Elaine Orr - Jolie Gentil 00.5 - Jolie and Scoobie High School Misadventures (7 page)

CHAPTER NINE

CHRISTMAS MORNING meant snow this year, which is only the case at the Jersey shore every few years. I stretched as I walked down the back stairs into the sitting room/kitchen combo. I had slept late because we had gotten home from church so late. “I’ll shovel in a couple of hours. Okay?”

“Makes sense,” Aunt Madge said
. “It’s supposed to stop by ten.”

I pulled a small package from behind my back
. “Merry Christmas.” I plopped it on the kitchen table next to her tea, and gave her a kiss. “Thanks for putting up with me.”

“There are days I even enjoy it
.” She tugged at my hair as I sat. “Merry Christmas.”

“Open it,” I commanded
. I had used babysitting money to get her the simple gold cross. That way it seemed more from me than if I had used my allowance.

“It’s lovely, Jolie
. And I like the shorter chain. It’s almost a choker.”

Petey barked from the back porch
. I ignored him. “You wear a lot of shirts with open collars. This’ll hit you right where the opening is.”

“It’s lovely
.” She put it on and fastened it behind her neck.

That’s when I caught the wonderful scent of apples and cinnamon
. “What smells so good?”

“On Christmas and Easter I make the same coffee cake your grandmother and I learned from our mother. It’s apples and cinnamon and a secret spice.”

I sniffed again. “I wish I’d known grandmother better. All I really remember is she kept her hair in a kind of severe bun or something.”

“She was very formal
. Well, a lot of women born in the 1920s were more reserved than women are today. But she had a good sense of humor.”

“Last night Thomas Edward and Hannah were talking about how their grandparents were dead
. I didn’t know what to say. Their parents just seem awfully young to have no parents.” I had thought about this in church last night, as I looked at a couple of families that had three generations sitting together.

Aunt Madge was thoughtful
. “Mid-thirties, aren’t they?  I guess people that age do often have parents. When I was young,” she caught my smirk and shook her finger at me, “people didn’t live as long.”

Before I could say anything the phone rang
. I walked over to the phone on the wall and picked it up.

“Jolie?”

“Scoobie!  How’s Vermont?  Is it snowing there?”

“We came back late last night
. My mom decided she wanted to be home for Christmas.”

“Wow
. That’s a lot of driving to just stay a couple of days,” I said. I mouthed Scoobie’s name to Aunt Madge. She gave a kind of noncommittal nod and began to pick up her tea cup and a couple of napkins from the table.

“Tell me about it
. Listen, they drove almost all night, so they’ll sleep a lot today.”

It sounded as if Scoobie was asking if he could come over
. “Hang on a minute.” I put my hand over the phone’s mouthpiece. “Aunt Madge, can Scoobie come over later?”

“Of course
. Tell him dinner’s a repeat of Thanksgiving.”

I grinned at her and then spoke into the phone again
. “Aunt Madge said if you can stand turkey come over at…”

“
One o’clock,” she said.

“I heard her
. I’ll see you then.” Scoobie actually sounded excited.

I told Aunt Madge what he had said, and added, “I wonder if it snowed all the way on their drive home?”

“That would make for treacherous driving,” she said.

Her back was to me and I thought she had an odd tone. “Do you think that maybe they didn’t really go?” I asked.

She faced me. “I didn’t say that, Jolie.”

“I know, I just…”  It suddenly seemed better not to consider whether Scoobie had lied
. “What can I do to help today?”

She turned and smiled
. “You can start by going upstairs and looking in the room two doors down from yours.”

Presents!  I felt like a six- year-old Hannah, and ran up to the third floor
. It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder why doors in my hallway were shut. Aunt Madge sometimes turns off the heating vents in rooms that aren’t being used, and then she shuts the door. I could hear Aunt Madge coming up the steps behind me.

“Wow!”  The small desk was finished in an oak stain and had two slots under the desk top for books
. I was running my hand over the top when Aunt Madge came in. I almost threw myself at her to give her a hug. “It’s great!”

“Goodness sakes, Jolie.”

“No one ever made me furniture.”

She smiled
. “Your Grandmother Alva used to make you some cute clothes.”

I thought about this for a moment
. “Yep.” I patted the desk. “This is really cool.”

She smiled
. “I can’t say it was easy finding time to do it when you weren’t paying attention. We can put it in your room now.”

I started to say we could wait for Scoobie, but instead we carried it the short distance down the hall, each holding one end
. It wasn’t big, but it was bigger than the make-shift desk I had crafted from the card table I’d found in the basement.

“We’ll pick up a card table chair for you
. Then you don’t have to keep bringing one in and out of the room.”

I had spent a lot of time studying on my bed
. Maybe having a desk would help me learn geometry.

SCOOBIE SHOWED UP at noon with some maple sugar candies for Aunt Madge. “Thanks for letting me come.”

She didn’t say anything about him coming early
. “Any time, Adam. You and Jolie can set the table in an hour or so.”

“Come up and see my desk,” I said
. “Aunt Madge made it.”

“Cool.”

If I had led a guy into my bedroom at home it would have seemed, well, odd. But Scoobie felt more like a girlfriend. No, I thought, that wasn’t right. He was a good friend.

Scoobie had never been upstairs in Aunt Madge’s Cozy Corner, and he didn’t quite keep pace with me as we walked down the third floor hall to my room
. He took in every painting on the walls and paused for a couple of seconds to look in the room next to mine. Aunt Madge had that one decorated in more neutral colors and once told me if she has single male guests she often puts them in that room. I figured he liked the plainness of the room.

“What do you think
?” I pointed to the desk.

“She’s pretty amazing, isn’t she?” he asked, and then glanced around the room
. “I never figured you for keeping a room this neat.”

“I’m not saying I do at home
. Why, is your room messy?” I asked.

He shrugged
. “Not really. Lots of books all over the place.”

At that I got up and went to a drawer and pulled out a small book that I had wrapped last night
. “I was going to give this to you on the first day back.”

Scoobie looked almost stunned
. “I didn’t get…”

“Don’t be a dork
. Besides,” I grinned at him, “who would I sit under the boardwalk with if you weren’t around. Open it!”

He
rewarded me with his cocky grin. “It’s not a copy of
How to Win Friends and Influence People,
is it?”

“Like you’d read it.”

He tore off the wrapping and looked at the brand new copy of
To Kill a Mockingbird
.

When he didn’t say anything for several seconds, I looked at him, wondering if I had somehow offended him
. “I knew your old copy had rubber bands around it…”

It actually looked as if he had tears in his eyes
. “This is the nicest gift anyone ever gave me.”

I laughed
. “Didn’t your English class talk about hyperbole?”

“Damn
. I didn’t think you even knew what that meant.”

“Hey, it’s Christmas, no insults
.” We turned to walk back downstairs. “You missed some really good cookies and hot chocolate at First Prez last night.”

“I thought you were babysitting with those kids you don’t like,” he said.

“That was earlier, remember? And they’re kind of growing on me. Not so whiney anymore.”

It had snowed longer than we had expected, only just stopping
. After making sure that Aunt Madge didn’t have any immediate stuff she needed help with in the kitchen, we headed outside with the snow shovel and broom.

It was wet snow, the kind that’s really good for snowmen and snowballs
. Much of Aunt Madge’s small yard is taken up with the parking lot for guests, but that was a good thing today because it gave us a lot of snow to roll up for snow people, as Scoobie called them.

Petey would run ten feet from us and run back
. It looked really funny to see his deep black fur in the white snow. It also took him about five tries to figure out that the snowballs Scoobie would throw for him to fetch were not something he could really bite. He had to keep licking snow off his nose.

“What do you have against anatomically correct snow women?” Scoobie asked, as I used the broom to sort of wipe the boobs off the female snow person.

“I’m cool with it.” I nodded my head to the B&B, which was behind me. “I don’t know if Aunt Madge would…”

There was a honk from a car pulling into the small lot
.

“Nuts!  My parents,” I said
. I sighed. “Come on. You can enjoy my mother.”

“I should go,” he said, quickly.

“If you leave now I’ll tell Sean O’Malley I think you’re gay.”

“Not that there’s anything wrong with that,” we said, together, quoting the Seinfeld show.

We were laughing as we walked to the car, and I was glad that we were. Maybe it would make my parents realize that I was getting along fine without them, maybe they’d decide if they left me in Ocean Alley for the second semester of junior year that I wouldn’t want to go home at all.
I wish.

To my great relief, Renée was with them
. When she got out of the car she was holding some kind of a pie. Scoobie stayed a bit behind me as I kissed my dad and walked to my mom’s side of the car. I was finding it much harder to stay angry now that they were here.

“Hi, mom
.” As I gave her a kiss I had a sudden rush of guilt. I had a pretty rose-colored scarf for my sister, but I hadn’t gotten either of my parents a present. I hoped Aunt Madge didn’t mention the small cross I had given to her.

“So, you’re talking to me?” she said as she shut the car door.

“Mother,” Renée said.

“Of course she’s talking to you!”  My father said this in his usual booming voice, which has just a trace of a Canadian accent
. He was born in Vermont, near the border with Canada, but he had cousins only a few miles away who were full-fledged Canadians. When I hear him speak French to them his accent sounds just like theirs.

“Hi to you too, mom,” I said, with memories of her trying to make me wear a dress to first grade when I wanted to wear a cool tee-shirt that said Niagara Falls, which we had visited over the summer.

I gave them each a quick look, trying not to stare. My mother is very trim, but her five-foot four frame looked as if she had lost some weight. It was kind of hard to tell with her coat on. My father is not trim, but he’s quite tall, so you don’t notice so much. It looked as if he had gained a bit.
Mother must be making him a lot of butterscotch brownies
.

My father stuck his hand out to Scoobie
. “Glad to meet you. Renée said you know how to build dog houses.”

I took a quick glance at Scoobie as I let my mother rest her hand on my arm for the walk from the car to the Cozy Corner’s side entrance
. My dad has a way of making people relax, and it seemed to be working on Scoobie.

“When do you guys leave for your trip?” I asked.

“Day after tomorrow,” she said.

Her response was very clipped
. Since I had told her how angry I was that she only wanted me home for two days, she must have thought I was criticizing her. I wasn’t. It was Christmas.

BY FOUR O’CLOCK when my parents and Renée left I was almost glad I was spending the year in Ocean Alley. If Scoobie hadn’t kind of nudged my elbow a couple of times at dinner I wouldn’t have been able to take one more of my mother’s descriptions of neat things she and my dad had done together since September. He seemed to nudge me when he thought she was especially talkative, like when she wondered if she should have tried to feed a dolphin at Sea World a fish. She had not done so because the fish were stinky, according to her.

I wished that Renée had not ridden down with them
. If she had brought her car she could have stayed at least overnight.

Scoobie had been very quiet all through dinner, and he kind of hinted that he wanted to leave as soon as we had the pie
. I gave him what the guys in homeroom call the evil eye. Except there was no consequence if he ignored me. Luckily, Scoobie got the point, and stayed.

“Why doesn’t your mother like camouflage pants?” he asked, but quietly, when she was in the bathroom and Renée had taken my dad into the backyard to show him Petey’s dog house.

“Not feminine enough,” I said.

“You don’t exactly dress like a guy,” he said.

“Nope, but you’ve seen my sister twice. Can you imagine her in camouflage pants?  My mother likes everything Renée does.”

He nodded, seemingly thinking
. “Maybe you could learn to make pies.”

IT WAS TOO COLD to spend a lot of time on the boardwalk, but in late January there were a couple of days when the temperature got to be fifty degrees and there wasn’t a lot of wind. Scoobie and I had walked past the many closed businesses and looked into the arcade twice.

“The owner should open it so we can stay warm,” Scoobie said.

“He barely has air-conditioning in the summer. Maybe he doesn’t even have heat,” I said.

“Cheapskate,” he muttered.

“What’s with you?” I asked. “You’ve been in a bad mood for days.”

“It’s a free country,” he said.

I stopped walking. “Okay, I’m your friend. If you want to talk to me that’s fine. But I’m not in the mood for snide comments.”

He looked at me
. “Okay, see you later.” He turned and walked away quickly, almost running down the steps from the boardwalk to the street below.