Free Wishin' and Hopin' by Wally Lamb

V-for-victory sign. Jeezum, I thought as I trudged down to the bus station: Ma was practically as famous as Annette.
    Counting bus travelers and regular customers, 63 people gathered at the lunch counter to watch that afternoon’s special edition of Art Linkletter’s House Party , plus have their free pie and coffee. Pop had set up our TV at the end of the counter, and Joey Cigar from Joey’s Newsstand & Smoke Shoppe on the other side of the depot had helped him hook up this special Sputnik-looking antenna on top. The picture was snowy, but you could still see everything pretty good,especially when Joey had his brother-in-law, Frankie, hold on to the end of the long wire that trailed down from the Sputnik thing. “We finally found something that Frankie’s good for,” I overheard Joey telling Chino. “Pulling in television signal.”
    We fed everybody first. Pop cut the pies, Frances scooped the ice cream, and me and Simone passed people their plates. Chino was in charge of the coffees. “Cowboy” Zupnik came with this lady, Noreen, and I was like, whoa, the Cowboy’s got a wife? But Noreen was his sister. She said we should start selling Shepherd’s Pie Italiano at the lunch counter, and everybody said, yeah, yeah, that was a great idea. Cindy Creamcheese said she’d even skip eating her pepperoni omelet to try a piece, and Chino said, maybe she’d better not, because if she actually ordered something different than her usual, it might give him and Sal a heart attack. (He was only kidding.) Cindy Creamcheese brought her son Christopher with her, which, I didn’t even know she had a kid. He was about my age, and real fat like his mother, and I thought, wow, thatsure is a weird name: Christopher Creamcheese. He finished his free pie à la mode in about two seconds, licked his plate, and asked me if he could have seconds. I asked Pop and he said no, just one to a customer. Christopher was kind of a pest because he kept following me around wherever I went, like he was my shadow or something. Oh, and Reverend Peavey? He was there. He came with this sailor he was doing missionary work on, except they had to leave before the Bake-Off came on, because they had to go pray or something. And Mush Moriarty came, too, but when Pop asked him did he want any pie, he said no, but he’d take a Four Roses, neat, and Pop pointed at the door and he left.
    Simone moved through the crowd, handing out the pie à la modes and bragging to everybody about how, the day after she flew to California, Ma went to visit Annette’s parents at their house on account of Pop was Annette’s father’s cousin , and he and Ma had gone to Annette’s parents’ wedding , and when Simone was a baby, she’d been in the same playpen with Annette—there was even a picture of it. And how, even though Ma hadn’t exactly seen Annette when she went over to her parents’ house—which was real beautiful, by the way—she had seen the room where they kept all of Annette’s souvenirs and stuff, including this huge framed color picture of her with Walt Disney in front of Cinderella’s castle at Disneyland that said, on the bottom, To America’s Sweetheart and her Wonderful Family! With my very fondest wishes, “Uncle” Walt .
    Simone was in the middle of telling the eight billionth person about Ma’s going to Annette’s parents’ house when Frances, who could whistle the loudest out of anyone in our whole family, stuck two fingers in her mouth, let go a real loud one, and shouted, “Hey! Shush up, everybody! It’s coming on!” Everyone crowded in closer to the TV, all’s except Frankie, who grabbed onto the end of the wire and made the picture stop snowing. It was kinda cool, I thought, the way he was like this human antenna. “S’cuse me, s’cuse me,” I kept saying until I’d squeezed my way up to the front.
    First, Art Linkletter said the Pillsbury Bake-Off was like the kitchen Olympics, except instead of athletes competing, the