Henry licked his cone and peeked at Danny over the hill of ice cream. A chocolate smear circled his mouth like a clown’s smile. His hand was clamped around his ice cream and the first knuckle of his index finger poked through the cone. A wet glob dripped over the crotch of his thumb.
Henry steadied Danny’s hands in his own and began licking away at the mess of the ice cream cone in an effort to salvage it, and Danny screamed, finally surrendering the ice cream cone to his father as Lori erupted through the door of the Brown Cow.
Three weeks after Danny’s first birthday, on the June evening of his last day of the school year, Henry and Lori took a walk with Danny to the Brown Cow Ice Cream Shoppe on Madison. They’d barely stepped off the front porch when Lori crouched toward Danny and pointed out the only star in the sky.
“Look, Danny,” she said. “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight. Wish I may, wish I might, wish this wish I wish tonight.”
“Are you sure that’s how it goes?” Henry said.
“That’s the way it goes,” Lori said. “I’m sure of it.”
When they were just steps from the ice cream shop, Lori pointed to the sky again.
“Look at them now, Danny,” she said. The sky was filled with stars, and the moon was a white ball.
“In Africa,” Henry said, “the moon casts shadows you wouldn’t believe. You could read by the light of it.”
Henry and Danny sat at a table outside while Lori waited in line. When she joined them with two single-scoop ice cream cones in her hands she passed them to Henry and returned to the counter for a decaf cappuccino. Through the window, Henry watched her speak with the cashier, a pale, skinny girl whose earrings curled around her left ear like a question mark.
“Two hands, Danny,” Henry said. “Nothing sadder in the world than an ice cream cone smashed on the ground.”
Danny’s hair had just begun to grow, soft wisps of browns and golds looped against his head.
Across the street three girls wearing Nazareth Academy Volleyball jerseys walked out of Byron’s Hot Dog Joint and toward the ice cream shop.
Henry licked his cone and peeked at Danny over the hill of ice cream. A chocolate smear circled his mouth like a clown’s smile. His hand was clamped around his ice cream and the first knuckle of his index finger poked through the cone. A wet glob dripped over the crotch of his thumb.
Henry steadied Danny’s hands in his own and began licking away at the mess of the ice cream cone in an effort to salvage it, and Danny screamed, finally surrendering the ice cream cone to his father as Lori erupted through the door of the Brown Cow.
“What are you doing, Henry?”
“I’m helping him out,” he said.
“You’re eating his ice cream, Henry.”
The girls from Nazareth stared as though waiting for Henry’s response.
“I’m cleaning it up,” Henry said.
“Give me the cone,” Lori said, and Henry handed it to her. She smoothed Danny’s hair off his forehead and returned to him his cone.
“When I was a kid I never let my ice cream get messy,” Henry said.
“You were an amazing child, Henry,” she said, and in the relative quiet that followed this misunderstanding, Henry returned to his own ice cream, licking a slow and spiraling mountain’s path around the hill of his cone. Lori, closing her eyes and sighing, stirred a tiny silver spoon of sugar into her cappuccino.
In the mere seconds that comprised this peace, neither Lori nor Henry noticed Danny move toward the street. Neither did they see his pace quicken across the sidewalk. Only when Lori lifted her cup of cappuccino to her lips did she raise her eyes to see Danny step off the curb and into the street.
“Henry! Danny! No!” she screamed, and Henry jumped from his seat, banging the wrought iron chair against the window of the Brown Cow. Lori jolted toward the curb as Danny stepped between two parked cars and toward the traffic of Madison Avenue. She raced off the curb and clamped her hand on Danny’s right arm, yanking him above the earth and back to the safety of the curb.
She breathed heavily, strands of loose hair spilled from her pony-tail.
In his left hand Danny held a rubber ball he had found against the rear tire of the parked car. He looked down at his ice cream globbed on the curb, screamed again, yanked his arm from his mother’s hands, stamped his foot on the fallen dessert, and screamed once more.
And what next unfolded was a scene that Henry would forever recall in slow motion. Customers inside the Brown Cow, at the sound of the chair knocking against the window, stood watching. Passersby, at the sound of a screaming boy and the sight of a heavily breathing mother, hair splayed across her face, stopped to watch the scene. And Danny—screaming, his mouth opened wide, the rubber ball in the two-seam grip of his left hand—reeled back and let the gray orb fly, and it sailed in something like the arc of a rainbow across Madison Avenue, dozens of heads following its trajectory from Danny’s left hand over the languid traffic, bouncing onto the sidewalk in front of Byron’s, thudded against the window, ricocheted off the edge of a no parking sign, and rolled toward the funeral home before disappearing under a car parked at the curb on the westbound side of the street.
“Holy crap!” Henry said. “Nice throw!” But only when he looked back at Danny, whose left hand still dangled at the end of his follow-through, did Henry realize he had thrown the ball lefty.
He looked at Lori. “Did you see that?” he said.
“He nearly killed himself,” Lori said.
“No, Lori,” Henry said. “Did you see him throw the ball?” Lori stared hard at her husband.
“He threw it lefty,” Henry said.
Danny’s head swiveled between them at the sound of their voices.
“Great, Henry.” She picked Danny up and placed him in Henry’s arms. “I’m going to get him another ice cream. Should I take Danny with me, or do you think maybe you can handle watching him?”
“He was just getting a ball,” Henry said to Lori as she went back to the Brown Cow. The door to the shop closed before Henry completed his thought. “That’s what boys do,” he said.
And before Lori had returned from the Brown Cow with another ice cream in her hand, Danny had thrown the ball again from the left side.
The above excerpt is reprinted with permission from Overlook Press. To purchase Billy’s book, or to check out Overlook’s other great titles, go to overlookpress.com.
For more information about Billy Lombardo, go to billylombardo.com.
