Lily's Crossing Read Free

Walnettos, Sugar Daddy lollipops, and even a couple of rolls of assorted LifeSavers.
    Lily’s eyes widened. Not counting the dusty case in Mrs. Tannenbaum’s stationery store, she had never seen so much candy in her life. She reached out to run her fingers over a roll of Necco wafers. Her mouth was watering. She could see four yellow ones in a row, her favorites . . .
    “Maybe we could take one thing,” Margaret said. “Just one. My mother is saving all this for my brother Eddie in the army. Now that he’s a soldier fighting for his country, he gets everything, and I don’t even get a sniff of this stuff. She’s going to send it all overseas in this heat. The whole thing will be one big melted mess.”
    Almost without thinking, Lily reached for the Necco wafers and began to rip open the paper.
    “You like that?” Margaret asked. “Not me. I’m going to have a nut thing. Something with chocolate.”
    They sat there, not talking, Lily crunching down on two yellow Necco wafers, feeling the sweetness in her mouth. “I hope Eddie won’t mind,” she said.
    “Listen,” Margaret said, “there’s enough candy here for the whole army.” She stopped. For a moment she looked worried. “D-Day. I wonder if he was there.”
    Lily had a quick flash of Eddie in her mind, his square front teeth, a little separated, resting gently on his lower lip, his nose red. He always had a cold, was always sniffling even on the hottest day of the summer. What Lily liked best about Eddie was that she could make him laugh. He always knew when she was telling Margaret a story; he never gave her away.
    One time she had told Margaret she had almost seen a murder on Cross Bay Boulevard. A car had screeched to a stop in front of Bohack’s at closing time, and the Bohack guy wouldn’t let the man in. The man said something about being ready to throttle him, whatever that meant exactly, but he had gone away two seconds later. Lily hadn’t mentioned the going away part to Margaret, though.
    “I think I even heard the police sirens,” Eddie had said.
    “Yes,” Lily hadn’t stopped for a breath. “About four police cars. They zeroed right in.”
    Eddie Dillon with those square teeth, always ready to laugh. Eddie at Normandy beach on D-Day? Everyone had talked about it all through the war . . . the day that the Allies, thousands of Americans and English men, would land in France to fight their way across Europe.
    Lily had seen the news at the movies, boats coming close to the shore, the water rough as Rockaway on a stormy morning. The forward flaps of the little square boats had come down, and soldiers had waded through water almost to their waists, while the Germans kept shooting and shooting . . . She shivered.
    “What is it?” Margaret asked.
    Lily shook her head. “Nothing.”
    Margaret fished through the candy. “Take one more thing,” she said. “I’m going to try a couple of Walnettos next, and maybe just one butterscotch.”
    Lily finished the Necco wafers and took a butterscotch too. At home Gram would never let her buy butterscotch candies. “They pull the fillings right out of your mouth,” she’d say.
    “Now the next thing is really secret,” Margaret said, her mouth full. “We’re moving out of Rockaway until the end of the war. My father has a job in a factory at Willow Run. It’s in Detroit, wherever that is, largest factory in the world. Top secret. We’re going to lock the house, board up the windows, and off we go. My mother, my father, me, and even the cats.” She leaned forward. “He’s going to make those Liberator bombers. B-24’s.”
    Margaret had the best luck in the world, Lily thought. But then she thought about the summer without her. “When?”
    “Tomorrow,” Margaret said. “The next day at the latest.”
    “But we were going to . . .” Lily closed her mouth around another butterscotch. It wasn’t so much that they were going to do anything. But Margaret, who lived at the