Snow Day: a Novella Read Online Free Page A

Have! I! Told! You...
    The rusty storm door on the back porch, which she had propped open with her hip, creaked and rattled with each blow.
    Tommy wasn’t just crying now, he was screaming: “Noooo! No! I didn’t do nothing wrong. No! Stop! I just wanted to play!’
    “Get in here, God damn it!”
    Delilah balanced the infant in one hand and pulled on Tommy’s arm with the other. He resisted, leaning back with the entire weight of his slim frame, to his heels, trying to pull away. Finally, the massive woman yanked him back to his feet and when she did she started beating him ferociously. She was determined to teach him the price of defiance.
    Then Tommy did something that shocked us. He screamed. He screamed like we’d never hear a kid scream before.
    “Fuck you, you fat cow!”
    The slap Delilah planted across Tommy’s face in return was so vicious, and its crack so loud and piercing, that, even three houses away, it stung us and we flinched.
    “Oh, my God.” Bobby whispered.
    The blow sent Tommy stumbling back. He tumbled down the few stairs to the snow at the foot of the porch. Still crying, he crawled a bit and then staggered to his feet.
    “Get back here, damn it! Get in this house, now!”
    But once Tommy gained his feet, he ran, turned the corner of his house, and was gone. Delilah mumbled something we couldn’t quite make out, and then she finally retreated and slammed the kitchen door.
    There was no more laughing.
    Bobby and I just stood there for a moment, silent. Fat Delilah was always a mean woman, but she’d become worse – much worse – after her husband disappeared. Yet still, we’d never seen her hit Tommy before. I mean, we knew she probably did. All our parents hit us at one time or another, usually because we had it coming, but never in public. They called it discipline, but it came with rules, unspoken as they were. Rule number one: you didn’t hit your kids in public, but behind closed doors you could beat the living shit out of them with a leather belt or a wooden kitchen spoon if your kids had it coming, if the punishment was well bought and paid for.
    But for Delilah, it was different. The parental rule book went in the trash beside her wedding album. Tommy, his father’s son and a constant reminder of Delilah’s shitty circumstances, was going to get it whether he deserved it or not.



3
    M Y PARENTS NEVER TALKED ABOUT THE S CHNEIDERS , but the kids on the block all had their theories. Someone thought Mr. Schneider ran off with a girlfriend. One look at Delilah Schneider and you might think that was a plausible theory, but when would he have found the time to meet someone? He ran the barbershop on Summit Avenue, just one street over from ours. It was always open and he was always there, but women never went there, just reluctant neighborhood boys sent by their mothers and old men who smelled of cigars and Brylcreem. Everyone had a different theory – even my little brother Rudy chimed in. He suggested that Mr. Schneider was really a secret agent who had to leave on a mission to catch some bad guys. Ever since he stayed home from school with the chicken pox for a week, scratching and watching Bill Cosby and Robert Culp in old reruns of I Spy , Rudy thought everyone was a secret agent. But in the end, I knew enough to piece together the real story, or at least a strong theory that I’ve kept to myself until now.
    I used to earn money after school at the barbershop – sweeping up, washing aprons, taking out the trash, that sort of stuff. The job had been Frank’s, but when he started High School at Paramus Catholic and made the basketball team, he needed his afternoons to attend practice. So Frank took to delivering the Hudson Dispatch before school and going to practice after school, and he made sure the barbershop job came to me.
    When I started the job, the shop was owned by ol’ Luigi, who had cut hair there since before I was born, or so my mother told me. He was a little man