Ask Again, Yes by Mary Beth Keane Read Free Book Online Page B

Peter said. “I was just—” He held up the can of beans.
    “We’ll do that later, buddy. That’ll just take a minute when we’re ready to eat.”
    Peter put the can down. He left the saucepan on the stovetop for later. “Well, then can I go out to play for a while? Some of the kids—”
    “I saw them. Go on. Have fun.”
    “The chicken is—”
    “I’ll take care of it.”
----
    The first shot of war had not yet been fired. The teams had assembled on the wide stretch of flat yard beside the Maldonados’ house. Kate saw him first. “We get Peter!” she called, and every head turned. “Did you find it?” she asked when he took his spot beside her. They’d drawn boundaries—one team would fire from behind the grove of trees, the other from behind Mr. Maldonado’s Cadillac.
    “Not yet,” he said.
    A snowball exploded on the front hubcap of the Caddy. In an instant, Peter, Kate, and the rest were returning fire, the cold burning theirhands, their cheeks, while under their coats their bodies grew warmer. As Kate gathered as many snowballs as she could, Peter crouched beside her, hammering them at the other team faster than she could make them. His nose running, his cheeks stinging, he forgot about the ship, about his mother, about the chicken drums he hoped his father would remember to take out of the oven. Kate was laughing so hard she fell face-first into a pile of snow.
    Their side ran out of ammo. When half their team broke off to build up a store again, the ones who kept fighting got pelted, had to go lie down in the graveyard. “This sucks,” Kate’s sister Natalie said after a few minutes. “I’m going inside.” When she stood up and walked across the battlefield, skirting the dead bodies like they were nothing, the game collapsed and the battlefield became just a yard again, the soldiers became kids. One by one, the others emerged from cover and headed home. The snow began to fall in earnest.
    “You coming?” Sara said to Kate as she headed for their front door. The three Gleeson sisters crisscrossed traits. Kate looked more like Natalie, but Natalie had dark hair and was at least four inches taller than Kate. Sara and Kate were both blond, but other than those two details they didn’t look at all alike. All three of them spoke with their hands, like their mother. “In a minute,” Kate said.
    “You going in?” Kate asked Peter when it was just the two of them left.
    “I guess,” he said.
    “My mom made hot chocolate. We could take a thermos to the rocks.”
    “I better not.”
    “Okay,” she said, looking past him to his house, to the upstairs window where his mother was looking down at them. “It’s your mom,” Kate said, offering an uncertain wave. Then she dropped her hand and waited, as if giving Peter’s mother a chance to wave back. “My mom?” Peter wheeled around, cupped his hand to his eyes.
    “That’s your room, isn’t it? Your window?” Kate asked.
----
    By the time he stripped off his wet mittens, hat, scarf, coat, and boots and bounded up the stairs to his room, the ship was in bits. Some things came off easily as they were made to do in case they needed replacement. The jib, the boom, the crow’s nest. But the entire hull was in splinters. Seeing the raw, broken-open insides of wood that had been varnished to a shine was like seeing something naked and vulgar, and Peter had to look away.
    “It was in the garage,” she said evenly. “It was just sitting there on the lid of the garbage can.”
    “I know,” Peter said, astonished. He felt dizzy, confused. “That’s where I left it.” It came to him now in full color: hearing the hollow rumble of the school bus’s engine coming around the corner, running into his garage with the ship to place it somewhere safe until his return.
    “You left it where it could slide right off and fall? You left it where it could get damaged? Why?”
    “I was playing with it. I wanted to show it to Kate. You know, because