Hupp with her drilling eyes and ribboned ponytail, and even old Mrs. Reka Muller stumped up the stairs to join them, swathed in paisley shawls, her gray hair scraped into a straggling knot.

The Communist invasion was launched in great force, with planes, tanks, and artillery. The size of the attack, and the speed with which it was followed up, make it perfectly plain that it had been plotted long in advance.

Pete shivered. He vaguely remembered seeing headlines about Korea over the last few weeks, but he’d been more concerned with the Senators’ pitching roster, with his new job sweeping up fern fronds and snippings of baby’s breath at Moonlight Magnolias, with dodging his mother’s endless list of summer chores. He wasn’t sure where Korea even was, and now the president stood on television looking worried about it. Pete had a sudden vivid memory of hearing about the Pearl Harbor attack on the radio—he’d been just four years old; he didn’t really remember what the announcer had said, only that it interrupted a show his father was listening to. How horribly pale Dad had gotten, sitting there in his chair gripping Pete so hard Pete remembered squirming. Dad had been gone with the Marines just two weeks later, Mom saying He couldn’t wait to leave us! If it hadn’t been the war, it would have been some other excuse . . .

Pete shivered again, and Nora laid an arm around his shoulders but he was too queasy to enjoy it.

The Soviet government has said many times that it wants peace in the world, but its attitude toward this act of aggression against the Republic of Korea . . .

“Soviets,” Arlene sniffed. “Of course the Reds are in the middle of this!”

Mrs. Grace shushed her, drawing glass after glass of sun tea and passing them down. Mrs. Fliss knocked at the open door, baby Angela crying fretfully against her shoulder.

“I brought jammy dodgers,” she said in her English clip, presenting a plate heaped with some kind of jam-filled cookies, and then the whole room was full of the Briarwood women, all gulping sun tea and munching cookies as they watched the light gleam off President Truman’s glasses.

The American people are unified in their belief in democratic freedom.

We are united in detesting Communist slavery . . . President Truman

intoned, looking resolute, and the lump in Pete’s throat grew.

When it was finally over and some studio music replaced the presidential broadcast, they all stood looking at one another.

“Szar,” old Reka Muller said suddenly and concisely, and Pete had no idea what that meant, but he thought he could guess.

“I quite agree,” said Grace. Fishing under her narrow bed, she came out with an unopened bottle of gin. “Given the occasion,” she said as she dumped about half into the mason jar of sun tea.

Everyone filled up, even Arlene Hupp, who always told anyone who asked (and anyone who didn’t) that she never touched liquor. It was Arlene who tossed her head now and said with presidential confidence, “The Russkies will use this as an excuse to invade.”

“Oh, yes.” Claire rolled her eyes. “Ivans and Pyotrs just dropping out of the sky, all over Foggy Bottom.”

“You laugh, but they’ve been making preparations for years. They’ve got the Bomb and they’re itching to use it. Once Korea goes red,” Arlene said ominously, “they’ll set their sights on us.”

“We have no way of knowing that,” Nora objected, sneezing into her sodden handkerchief.

“You may have your nose buried in fusty old documents over at the National Archives, but I work for HUAC—”

“Oh yes, you work for HUAC,” Claire snorted. “You and Senator McCarthy are bosom confidantes, I’m sure.”

“—and you wouldn’t believe the things I hear,” Arlene finished, ponytail bobbing. “If I was allowed to repeat what the men at work tell me . . .”

“I make it a policy never to believe more than a third of what men tell me,” Mrs. Grace said with her amused, half-lidded smile. “At work or anywhere. Who wants a sandwich? Paranoia really works up the old appetite.”

“You won’t call it paranoia when poor Pete’s having to do duck-and- cover drills in school this fall,” Arlene protested.

But somehow Mrs. Grace shoveled her into the tiny kitchen area to slab day-old bread together with peanut butter and jelly, and Pete was eyeing the last of the jammy dodgers (what kind of name for a cookie was that?) when Mrs. Grace came back to press a stack of handkerchiefs on Nora and turn to Mrs. Fliss. “You’re looking quite pale there; let me take the baby.”

“What if my Dan gets posted to Korea?” Fliss burst out. “He’s getting out in four more months. We’re supposed to go bloody house hunting—”

“No sense borrowing trouble.” Pete couldn’t help but be impressed by how calm Mrs. Grace was, burping Angela against one shoulder, removing the bottle of gin from old Mrs. Muller, who was sucking it down right from the neck. “Reka, really, that’s enough.” How did she already know everyone’s names, speak with such easy authority? She’d only been here a few weeks.

“Kurva,” the old woman mumbled, glaring at Mrs. Grace, but she released the bottle. Lina came clumping up the stairs then, getting into Pete’s way as he reached for the last jammy dodger. His head was all buzzy and he didn’t know why.

“I wanna cookie,” Lina whined the moment she saw the plate, opening the icebox at just the wrong moment and spilling ice everywhere. Pete remembered he’d left the bag of ice on the landing outside, probably melted by now. His mother would skin him. His eyes burned.

“I want a cookie,” Lina persisted, knocking the loaf of bread to the floor.

“Can I ask Mrs. Fliss? Can I, can I, can I, can I, can I—”

“Lina, maybe you didn’t notice that war just broke out,” Pete snapped.

His little sister glowered at him and went to glom herself onto Mrs. Grace.

“—all being entirely too casual about this,” Arlene was tutting, ferrying sandwiches out of the kitchen area. “You really think the Russkies won’t invade? The Commies have been making preparations for years. They’re in our schools, they’re infesting Hollywood so they can put their propaganda in our movies—did you see the list that came out in Red Channels? If Orson Welles and Leonard Bernstein are Communists, anyone could— Oh no, I’m not taking a sandwich. I’ve sworn off bread, a girl has to watch her figure.”

“Oh for god’s sake,” Claire muttered, cramming down a peanut butter and jelly. Mrs. Grace was fixing Fliss a glass of sun tea one-handed as she juggled the baby; Nora had turned the radio on to the sound of Red Foley warbling “Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy”; Mrs. Muller was scattering sandwich crumbs and Hungarian curses; and baby Angela had stopped crying in Grace’s arms. It was the kind of gathering Pete had always wistfully imagined happening here at Briarwood House, but never did.

And he couldn’t enjoy it, not a bit.

“Goodness, Pete, you don’t have to do that,” Mrs. Grace exclaimed when the last crumb was eaten, the last bit of sun tea drunk, the last boarder trailed off downstairs to her own room. Pete had carried all the dishes into the bathroom on the landing and was washing up in the tiny sink. “I don’t believe in doing dishes right after a party. Kills the mood too quickly.”

“Funny kind of party,” he mumbled, bringing in a load of wet plates.

“Watching the president declare war.”

“Police action.” Mrs. Grace gave her sleepy smile, spreading out a towel for the plates to dry. “And you’re quite wrong, Pete—it’s times of crisis that produce the best parties. Who knows if I’d ever get all my fellow boarders up here without a television set and Mr. Truman? Goodness, that little Arlene Hupp is snippy, but if she’s one of those women who’s always on a diet, I can see why. Swearing off bread, that’s enough to put anyone in a temper . . .”

To Pete’s horror, he burst into tears. Stood there in the middle of Mrs. Grace’s tiny green-walled shoebox and bawled, hands over his face like a baby.

If she’d tried to hug him, he’d have flat-out died. Sunk through the floor and died. But she just pressed him gently toward the single armchair, and then she withdrew back to the kitchen area where he dimly heard the icebox opening. When he finally stopped bawling and was able to lift his shame- flushed, tear-wet face up toward hers, she was standing with a cigarette in one hand and yet another plate of sandwiches in the other. “Here,” she said.

“Boys your age are always hungry.”

She’d made about twelve sandwiches. He hadn’t managed to eat at the impromptu party, but suddenly he was ravenous. He took the plate, muttering, “Mom says I’m greedy.”

“You’re not greedy, you’re growing. Eat up.” He hoped she wouldn’t start probing—when an adult nailed you with that look of piercing concern, you knew you were really in for it—but she turned away, taking a drag off her cigarette as he plowed into the sandwiches. It felt like the first time he’d really been able to fill his stomach in months. But once the food was gone he’d have to look up, probably explain himself, and he felt his cheeks flush dully again.

“’M sorry,” he mumbled through a mouthful of tuna.

“For what?” Mrs. Grace replied, apparently examining the green wall by the window.

“Detective Mike Hammer never cries.” Pete swiped at his eyes. “Even when his best friend is gunned down in cold blood.”

“Mmm. I don’t think Detective Mike Hammer is the best example to follow, you know. In more ways than one. Contrary to what the good detective thinks, a great many women don’t really like being called dames, and a man is still a man if he sheds the occasional tear. Maybe take a break from Mr. Spillane, and try Monsieur Dumas?” She tapped a paperback copy of The Three Musketeers that lay on her tiny bureau, then stood back, still examining the wall. “These green walls wouldn’t be so dreadful with a bit of decoration. You know I trained as an artist? I’m no Monet, but I can sketch—thought I’d be an illustrator for children’s books or something. I wonder if I still have my old drawing pencils . . .” She stubbed out the cigarette and went rummaging under the bed. “I don’t think you’re crying your eyes out because of the Communist menace in Korea,” she said over one shoulder. “What’s eating you, Hammerin’ Pete?”

He stared down at the empty plate. Somehow he’d crammed down that entire enormous heap of sandwiches. “War ruins everything.”

“How very wise of you to realize that. Most boys your age are only a few years removed from playing Nazis and Allies with imaginary guns.” She fished some artists’ pencils out of a shoebox. “What did war ruin for Pete

Nilsson of Briarwood House?”

“My dad,” Pete said softly.

Mrs. Grace came to the narrow strip of wall by the window, settled on the floor cross-legged, and began to sketch right onto the bilious green paint near the baseboard. The sound of a saxophone drifted through the window —next door, Joe Reiss was playing jazz riffs again, despite the late hour.

Pete found himself going on, chasing a few crumbs around the plate.

“Dad was wounded at Saipan . . . He got better after the war, but not really.

He’d sit staring out the window, and if he wasn’t doing that he was missing work. He and Mom were always shouting, and finally two years ago he left.

Just left and got a job in New Jersey. And everything started going wrong.”

Mrs. Grace’s pencil never stopped moving, flick-flick over the green wall, outlining something long and sinuous. “Like what?”

Pete didn’t even know how to put it into words. Breakfast turning from bacon and pancakes around a family table to those horrible rubbery scrambled eggs at a table full of strangers. A list of chores in Mom’s sharp printing, never getting any shorter no matter how many he ticked off before

school. Lina turning from a sunny little girl to a sulky, clingy lump who could barely read the label on a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, much less a book. His mother’s plan for him to drop out of school in a few more years so he could be the Briarwood House handyman—no high school varsity baseball, no Johns Hopkins.

No Thursday nights in the kitchen helping Dad make Swedish meatballs.

No future.

He tried to say some of that, talking down to his lap, halting voice barely rising above the saxophone scales. Mrs. Grace never looked at him, thank God. Just kept drawing on the wall, rising to her knees as the sketched lines worked their way higher, then to her feet. “You’re very young to be concluding you have no future,” she said eventually, when he stuttered to a halt.

“I don’t,” Pete said. He didn’t say Mom will make sure of that, but he thought it, all right. Briarwood House handyman, assistant florist, probably a third job in there as soon as he dropped out of school—he could see it all, and guilt roiled in his stomach because he wanted to love his mother, and sometimes what pulsed through him came horribly close to hate. “Mom keeps planning our lives out like everything’s set in stone and we’re already old and we’ve already lived here forever. And that’s okay for me,” he managed to say around the lump in his throat. “It’s Lina I keep thinking about. She doesn’t have friends at school—with that lazy eye of hers they all call her Cross-Eyes, and she’s struggling in all her schoolwork, and people don’t like little girls who aren’t cute. If they aren’t cute, they have to make it up by being smart or charming or—” Trying to put his finger on it.

“But she isn’t. She just sulks and scowls and clings so hard to people, they want to scrape her off like a wad of gum. She wants a proper family, an Ozzie and Harriet Nelson family, and she doesn’t have that—so she needs school. She needs people who care, and all she has is me because Mom’s too busy. And when Lina drops out of school, too, because Mom thinks she can save money if Lina makes all the boarders’ beds and does the scrambled eggs in the morning, she’ll just . . . fall. Right through the cracks. And I don’t know if I’ll be able to catch her. And I have to, right? Because that’s what big brothers do. But what if I can’t?”

And what if the world blew up because of the atom bomb? Because that was the world they lived in now, where everything could disappear into a mushroom cloud at any moment. And somehow Pete kept thinking that it

could all get fixed—Lina, Briarwood House, the bomb—if Dad would just come back. Stupid, because did he really want the version of Dad that sat staring out a window and got into shouting matches with Mom?

It would be better than nothing, Pete thought, or maybe just hoped. But there was no point, because Dad hadn’t answered a single one of Pete’s letters in two years, hadn’t made a single telephone call, and Mom was quick to tell him and Lina that there hadn’t been any money sent either.

“Your father doesn’t care,” she said over and over, and in this at least, Pete had to conclude she was probably right.

He swallowed, still staring down at a plate strewn with sandwich crumbs, and he finally let himself say it out loud. Let himself say the thing he’d been dreading to even think. “Dad’s never coming home.”

“Maybe not,” said Mrs. Grace.

He cried again for a while, softly. Mrs. Grace kept sketching up the wall.

It was a vine, Pete saw through his tear-blurred eyes—a sinuous, fantastical vine winding vertically alongside the window, then traveling along the edge of the slanting ceiling beside it. Mrs. Grace had to stand on the bed to draw that high.

“I’ll extend the vine clear to the other side of the room,” she decided.

“Get some watercolors, do a cascade of flowers in all colors . . . Life really hasn’t been very fair to you, Pete. I’m sorry about that.”

“Mom says life isn’t fair and that’s all there is to it.”

“Your mother says that to justify the fact that she isn’t being fair to you,”

Mrs. Grace said calmly. “Which is mostly what people mean when they say ‘life isn’t fair.’ It isn’t, which is why people should endeavor to be more fair to one another, not less.”

Pete puzzled through that one. Mrs. Grace went on, outlining a curly leaf on the sketched vine.

“It isn’t fair that your father left, that you’ve been saddled with too much work in a house full of strangers, or that you’re apparently willing to let your own life land on the rubbish heap as long as the same doesn’t happen to your sister. It’s not fair—but it’s what you’ve got.”

“Thanks,” said Pete rather flatly. As far as pep talks went, this one was a

real dud.

“But I will point out one thing.”

“What’s that?”

Grace March looked down at him, smiling. “You aren’t alone.”

“I feel alone,” Pete said, the lump coming up in his throat again. “I feel alone all the time.” And maybe that was the worst of it. He was going to high school soon where he’d be a minnow in a big unfriendly pond, a freshman with pimples, fit only for getting stuffed into lockers and ignored in the cafeteria—and here at Briarwood House he was the only boy in a house full of strangers who didn’t even notice one another most of the time, much less him. “No one ever talks to each other here.”

Mrs. Grace stepped down off the bed. “Maybe we can fix that.”

Every Thursday night for as long as Pete could remember, his mother went out to her bridge club at six. The ladies played for nickels, and his mother was a demon at cards, so she never missed the chance to bring home a small sackful of change. He raced through the front door at 5:48, sprinting down the street from Moonlight Magnolias—the florist liked to keep him till the very last minute, wrapping up bouquets and sweeping up leaf clippings.

“You’re late,” his mom snapped, already in her coat and hat. “There’s a casserole for you and Lina; for heaven’s sake, try to heat it up without burning it this time. I’ll be back by nine. What’s that?” she asked, looking at the little nosegay of slightly wilted carnations.

“Mr. Winston let me make it up out of the day-old flowers.” Pete had tied it all together with a scrap of ribbon in his mother’s favorite mauve. He didn’t think he’d been a very good son lately—downright resentful and ungrateful, really, even if just inside his own head. So he offered her the flowers, smiling. “For you, Mom.”

“Oh. Well, that’s nice.” She regarded the flowers, then thrust them back at him. “Find a vase or something, I’m going to be late—” And out she went, heels clicking. Pete sighed, found his dad’s old Washington Senators beer mug to jam the flowers into, opened the oven to give the casserole a poke—it practically hissed at his touch—and dug Mrs. Grace’s copy of The Three Musketeers out of his back pocket. He’d just gotten to the affair of the queen’s diamonds, and who knew how that was going to turn out with Milady de Winter scheming around, when Mrs. Grace popped her head into the kitchen almost as if she’d been waiting for the door to close behind Pete’s mother.

“I’m afraid I need your help upstairs, Pete. I’m in a terrible fix.”

He raced upstairs, longing to be the man of the hour who solves a terrible fix. But when he got to Mrs. Grace’s apartment, all he saw was a pile of

ingredients—packages of ground meat, a pint of milk, a massive onion— and a man standing over it. Lanky, wide-shouldered, maybe thirty, with ash- fair hair and laugh crinkles at his eyes. “No idea what we do with all this, Gracie,” he said as Grace brought Pete in. “You the expert, sport?”

“Um,” Pete said, recognizing Joe Reiss, who lived over Rosenberg’s Deli next door. Pete’s mother always sniffed at Joe, because he went around in worn-out blue jeans and threadbare T-shirts (common!), because he played in a jazz trio at the Amber Club with a Negro drummer and a Negro bassist (unnatural!), and because the three of them were always practicing with the windows open (noisy!). But Pete liked the jazz, which he could imagine Detective Mike Hammer enjoying with a dame on his arm, so he smiled tentatively at Joe before remembering. “Um, no male visitors allowed, Mrs. Grace. Not in the upper rooms—only in the parlor between the hours of five and six thirty,” he recited.

“Right. We know the rule, now we’re going to ignore it.” Mrs. Grace passed Pete a wooden spoon and turned to the heap of ingredients. “So . . .

Swedish meatballs. We’re throwing a dinner party, and you’re the chef.”

Pete blinked. “I have a casserole to heat up downstairs.”

“What kind?”

“Tuna, potato chip, and mushroom soup.” Fast and cheap, one of his mother’s specialties.

Mrs. Grace stared, those sleepy golden-brown eyes opening up all the way. “Pete. The Founding Fathers did not create this great nation of ours so that we could let them down by combining canned tuna with instant mushroom soup. That is not a casserole, that is a war crime. Go downstairs and dump it in the trash this instant, and bring Lina back up. Tonight you’re both eating Swedish meatballs—if you can show us how it can be done on a hot plate.”

“I can’t—” Pete began. But he did remember how to make Swedish meatballs—hadn’t he watched Dad do it every Thursday night for years?

Start with a finely minced onion, he could hear Dad saying. A finely minced onion makes just about everything better, Peterino, unless you’re baking a cake. That’s what your mormor used to say, and she was making this back in Malmö before I was born . . . Slowly, Pete picked up a knife, clumsily chopping up the onion and then some garlic. Mom didn’t use any spices but salt and pepper—“That’s for foreigners,” she’d sniff—but Mormor had sworn by garlic, or so Dad said.

“Jesus Christ on a crutch, who’s cooking?” Nora put her head round the door, still in her trim slate-gray suit from a day at the National Archives.

Pete was now adding butter to the pan on the hot plate, and Mrs. Grace was mashing a bowl of diced bread scraps and milk into a slurry at his direction.

“Come in,” Mrs. Grace called. “We need someone to combine the beef and the pork. Just do whatever Pete tells you.”

“Your servant, sir.” Nora grinned, padding into the room in her stocking feet, and Pete’s heart did a flip-flop. Joe squeezed out into the hall to make room, taking up the guitar he’d stashed on the landing, and started strumming something that sounded like Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Lina had glued herself to his elbow, eyes as big as saucers.

“Who’s that playing?” Mrs. Fliss’s English voice floated up. “And what’s that smell?” By now Nora was combining the spiced meat with the soaked bread under Pete’s shy direction, and somehow the room was full. Claire with red hair exploding over her plump shoulders, the widow from 3A who Pete hardly ever saw, Fliss with Angela in her arms begging Joe “Please don’t stop playing, the baby’s been grizzling for hours and now she’s finally nodding off!” He groused “Thanks a lot!” but amiably, Gershwin changing to Duke Ellington. Soon pretty, peevish Arlene was poking her head around the door exclaiming “You aren’t supposed to have men up here, I could tell Mrs. Nilsson!” but Mrs. Grace waved her inside anyway.

“I thought you didn’t like Arlene,” Pete whispered, rolling ground meat into balls and adding them to the sizzling skillet, and Mrs. Grace just whispered back, “A successful dinner party needs just one person all the others loathe, Pete—it gives everyone something to unite against.” Pete found himself grinning when Arlene broke off sniping about house rules and moaned, “What is that smell? I can’t have red meat, not on my new regime—”

“Diets might be good for the waistline but not for the temperament,”

Grace advised. “Eat the red meat, sugar pie.”

“Well, maybe just this once . . .”

Three cheers for Mormor’s recipe from Malmö. Ancient Mrs. Reka Muller stumped up bearing a bottle of schnapps, and Mrs. Grace opened a little tray of watercolor paints and began dabbing blue flowers rather carelessly onto the sketched vine, which now stretched the whole length of the room. “There now, don’t you feel pretty?” she asked the wall, then

handed the paintbrush to Nora. “Add a flower, why don’t you—” and the Irish girl started swirling some petals onto the wall.

Maybe it wasn’t the most natural of crowds—none of the women except Mrs. Grace looked entirely easy with one another; Mrs. Muller’s face could have soured milk; Arlene and Claire were crabbing at each other—but the air popped and snapped the way the atmosphere at Briarwood House rarely did. It jived, full of the smell of the Nilsson family Thursday-night meatballs.

“This sauce needs to simmer,” Pete announced, cracking a lid over the pan on the hot plate. “Fifteen minutes—” And he flapped his dish towel at the chorus of female groans protesting they could not possibly wait that long.

“Hush, you folks,” said Mrs. Grace in her Iowa drawl. “Hammerin’ Pete is the cook and the man of the house, so as far as dinner tonight is concerned, what he says goes.”

Pete blushed, slipping out onto the landing where Joe Reiss was still noodling about on his guitar. “I thought you played saxophone?” Pete ventured.

“Sax, guitar, clarinet, I play everything.” He finished up with some kind of fancy run. “Always tenor sax for the Amber Club.”

“Is it true that’s a mobster club?” Pete couldn’t help asking. Everyone knew the Warring family ran Foggy Bottom—ran a lot of the District—and you heard things about where (and how) they did business. The numbers business, the racketeering business, illegal liquor . . . Pete had a long- running fantasy where he cleaned up Foggy Bottom with a lot of cold iron and hot lead and saw all the Warring brothers into a cell to wait for Old Sparky. This fantasy usually ended with him and a dame who looked like Nora out on the town with her in a mink and him in an arm sling from his final shoot-out.

Joe shrugged. “Mobsters tip better than senators, and I’ve played for both.”

Pete felt himself going bug-eyed. “You’re the luckiest, Mr. Reiss.”

“Jesus, call me Joe. I hear Mr. Reiss, I start looking around for my dad telling me to stop being a jazz bum and sell sump pumps at the hardware store in Fort Wayne, Indiana. And you’re the lucky one, sport.” Joe nodded into Grace’s tiny green-walled room, thick with the smells of meatballs and hot coffee. Claire was lighting a Lucky Strike, old Mrs. Muller was sourly

rocking baby Angela on her lapful of shawls, the widow from 3A was adding a misshapen yellow flower to the painted wall vine. “Growing up in a houseful of women? You are going to know everything about the fairer sex by the time you’re old enough to date.”

Pete blinked. He’d never thought of it that way before.

“Got a harmonica?” Joe’s long-fingered hands did a swift ripple over the guitar strings. “Thought I saw you noodling on one this summer.”

“I can play a bit.”

“Bring it next door sometime; we’ll jam. Some tunes need a bit of

harmonica.”

“My mom won’t—”

“Learn to sneak around,” Joe advised. “That’s the other thing you’ll need to know by the time you’re old enough to date.” He began to play again, improvising on “Now’s the Time.” Pete went back inside, rather dazedly.

Just go jam with a jazz trio, anytime he liked. Mom wouldn’t like it . . .

Well, Mom didn’t have to know, did she?

“How was everything?” his mother asked a few hours later, taking off her coat. She looked around with her usual sharp eyes, but the house was hushed, the kitchen immaculate, Lina gone up to bed.

Pete, stuffed with meatballs and jazz and conversation, thinking of the uncooked casserole he and his sister had buried joyously at the bottom of the trash can, gave a wide, innocent smile. “Quiet as a tomb, Mom.”

Pete’s Swedish Meatballs

3 cups diced stale bread, preferably sourdough 1/2 cup whole milk

1 pound ground beef

1 pound ground pork

1 pound ground lamb

1/2 teaspoon allspice

1/2 teaspoon garlic powder 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1 tablespoon ground thyme

Pinch of salt 1/2 cup finely minced white onion

1 egg 1 egg yolk 3 tablespoons freshly ground black pepper

2 tablespoons flour

4 tablespoons unsalted butter

1 cup white wine 1/2 cup heavy cream

1 teaspoon soy sauce or anchovy paste

1. Place the diced bread in a large mixing bowl, slowly add milk, and mix thoroughly, mashing until a slurry is produced. If necessary, add a dash of cream to achieve a smooth, porridge-like consistency.

2. Add the ground beef, pork, lamb, allspice, garlic powder, nutmeg, thyme, and salt to the bowl with bread/milk mixture and stir to combine. Add the onion, egg, egg yolk, and pepper, and sprinkle on 1 tablespoon of the flour. Beat together until the texture is smooth and you can form meatballs with your hands without the mixture falling apart. Add a little more flour to bind if necessary, then refrigerate the meat mixture for 20 minutes.

3. While the meat chills, melt 3 tablespoons of the butter in a large skillet over medium-low heat. Reduce heat to low to prevent burning. Remove the meat mixture from the refrigerator and form 1/2it into 1- to 1-inch meatballs, using a large baking sheet as a landing zone.

4. Place about 10 meatballs into the skillet and cook on medium-low, rotating meatballs in the butter to ensure browning on all sides.

Once meatballs are browned and retaining their shape, cover the skillet with a lid and cook for an additional 20 minutes— uncovering every 5 minutes to stir briefly and add a splash of

white wine if the skillet is looking dry, then re-cover. This will help the meatballs to steam and cook all the way through.

5. Slice a meatball in half to test for doneness. If it’s firm to the touch and lightly pink inside, remove the rest from the skillet to a serving bowl and repeat steps 4 and 5 with the remaining meatballs. Meatballs will continue cooking after being removed from the heat.

6. Once all the meatballs are cooked and transferred to the serving bowl, reduce the heat under the skillet to low. Scrape the bottom to remove browned bits, then add the remaining white wine, remaining butter, remaining flour, the heavy cream, and the soy sauce. Stir until smooth, cooking over low to medium-low heat until the sauce coats the back of a spoon.

7. Eat as a dinner party appetizer with lingonberry jam and plenty of toothpicks, or serve with buttered egg noodles or mashed potatoes as a main course, while listening to “I Wanna Be Loved” by the Andrews Sisters.

“You can take these home with you, Pete,” the florist at Moonlight Magnolias grunted, nodding at the enormous sheaf of peach-gold roses lying on the counter in a white paper cone. “They’re for that Irish girl at your mother’s house, Miss Walsh.”

Pete peeked at the card, but it was blank except for a big, slashed X. For a moment he was tempted to junk the card and give the flowers to Nora himself, but Athos from The Three Musketeers would never do anything so underhanded and dastardly, so Pete lugged the roses home and watched Nora blush clear to the tips of her ears when he handed them over. He’d have given a kidney to know how to make a girl look that dreamy, because he knew it was more than just a sheaf of expensive roses. Maybe that was something he’d figure out, if he really was going to grow up knowing everything there was to know about women. He figured he had a few years before he’d be asking girls on dates, so he’d better start applying himself.

There was the usual list of Do This, Do That from his mother—weed the garden, sweep the front stoop, mop the kitchen, wax the banisters—but he had something else to do first. Something he’d been putting off. Taking a

deep breath, he pulled up at the hall table with a fresh sheet of paper and wrote:

Dear Dad, I won’t be writing to you anymore. I guess you aren’t interested in hearing from me, since you don’t write back. I wish you’d come home, but I guess you aren’t interested in doing that either. Thirteen’s a little young to start being the man of the house, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do it. It’s not fair, but I can do it. I’m not alone here.

Pete tried to think what else to write, but there didn’t really seem to be anything else to say. So he signed his letter and sealed it, wrote the New Jersey address out for what he figured was the last time, and put it out for mailing. His heart was thumping like he’d just run a fast block, but he also felt oddly, grimly satisfied. He didn’t know what to feel. He just knew that he was finished with it.

“Peeeeeeeeete—” Lina ran out of the kitchen with oven gloves on her hands and something on a baking sheet billowing smoke. “What did I dooooooo?”

Pete inspected the scorched lumps. “Lina-kins, I don’t think peanut butter cookies need to be broiled.”

“I thought it would make them done faster,” she wailed.

“Why are you making cookies, anyway?”

She scuffed one foot along the floor. “I volunteered to bring them for

Sunday school, because . . .”

“Because?”

“Nobody likes me there,” she whispered. “They call me Cross-Eyes and Wall-Eyes. I thought maybe if I brought cookies . . . But I can’t read the recipe so good, and if I ask Mom she’ll just say she doesn’t have time and I should give up the whole idea. And then they’ll really hate me in Sunday school.”

Rage went through Pete like one-eyed Rochefort’s rapier in The Three Musketeers. All right, so his sister didn’t read so good. And their mother would tell her to give up the whole idea, and those Sunday school brats would call her names even more. And she’d start believing it, and that was the first step toward her falling through the cracks—the thing he hadn’t realized he dreaded till he fumblingly articulated it to Mrs. Grace.

“Lina-kins,” he said, jutting his jaw at an angle that was hopefully resolute and Musketeer-ish. “Mix up another batch and turn the oven down

to three fifty.” He had no idea if that was the correct temperature or not.

Why didn’t they have a proper cookbook like houses were supposed to have, with the smiling lady on the cover? Betty Somebody. “We’re going to make perfect peanut butter cookies if it takes us all day. And while they cook we’ll practice your reading,” he bargained, seizing the opportunity.

“Because if you can’t read recipes, how are you going to learn to bake?”

He hoped for a smile, but she just whined, “Peeeeeete, you’re bossy.” Yet she was lumbering back into the kitchen and reaching for the oven dials, and he’d take that—he’d take it any day. Maybe Dad was never coming home and maybe the world could end in a mushroom cloud at any moment, but Lina was trying again and he was going to see to it that this time things panned out for her. Pete grabbed the second bouquet he’d brought home from Moonlight Magnolias and hoofed it upstairs. “Can Lina bring dessert to the next supper club night?” he asked when Mrs. Grace answered his knock.

“Of course. Fliss is making us all some British specialty called bubble and squeak—I didn’t dare ask what on earth it was. I’m sure it’ll be as perfect as her jammy dodgers. How a woman with a baby keeps herself so pretty and crisp and bakes up a storm and keeps her room looking like a bandbox, I have no idea.”

“Just so we’re clear, Lina’s cookies are going to be awful,” Pete said.

“We need to help her get better. We have to.”

“We’ll have her fit for the Pillsbury Bake-Off in no time, Hammerin’ Pete.” Mrs. Grace gave a little salute. She was wearing one of Joe Reiss’s shirts tied up around the waist over her floral skirt, and Pete realized, They’re lovers with a certain thrill of mixed shock and laughter. Shock because he could just hear his mother trumpeting TRAMP, and laughter because skinny Pete Nilsson had done a bit of changing in the nearly two months since Mrs. Grace March had moved into Briarwood House. He was not only having all kinds of sophisticated realizations about things that went on between men and women (in his own house!), he was already realizing that he wasn’t going to rat Mrs. Grace out to his mother about it. Because he didn’t think Grace March was a tramp, and his mother would disagree and kick her out, and he knew this absolutely: that his mother was sometimes utterly, meanly, completely wrong, and he didn’t have to agree with her when she was.

He didn’t have to fight her about it, either. He could just . . . get around her. He was already trying to figure out how to do that—not just on the little things like chores, but on the bigger things, like those special prescription glasses that Lina needed. Maybe he could find a way to get them for her.

And he could make sure Lina finished school, somehow. He might not be able to get around Mom’s determination that he drop out as soon as possible, but he was damned if she’d do the same when his sister came of age.

“Lina can bring whatever kitchen horror she likes,” Mrs. Grace was saying. “We’ll all bill and coo.” She sniffed the air. “Is something burning?”

“Probably.” Pete brought out the nosegay he’d been hiding behind his back: three red carnations, only slightly wilted, in a sheaf of ferns. “For you, Mrs. Grace,” he said, sweeping an imaginary feathered hat from his head, bowing over one foot extended in its imaginary lace-topped musketeer’s boot. “‘Tell me what queen has a servant more ardent,’” he intoned in Dumas’s best style.

“Goodness,” Mrs. Grace said, taking the flowers and bringing them to her nose. “You are learning fast.”

And Pete raced down the stairs, hollering “Got that oven hot, Lina?” and grinning fit to beat the band.

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