Andy didn’t talk much on these forays into people’s places, their bathrooms and roofs and backyards, but he didn’t have to. He liked to listen to Mr. Sills talking about basketball—big plays, memorable shots, a best-of-seven playoff series that had come down to the final seconds of the last game. Mr. Sills would show Andy what he was doing while he worked, his big fingers deft and precise: “This is a Phillips-head screwdriver. That’s what we need here—see how the screw’s got a cross on top, not a straight line?” Andy loved the names of the tools—levels and hex keys, needle-nose pliers and socket wrenches. He liked how carefully Mr. Sills kept them, wiping them down with a clean, oiled cloth after each use, putting each wrench and screwdriver into its own compartment in his toolbox. He liked being able to do little jobs around his own house, unsticking a window or tightening a drawer pull. “That’s a man’s job,” Mr. Sills had told him when Andy had first started following him around. “A man takes care of his house, and a man takes care of his tools.”
On his days off, Mr. Sills went antiquing, which, he’d told Andy, he used to do with Mrs. Sills before she’d passed. He made the rounds of different thrift shops and consignment stores, driving his truck all over Philadelphia and South Jersey, talking back to the guys on sports radio. All the salespeople knew him and would put things aside for him—the magazines he liked, antique silver forks and spoons, Spode china in the Blue Italian pattern that he collected. In the shops that smelled like must and mothballs, yellowed paper and old clothes, Andy would page through comic books while Mr. Sills chatted with one of the old ladies who always seemed to be behind the cash registers. They would spend the morning shopping, then have a late-afternoon lunch of thick, juicy sandwiches from John’s Roast Pork, a cinder-block shack next to the train tracks where men in suits and ladies in high heels waited with construction workers and truck drivers. Lots of times, people thought Mr. Sills was Andy’s grandfather, Mr. Sills’s grandson, which made him feel like he’d swallowed something warm and sweet on a cold day. Sometimes Mr. Sills would call him son, and the word would catch in his heart like a hook.
For Christmas when he was twelve, he used some of his paper-route money to buy Mr. Sills the brass elephant bookends that he’d seen him admiring in a shop called Time and Again on South Street in Center City. At the same place, he bought his mother a necklace, a real pearl on a gold chain. It cost forty dollars (actually fifty, but the old lady behind the counter had said, “Forty for you”), and it was worth it to see his mother’s expression when he woke her up on Christmas and gave her the small square box, wrapped in red paper with a gold ribbon.
“It’s too much,” she’d said, and tilted her head up toward the ceiling, blinking, the way she did when she was trying not to cry, even though it was so early that she hadn’t put on her foundation yet, or the mascara that turned her lashes into stiff, bristly spider legs. Her hair, uncombed and unteased, hung in soft waves over her cheeks. She looked as young as a teenager in her plaid pajamas and chenille robe as she got out of bed and went to her closet. “Here,” she said, sounding shy, handing him a rectangular package wrapped in Sunday’s comics. “I hope I got the right kind.”
Andy’s hopes weren’t high. Most years, Lori got him useful stuff—shirts for school, a new blanket, and bars of soap and toothbrushes for stocking stuffers. When he found the Nike Air Flight sneakers, white with a blue swoosh, he shouted with delight. “I hope they’re the right size,” Lori said, and Andy had hugged her and said, “They’re perfect.”
Since the big fight, Andy and his mother had made their own Christmas traditions. They’d open their presents first thing in the morning. Then Lori would bake the one thing she made from scratch, cinnamon rolls with yeast and honey and flour that made a dough that had to rise twice. They’d have cinnamon rolls and sliced ham for lunch. Then Lori would put a prestuffed chicken into the oven, and they would watch A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life on TV. Lori would drink eggnog and Andy would drink hot chocolate, topped with whipped cream, and every time the whipped cream was gone, he’d take the canister out of the refrigerator and spray another white ruffle on top. “Only on Christmas,” his mother would say, and kiss the top of his head. In the warm little row house, with his belly full of good food and the living room full of the blue glow from the television set and the lights from the Christmas tree that he and Mr. Sills had carried in together, Andy felt warm and safe. For the last two years they’d gotten a white Christmas. The plows would push high drifts up against the cars still parked on the street, and the wind would send silvery gusts of flakes twirling and spinning down the empty sidewalks, but inside, all was calm and all was bright. Lori would wear Andy’s necklace, and she’d put on a Santa hat in the morning, and by the end of the day it would be cockeyed, one side slipping down over her penciled-in eyebrow, her lipsticked mouth curved into a pretty smile, and Andy would think that no boy had ever loved his mother as much as he loved Lori.