Free As Simple as Snow by Gregory Galloway Page B

costume and bringing home candy, my parents stopped handing it out. It must have had something to do with reciprocity. I could imagine my father running the numbers in his head, seeing the debits, the red numbers piling up with every knock. He always hated kids’ coming to the door anyway. “Are there any worse sounds than doorbells?” he grumbled. So now my parents retreated to their usual spots in the house—my father to his den of solitude, and my mother to eat cookies in the dark, so that no one would think they were home.
    As we headed down to the Caynes’ basement after dinner, a group of trick-or-treaters came to the door. “Where’s the witch?” they kept saying.
    “No witches,” Mrs. Cayne answered calmly. “Only princesses live in this house.”
    I looked at Anna, but she didn’t even acknowledge that anyone had said anything.

the basement
    A door off the kitchen led to the basement at the Caynes’. There wasn’t much down there, but it was away from the rest of the house, and you could hear anyone coming. No one could sneak up on you or surprise you.
    The stairs led to a large room, maybe forty feet by forty feet, almost perfectly square, with a small utility room right by the stairs, that housed the furnace and hot-water heater and all that junk. Behind the stairs was an old bumper pool table, and a beat-up brown sofa against one wall. At the other end of the basement was another sofa, positioned near a wood-burning stove that heated the place. While most of the basement was underground, there was a door that led outside. You only had to walk up a few steps and you were underneath a wooden deck at the back of the house that overlooked the yard sloping toward the street.
    Mr. Cayne led us past a stack of boxes left over from their move and past an ancient TV set. It was the only TV in the house. “Is that color?” I joked.
    “It is color, isn’t it, Dad?” Anna said. Mr. Cayne laughed, but his soft-boiled features turned menacing, and I could almost see the man who was capable of crushing somebody’s wrist and pulling an arm out of its socket. Anna didn’t say another word until he left us alone.
    “We have six TVs,” I said. “Two for each of us. I don’t think there’s ever a time when one isn’t on somewhere in the house.”
    Mr. Cayne continued toward the end of the room, “This is my workbench.” He pointed to a countertop, maybe eight feet long, with four cabinet doors and a row of four drawers underneath. Another pair of doors were above the counter, and a series of cubbyholes in various sizes beside those. A large pegboard covered the wall to the right of the workbench, where his tools hung in haphazard fashion. The top of the bench was covered with more tools, fishing tackle, and empty shotgun shells, as well as old radios and radio parts. There was also a machine to make shotgun shells, and a shortwave radio, a gray box with a bunch of dials set up on a corner of the workbench. “I’m not allowed to have this upstairs,” he explained, then turned it on and patiently navigated the static until he found a broadcast.
    “This is above the medium-wave band you’re familiar with,” he told me. “It’s a huge space, over twenty times larger than the medium-wave band. There’s everything here, news and music, amateur radio operators, Coast Guard ships, commercial airlines, military communications. You can listen to broadcasts from all over the world.”
    He kept a notebook where he logged the frequency of the stations he liked and what time he listened to them. He consulted his log and tuned to a broadcast from Kuwait and then one from Algeria. I couldn’t understand any of it, but he was clearly enjoying it. He seemed like Anna then, his words spilling out and his enthusiasm infectious. He wasn’t trying to force it on me; he just thought I would like it as much as he did. I didn’t see the attraction at first, but then he tuned to some stations that sounded like the disc