Free Nickel Bay Nick by Dean Pitchford Page A

notes and cards and clippings, I suddenly feel overwhelmed by the task ahead of me.
    â€œIt’s not the job you imagined, is it?” Mr. Wells asks, and I look across to find him studying me.
    â€œHardly,” I say. “I thought that, y’know, being Nickel Bay Nick, all I’d have to do is run around town, giving away money. But this . . .” I jerk a thumb at the clutter around us. “All this mapping and memorizing, this is worse than being in school.”
    â€œKeeping a secret is very tough work,” he says, and returns to his lunch.
    I’m getting so warm from the soup that I pull my sweater over my head and toss it aside. Mr. Wells looks at me, and his eyes narrow.
    â€œThat object around your neck,” he says, pointing to his own throat. “I haven’t noticed it before.”
    â€œOh, this?” I rub the little stone carving between two fingers. “Maybe cuz it’s always been under my sweater.”
    â€œIs there a story behind it?” he asks.
    â€œYeah,” I say. “It’s a long one, though.”
    Mr. Wells spreads his arms wide. “I’ve got all the time in the world.”
    â€œWell, okay.” I finish my last spoonful of soup and take a deep breath.
    â€œD’you ever hear about the big fire that burned down the Nickel Bay Furniture Works?”
    â€œI heard it was horrible,” Mr. Wells says. “But I also heard that there was one particularly heroic firefighter. Saved a dozen lives, if I remember correctly?”
    I nod. “That was my dad.”
    Mr. Wells blinks in surprise. “Dwight? Really?”
    â€œYeah. Anyway, because of that, he got written up in papers all over the country. He even got interviewed on the
Today
show. I was three and a half at the time, so I really had no idea how famous my dad was, if only for a few weeks.
    â€œThen the bad news started. After the factory closed, people started leaving town to look for other work and more businesses shut down. So the town of Nickel Bay cut the fire department’s budget, and Dad lost his job. Six months later, when the doctors found out I’d need a new heart, the same reporters who wrote about Dad’s bravery wrote stories about me. Y’know, things like, ‘Hero’s Child Needs Heart!’
    â€œWhen I finally had the operation, it got reported everywhere. Mom even came back to see me and gave a few interviews. But she had a job singing on a riverboat outside St. Louis, so she had to leave before she could visit the hospital.”
    â€œIs that when she sent you the Rolex?” Mr. Wells asks.
    â€œUh-huh.”
    â€œEven though you were too small to wear it and too young to tell time?”
    â€œIt was her way of apologizing, okay?” I say, feeling a little defensive.
    Mr. Wells holds up his hands. “Whatever you say.”
    â€œAnyway,” I continue, “my hospital room was flooded with all kinds of
heart
gifts . . . heart-shaped candies and heart-shaped balloons and pajamas and T-shirts with hearts on them, and—”
    â€œOkay.” Mr. Wells smiles. “I get the idea.”
    â€œDad donated most of that stuff to other kids in the hospital, and one of the only gifts he kept was a wooden box with this inside it, hanging from a leather cord.” I squint at my pendant. “There was no card, Dad said, so we never knew who it came from. Or what it was supposed to be. We thought it looked like a monkey, but we were never sure. Dad says I used to swing it back and forth and stare at it for hours, but then I got over it and stuck it in my sock drawer.
    â€œI didn’t think about it again until the day my third-grade class took a field trip to an art museum upstate. I happened to look into a room we were marching past, and I saw a stone statue as tall as me, exactly like my carving. I got yelled at for breaking out of line, but I had to get a closer look. And