Runner by Carl Deuker Page B

Street. On decent days, I'd walk to Great Harvest bakery. They give away big hunks of warm bread as samples. I'd get a piece, then sit down at one of the tables and—surrounded by the smell of baking bread and the warmth of the ovens—eat it as slowly as I possibly could. A couple of times I caught matinees at the Majestic Bay. Still, the days dragged.
    On Christmas Eve, my dad found some hemlock branches
that had been downed by a windstorm. He stuck them in a bucket filled with sand and stood them up in the corner of the cabin. "What do you think of our Christmas tree?" he said.
    "It's great," I said, but I wished he'd done nothing.
    Christmas morning I gave him a book on the exploration of Antarctica that I'd bought at Secret Garden bookstore. He read the title and then flipped the book over. "This is about Roald Amundsen." He skimmed the first paragraph, and then looked up. "Amundsen was a great man, Chance. A great explorer. Thank you very much."
    He shoved a plastic bag toward me. I opened it; inside were gloves made of some high-tech fabric. "I got them at a bike shop," he said. "They're supposed to keep you warm but not make you sweaty."
    "They're great, Dad," I said. "Thanks."
    "I figured sometimes your hands must get cold when you run."
    "They do. These will be great."
    "All right, then. Not such a bad Christmas after all."
    I ran at my regular time that afternoon, and then I went to the movies. I thought the theater would be empty, but it was nearly full. The movie was some comedy whose name I can't remember. Around me, people laughed like crazy. When the movie ended, I walked back to the marina. I thought I'd have the boat to myself, but my dad was waiting for me down in the cabin. "Let's go to dinner," he said.
    We went to Charley's, a restaurant on the waterfront not too far from our pier. When the waiter came around, I ordered
a hamburger. My dad shook his head. "You're getting a New York steak," he said. "And I'm getting the same."
    "Anything to drink?" the waiter asked.
    "Coke," I said.
    "The same for me," my dad said, which surprised me.
    I guess I must have looked nervous about the money he was spending, because he told me to stop worrying. "I've been working steady all week at Ballard Bicycles. Assembling bikes, that sort of thing."
    After that we sat at the table, neither of us talking. Finally the food came. I'd been eating canned and packaged meals for so long that I'd forgotten how good a steak dinner at a restaurant could be. The meat was pink and juicy; the mashed potatoes buttery; the carrots glazed in brown sugar. After he took his first bite of the steak, my dad looked up. "Good, isn't it?"
    "Yeah," I said, "it is."
    When we had both finished eating, he put the napkin down by his plate and looked at me. "There's a chance they'll keep me on at the bike shop. If they do, I want you to quit that job of yours. You understand?"
    "Sure, Dad," I said.
    He leaned forward. "I mean it, Chance. If they hire full-time, I want you to quit that job. I don't like anything about it."
    "You don't know anything about it," I said.
    "I know you get paid in cash, Chance. You try to hide that wad of bills, but I've seen it. Delivering stuff on the waterfront for cash—I wasn't born yesterday."
    I looked out the window. "Say I quit and then you lose your job. Where will we be then?"
    "I won't lose it, Chance."
    The family at the table across from us all broke into laughter over something. We both looked over; the man was laughing so hard tears came to his eyes.
    "OK," I said. "If they hire you full-time, I'll quit."

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    When I'd first started working for the fat guy, I figured the lousy weather in the winter would empty the beach and make it easier for me to search through the rocks for packages without worrying that someone would see me and get suspicious. But it was almost January, and every day people were still out combing the beach.
    These weren't muscle builders or babes working on their