Free By the Rivers of Brooklyn by Trudy Morgan-Cole Page B

Ethel cooked supper, all those male voices, all that energy. And Harold was so kind and thoughtful too. The way Bert used to be. He would carry his own dishes in from the table to the kitchen, and sometimes even pick up a towel to dry for her while she was washing.
    And while he dried the odd dish or stood in the kitchen, he talked to her. That was it, really. He talked to her. Jim would come home at the end of the day and give her a kiss on the cheek and say, “How was your day?” but she knew that if she said anything more than, “Fine, dear,” he would stop listening. He wanted peace and quiet at the end of a long day; he might play with Ralphie but he didn’t want to be badgered with questions or news.
    Harold, now, he would come into the kitchen after supper when she was washing up, and say, “You’ll never guess what we saw coming home from work on the subway today, Ethel. You’d have laughed if you’d been there. There was a woman, dark-skinned, kind of a foreign-looking woman, and do you know what she had? She had a dog in her purse! In her purse! I said to Jim, didn’t I, Jim, ‘My, I wish Ralphie was here, he’d get some laugh at seeing that.’ Imagine, a dog so small it could fit in her purse. You ever see a dog that small, Ethel?”
    And Ethel would say, “No, I never did. I saw a woman walking a dog the other day with a sweater on, though. Can you imagine the like, knitting a sweater for a dog? I wonder where you’d even get the pattern.” And Harold would laugh, and they’d share that moment, laughing at New York people and their foolish dogs and their strange ways.
    It wasn’t much, perhaps, but Harold made a great difference to the house. He’d been sleeping on their couch now for five months, and two or three times he’d made some noise about finding himself a boarding house, but Jim and Ethel both said, nonsense, they wouldn’t hear of it. Of course they would have said the same to any relative. It would be a shame to have a member of the family off living in some boarding house when they had room to spare. But even Jim said that Harold was great to have around. It was like he made the apartment warmer, or brighter or something.
    As Ethel finished stringing each long strand of popcorn she handed it to the boys, and they twisted it round and round the little tree. Harold had poked holes in the cookies – they were shaped like stars and Christmas trees – and stuck little bits of thread through them, which he was clumsily tying to make hangers. He and Jim got foolish again while they decorated, and started eating the bits of popcorn that fell off and then tossing them into each other’s mouths, standing farther and farther back to see how far they could catch it from. And Ethel, who usually didn’t have much patience with shenanigans, laughed right along with them.
    Suddenly they heard the door to the hall open, and there in his pyjamas stood Ralphie, wide-eyed. Ethel saw the surprise and delight in his eyes and the big grin on Jim’s face, seeing him there. All she could think was that this was supposed to have happened in the morning, when the tree was all done and the presents underneath it. Here it was, half-past eleven at night and the tree half-done and the star not even on it. Now he was awake and might have a hard time getting back to sleep, and Christmas morning was all spoiled.
    â€œLook what you done now. I told you you’d wake up Ralphie if you didn’t stop carrying on!” she snapped. “Ralphie! You shouldn’t be out of your bed this hour of night!”
    Ralphie stood still, as if he didn’t hear her at all, staring at the tree as if he couldn’t imagine how it had grown there so fast. Ethel was just getting ready to raise her voice and order him back to bed when Harold crossed the floor in two steps and scooped up Ralphie – just in time, before she told him