The Seventeenth Swap by Eloise McGraw Page B

because you couldn’t risk being weeded out again when you least expected it. Instead you might stick forever to something you knew you could do. Do with both hands tied behind you. You might be bored but you’d be safe. Like Dad.
    For just an instant Eric saw that vividly, like a landscape in a flash of lightning. Then it all went murky again and he wondered if he’d seen anything at all. He was tired of thinking about it anyhow. And tired of the cornflakes, which had gone all soggy.
    â€œGuess I’ll go out and walk around a little,” he told his dad, who studied him questioningly a moment, hesitated, then nodded and folded the paper another way.
    Outside, it was more like June than early April. Eric unzipped his jacket and let it flap, wishing he’d left it behind. The firs all had little bright green tips on their branches, and the other trees showed a mist ofgreen caught in their bare black limbs. There were azaleas out—just since yesterday, it seemed like, though yesterday he hadn’t really been looking. Too busy running all over the place swapping things and trying to climb Mount Everest without equipment.
    What’s more, thought Eric, suddenly kicking a fallen fir cone so hard it sailed clear across the street, I wish I was still doing that today! Instead of making my peace with this.
    Restlessly he swerved and crossed the street after the fir cone, kicked it again and kept it going in a wrathful zigzag until all its stiff little pointy scales began flying off this way and that and there was nothing much left to kick. So. Now I’ve planted little fir trees all along the Fifth Street sidewalk, he told himself with a half-grumpy, half-amused glance behind him. Old Johnny Firseed. All I need is a fiddle in a green baize sack and a charcoal stove to mend pots and pans.
    Pots and pans. Cholly.
    Eric looked up from the sidewalk. Less than a block ahead, the dilapidated old house nestled under its huge maple tree like a frowsy chick under a swan—and Cholly never went anywhere on Sunday mornings. Eric swerved back across the street, trod down the sloping path, and stuck his head inside the basement doorway.
    â€œThought I knew that footstep,” Cholly remarked from the workbench, restoring a handful of nails to a coffee can and reaching for his teakettle. “Ready for your cuppa, are you?”
    â€œOkay—if you’re not busy.” Eric descended the two crumbling steps, dropped down on the hard old daybed, and almost at once got up again and beganwandering around, staring at this thing and that without taking much note of what he was seeing, while Cholly went through his tea-making routine and talked about the price of sugar and the trilliums blooming in the ravine and the raccoon he’d surprised that morning nosing around his garbage can.
    â€œReally? A real raccoon?” said Eric, momentarily diverted.
    â€œA real fat rascal, a-wearing his robber mask. I sent him packing, let me tell you. Else he’d bring all his cousins and his uncles and his old maiden ahn-ties tomorrow. You mean you never spotted any raccoon-robbers down around that flat of yours?”
    â€œNo, never,” Eric answered. Cholly had more to say about it, but Eric’s gaze had fixed on the Old English Stone Ginger Beer bottle and his thoughts moved on. At the next pause he said, “I went to that shop the other day, that Hobbyhorse place you told me about.”
    â€œDid you now! And how did you get on with Maggie Teggly?”
    â€œFine.” Eric felt a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth in spite of everything.
    â€œAh. Thought you might. Which cup you want, son, the plain or the fancy?”
    â€œFancy.” Eric accepted his tea in a cup with a gilded rim but only half a handle, and sipped it gingerly. He didn’t really care for tea, but had never found a way to tell Cholly so. “I saw the old telephone, and the naked baby pictures and all.