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The Five People You Meet in Heaven

By Mitch Albom

The Arrival

EDDIE AWOKE IN A TEACUP.

It was a part of some old amusement park ride—a large teacup, made of dark, polished wood, with a cushioned seat and a steel-hinged door. Eddie's arms and legs dangled over the edges. The sky continued to change colors, from a shoe-leather brown to a deep scarlet.

His instinct was to reach for his cane. He had kept it by his bed the last few years, because there were mornings when he no longer had the strength to get up without it. This embarrassed Eddie, who used to punch men in the shoulders when he greeted them.

But now there was no cane, so Eddie exhaled and tried to pull himself up. Surprisingly, his back did not hurt. His leg did not throb. He yanked harder and hoisted himself easily over the edge of the teacup, landing awkwardly on the ground, where he was struck by three quick thoughts.

First, he felt wonderful.

Second, he was all alone.

Third, he was still on Ruby Pier.

But it was a different Ruby Pier now. There were canvas tents and vacant grassy sections and so few obstructions you could see the mossy breakwater out in the ocean. The colors of the attractions were firehouse reds and creamy whites—no teals or maroons—and each ride had its own wooden ticket booth. The teacup he had awoken in was part of a primitive attraction called Spin-O-Rama. Its sign was plywood, as were the other low-slung signs, hinged on storefronts that lined the promenade:

El Tiempo Cigars! Now, That's a Smoke!

Chowder, 10 cents!

Ride the Whipper—The Sensation of the Age!

Eddie blinked hard. This was the Ruby Pier of his childhood, some 75 years ago, only everything was new, freshly scrubbed. Over there was the Loop-the-Loop ride—which had been torn down decades ago—and over there the bathhouses and the saltwater swimming pools that had been razed in the 1950s. Over there, jutting into the sky, was the original Ferris wheel—in its pristine white paint—and beyond that, the streets of his old neighborhood and the rooftops of the crowded brick tenements,with laundry lines hanging from the windows. Eddie tried to yell, but his voice was raspy air. He mouthed a "Hey!" but nothing came from his throat.

He grabbed at his arms and legs. Aside from his lack of voice, he felt incredible. He walked in a circle. He jumped. No pain. In the last ten years, he had forgotten what it was like to walk without wincing or to sit without struggling to find comfort for his lower back. On the outside, he looked the same as he had that morning: a squat barrel-chested old man in a cap and shorts and a brown maintenance jersey. But he was limber. So limber, in fact, he could touch behind his ankles, and raise a leg to his belly. He explored his body like an infant, fascinated by the new mechanics, a rubber man doing a rubber man stretch.

Then he ran.

Ha-ha! Running! Eddie had not truly run in more than 60 years, not since the war, but he was running now, starting with a few gingerly steps, then accelerating into a full gait, faster, faster, like the running boy of his youth. He ran along the boardwalk, past a bait-and-tackle stand for fishermen (five cents) and a bathing suit rental stand for swimmers (three cents). He ran past a chute ride called The Dipsy Doodle. He ran along the Ruby Pier Promenade, beneath magnificent buildings of moorish design with spires and minarets and onion-shaped domes. He ran past the Parisian Carousel, with its carved wooden horses, glass mirrors, and Wurlitzer organ, all shiny and new. Only an hour ago, it seemed, he had been scraping rust from its pieces in the shop.

He ran down the heart of the old midway, where the weight guessers, fortune-tellers, and dancing gypsies had once worked. He lowered his chin and held his arms out like a glider, and every few steps he would jump, the way children do, hoping running will turn to flying. It might have seemed ridiculous to anyone watching, this white-haired

maintenaance worker, all alone, making like an airplane. But the running boy is inside every man, no matter how old he gets.

AND THEN EDDIE stopped running. He heard something. A voice, tinny, as if coming through a megaphone.

How about him, ladies and gentlemen? Have you ever seen such a horrible sight? . . ."

Eddie was standing by an empty ticket kiosk in front of a large theater. The sign above read

The World's most Curious Citizens.

Ruby pier's Sideshow!

Holy Smoke! They're Fat! They're Skinny!

See the Wild Man!

The sideshow. The freak house. The ballyhoo hall. Eddie recalled them shutting this down at least 50 years ago, about the time television became popular and people didn't need sideshows to tickle their imagination.

"Look well upon this savage, born into a most peculiar handicap . . ."

Eddie peered into the entrance. He had encountered some odd people here. There was Jolly Jane, who weighed over 500 pounds and needed two men to push her up the stairs. There were conjoined twin sisters, who shared a spine and played musical instruments. There were men who swallowed swords, women with beards, and a pair of Indian brothers whose skin went rubbery from being stretched and soaked in oils, until it hung in bunches from their limbs.

Eddie, as a child, had felt sorry for the sideshow cast. They were forced to sit in booths or on stages, sometimes behind bars, as patrons walked past them, leering and pointing. A barker would ballyhoo the oddity, and it was a barker's voice that Eddie heard now.

"Only a terrible twist of fate could leave a man in such a pitiful condition! From the farthest corner of the world, we have brought him for your examination—"

Eddie entered the darkened hall. The voice grew louder.

"This tragic soul has endured a perversion of nature—"

It was coming from the other side of a stage.

"Only here, at the World's Most Curious Citizens, can you draw this near. . . ."

Eddie pulled aside the curtain.

"Feast your eyes upon the most unus— "

The barker's voice vanished. And Eddie stepped back in disbelief.

There, sitting in a chair, alone on the stage, was a middle-aged man with narrow, stooped shoulders, naked from the waist up. His belly sagged over his belt. His hair was closely cropped. His lips were thin and his face was long and drawn. Eddie would have long since forgotten him, were it not for one distinctive feature.

His skin was blue.

"Hello, Edward," he said. "I have been waiting for you."

The First Person Eddie Meets in Heaven

DON'T BE AFRAID. . . ." THE BLUE MAN said, rising slowly from his chair. "Don't be afraid. . . ."

His voice was soothing, but Eddie could only stare. He had barely known this man. Why was he seeing him now? He was like one of those faces that pops into your dreams and the next morning you say, "You'll never guess who I dreamed about last night."

"Your body feels like a child's, right?"

Eddie nodded.

"You were a child when you knew me, that's why. You start with the same feelings you had."

Start what? Eddie thought.

The Blue Man lifted his chin. His skin was a grotesque shade, a graying blueberry. His fingers were wrinkled. He walked outside. Eddie followed. The pier was empty. The beach was empty. Was the entire planet empty?

"Tell me something," the Blue Man said. He pointed to a two-humped wooden roller coaster in the distance. The Whipper. It was built in the 1920s, before under-friction wheels, meaning the cars couldn't turn very quickly—unless you wanted them launching off the track. "The Whipper. Is it still the 'fastest ride on earth'?"

Eddie looked at the old clanking thing, which had been torn down years ago. He shook his head no.

"Ah," the Blue Man said. "I imagined as much. Things don't change here. And there's none of that peering down from the clouds, I'm afraid."

Here? Eddie thought.

The Blue Man smiled as if he'd heard the question. He touched Eddie's shoulder and Eddie felt a surge of warmth unlike anything he had ever felt before. His thoughts came spilling out like sentences.

How did I die?

"An accident," the Blue Man said.

How long have I been dead?

"A minute. An hour. A thousand years."

Where am I?

The Blue Man pursed his lips, then repeated the question thoughtfully. "Where are you?" He turned and raised his arms. All at once, the rides at the old Ruby Pier cranked to life: The Ferris wheel spun, the Dodgem Cars smacked into each other, the Whipper clacked uphill, and the Parisian Carousel horses bobbed on their brass poles to the cheery music of the Wurlitzer organ. The ocean was in front of them. The sky was the color of lemons.

"Where do you think?" the Blue Man asked. "Heaven."

NO! EDDIE SHOOK his head violently. NO! The Blue Man seemed amused.

"No? It can't be heaven?" he said. "Why? Because this is where you grew up?"

Eddie mouthed the word Yes.

"Ah." The Blue Man nodded. "Well. People often belittle the place where they were born. But heaven can be found in the most unlikely corners. And heaven itself has many steps. This, for me, is the second. And for you, the first."

He led Eddie through the park, passing cigar shops and sausage stands and the "flat joints," where suckers lost their nickels and dimes.

Heaven? Eddie thought. Ridiculous. He had spent most of his adult life trying to get away from Ruby Pier. It was an amusement park, that's all, a place to scream and get wet and trade your dollars for kewpie dolls. The thought that this was some kind of blessed resting place was beyond his imagination.

He tried again to speak, and this time he heard a small grunt from his chest. The Blue Man turned.

"Your voice will come. We all go through the same thing. You cannot talk when you first arrive." He smiled. "It helps you listen."

THERE ARE FIVE people you meet in heaven," the Blue Man suddenly said. "Each of us was in your life for a reason. You may not have known the reason at the time, and that is what heaven is for. For understanding your life on earth."

Eddie looked confused.

"People think of heaven as a paradise garden, a place where they can float on clouds and laze in rivers and mountains. But scenery without solace is meaningless.

"This is the greatest gift God can give you: to understand what happened in your life. To have it explained. It is the peace you have been searching for."

Eddie coughed, trying to bring up his voice. He was tired of being silent.

"I am your first person, Edward. When I died, my life was illuminated by five others, and then I came here to wait for you, to stand in your line, to tell you my story, which becomes part of yours. There will be others for you, too. Some you knew, maybe some you didn't. But they all crossed your path before they died. And they altered it forever."

Eddie pushed a sound up from his chest, as hard as he could.

"What . . ." he finally croaked.

His voice seemed to be breaking through a shell, like a baby chick.

"What . . . killed . . ."

The Blue Man waited patiently.

"What . . . killed . . . you?"

The Blue Man looked a bit surprised. He smiled at Eddie.

"You did," he said.

Today Is Eddie's Birthday

He is seven years old and his gift is a new baseball. He squeezes it in each hand, feeling a surge of power that runs up his arms. He imagines he is one of his heroes on the Cracker Jack collector cards, maybe the great pitcher Walter Johnson.

"Here, toss it," his brother, Joe, says.

They are running along the midway, past the game booth where, if you knock over three green bottles, you win a coconut and a straw.

"Come on, Eddie," Joe says. "Share."

Eddie stops, and imagines himself in a stadium. He throws the ball. His brother pulls in his elbows and ducks.

"Too hard!" Joe yells.

"My ball!" Eddie screams. "Dang you, Joe."

Eddie watches it thump down the boardwalk and bang off a post into a small clearing behind the sideshow tents. He runs after it. Joe follows. They drop to the ground.

"You see it?" Eddie says.

"Nuh-uh."

A whumping noise interrupts them. A tent flap opens. Eddie and Joe look up. There is a grossly fat woman and a shirtless man with reddish hair covering his entire body. Freaks from the freak show.

The children freeze.

"What are you wiseacres doin' back, here?" the hairy man says, grinning. "Lookin' for trouble?"

Joe's lip trembles. He starts to cry. He jumps up and runs away, his arms pumping wildly. Eddie rises, too, then sees his ball against a sawhorse. He eyes the shirtless man and moves slowly toward it.

"This is mine," he mumbles. He scoops up the ball and runs after his brother.

LISTEN, MISTER," EDDIE rasped, "I never killed you, OK? I don't even know you."

The Blue Man sat on a bench. He smiled as if trying to put a guest at ease. Eddie remained standing, a defensive posture.

"Let me begin with my real name," the Blue Man said. "I was christened Joseph Corvelzchik, the son of a tailor in a small Polish village. We came to America in 1894. I was only a boy. My mother held me over the railing of the ship and this became my earliest childhood memory, my mother swinging me in the breezes of a new world.

"Like most immigrants, we had no money. We slept on a mattress in my uncle's kitchen. My father was forced to take a job in a sweatshop, sewing buttons on coats. When I was ten, he took me from school and I joined him."

Eddie watched the Blue Man's pitted face, his thin lips, his sagging chest. Why is he telling me this? Eddie thought.

"I was a nervous child by nature, and the noise in the shop only made things worse. I was too young to be there, amongst all those men, swearing and complaining.

"Whenever the foreman came near, my father told me, 'Look down. Don't make him notice you.' Once, however, I stumbled and dropped a sack of buttons, which spilled over the floor. The foreman screamed that I was worthless, a worthless child, that I must go. I can still see that moment, my father pleading with him like a street beggar, the foreman sneering, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. I felt my stomach twist in pain. Then I felt something wet on my leg. I looked down. The foreman pointed at my soiled pants and laughed, and the other workers laughed, too.

"After that, my father refused to speak to me. He felt I had shamed him, and I suppose, in his world, I had. But fathers can ruin their sons, and I was, in a fashion, ruined after that. I was a nervous child, and when I grew, I was a nervous young man. Worst of all, at night, I still wet the bed. In the mornings I would sneak the soiled sheets to the washbasin and soak them. One morning, I looked up to see my father. He saw the dirty sheets, then glared at me with eyes that I will never forget, as if he wished he could snap the cord of life between us."

The Blue Man paused. His skin, which seemed to be soaked in blue fluid, folded in small fatty layers around his belt. Eddie couldn't help staring.

"I was not always a freak, Edward," he said. "But back then, medicine was rather primitive. I went to a chemist, seeking something for my nerves. He gave me a bottle of silver nitrate and told me to mix it with water and take it every night. Silver nitrate. It was later considered poison. But it was all I had, and when it failed to work, I could only assume I was not ingesting enough. So I took more. I swallowed two gulps and sometimes three, with no water.

"Soon, people were looking at me strangely. My skin was turning the color of ash.

"I was ashamed and agitated. I swallowed even more silver nitrate, until my skin went from gray to blue, a side effect of the poison."

The Blue Man paused. His voice dropped. "The factory dismissed me. The foreman said I scared the other workers. Without work, how would I eat? Where would I live?

"I found a saloon, a dark place where I could hide beneath a hat and coat. One night, a group of carnival men were in the back. They smoked cigars. They laughed. One of them, a rather small fellow with a wooden leg, kept looking at me. Finally, he approached.

"By the end of the night, I had agreed to join their carnival. And my life as a commodity had begun."

Eddie noticed the resigned look on the Blue Man's face. He had often wondered where the sideshow cast came from. He assumed there was a sad story behind every one of them.

"The carnivals gave me my names, Edward. Sometimes I was the Blue Man of the North Pole, or the Blue Man of Algeria, or the Blue Man of New Zealand. I had never been to any of these places, of course, but it was pleasant to be considered exotic, if only on a painted sign. The 'show' was simple. I would sit on the stage, half undressed, as people walked past and the barker told them how pathetic I was. For this, I was able to put a few coins in my pocket. The manager once called me the 'best freak' in his stable, and, sad as it sounds, I took pride in that. When you are an outcast, even a tossed stone can be cherished.

"One winter, I came to this pier. Ruby Pier. They were starting a sideshow called The Curious Citizens. I liked the idea of being in one place, escaping the bumpy horse carts of carnival life.

"This became my home. I lived in a room above a sausage shop. I played cards at night with the other sideshow workers, with the

tinsmiths, sometimes even with your father. In the early mornings, if I wore long shirts and draped my head in a towel, I could walk along this beach without scaring people. It may not sound like much, but for me, it was a freedom I had rarely known."

He stopped. He looked at Eddie.

"Do you understand? Why we're here? This is not your heaven. It's mine."

TAKE ONE STORY, viewed from two different angles. Take a rainy Sunday morning in July, in the late 1920s, when Eddie and his friends are tossing a baseball Eddie got for his birthday nearly a year ago. Take a moment when that ball flies over Eddie's head and out into the street. Eddie, wearing tawny pants and a wool cap, chases after it, and runs in front of an automobile, a Ford Model A. The car screeches, veers, and just misses him. He shivers, exhales, gets the ball, and races back to his friends. The game soon ends and the children run to the arcade to play the Erie Digger machine, with its claw-like mechanism that picks up small toys.

Now take that same story from a different angle. A man is behind the wheel of a Ford Model A, which he has borrowed from a friend to practice his driving. The road is wet from the morning rain. Suddenly, a baseball bounces across the street, and a boy comes racing after it. The driver slams on the brakes and yanks the wheel. The car skids, the tires screech.

The man somehow regains control, and the Model A rolls on. The child has disappeared in the rearview mirror, but the man's body is still affected, thinking of how close he came to tragedy. The jolt of adrenaline has forced his heart to pump furiously and this heart is not a strong one and the pumping leaves him drained. The man feels dizzy and his head drops momentarily. His automobile nearly collides with another. The second driver honks, the man veers again, spinning the wheel, pushing on the brake pedal. He skids along an avenue then turns down an alley. His vehicle rolls until it collides with the rear of a parked truck. There is a small crashing noise. The headlights shatter. The impact smacks the man into the steering wheel. His forehead bleeds. He steps from the Model A, sees the damage, then collapses onto the wet pavement. His arm throbs. His chest hurts. It is Sunday morning. The alley is empty. He remains there, unnoticed, slumped against the side of the car. The blood from his coronary arteries no longer flows to his heart. An hour

passes. A policeman finds him. A medical examiner pronounces him dead. The cause of death is listed as "heart attack." There are no known relatives.

Take one story, viewed from two different angles. It is the same day, the same moment, but one angle ends happily, at an arcade, with the little boy in tawny pants dropping pennies into the Erie Digger machine, and the other ends badly, in a city morgue, where one worker calls another worker over to marvel at the blue skin of the newest arrival.

"You see?" the Blue Man whispered, having finished the story from his point of view. "Little boy?"

Eddie felt a shiver.

"Oh no," he whispered.

Today Is Eddie's Birthday

He is eight years old. He sits on the edge of a plaid couch, his arms crossed in anger. His mother is at his feet, tying his shoes. His father is at the mirror, fixing his tie.

"I don't WANT to go," Eddie says.

"I know," his mother says, not looking up, "but we have to. Sometimes you have to do things when sad things happen."

"But it's my BIRTHDAY."

Eddie looks mournfully across the room at the erector set in the corner, a pile of toy metal girders and three small rubber wheels. Eddie had been making a truck. He is good at putting things together. He had hoped to show it to his friends at a birthday party. Instead, they have to go someplace and get dressed up. It isn't fair, he thinks.

His brother, Joe, dressed in wool pants and a bow tie, enters with a baseball glove on his left hand. He slaps it hard. He makes a face at Eddie.

"Those were my old shoes," Joe says. "My new ones are better."

Eddie winces. He hates having to wear Joe's old things.

"Stop wiggling," his mother says.

"They HURT!" Eddie whines.

"Enough!" his father yells. He glares at Eddie. Eddie goes silent.

At the cemetery, Eddie barely recognizes the pier people. The men who normally wear gold lame and red turbans are now in black suits, like his father. The women seem to be wearing the same black, dress; some cover their faces in veils.

Eddie watches a man shovel dirt into a hole. The man says something about ashes. Eddie holds his mothers hand and squints at the sun. He is supposed to be sad, he knows, but he is secretly counting numbers, starting from 1, hoping that by the time he reaches 1000 he will have his birthday back.

The First Lesson

PLEASE, MISTER . . ." EDDIE PLEADED. "I DIDN'T know. Believe me . . . God help me, I didn't know."

The Blue Man nodded. "You couldn't know. You were too young."

Eddie stepped back. He squared his body as if bracing for a fight.

"But now I gotta pay," he said.

"To pay?"

"For my sin. That's why I'm here, right? Justice?"

The Blue Man smiled. "No, Edward. You are here so I can teach you something. All the people you meet here have one thing to teach you."

Eddie was skeptical. His fists stayed clenched.

"What?" he said.

"That there are no random acts. That we are all connected. That you can no more separate one life from another than you can separate a breeze from the wind."

Eddie shook his head. "We were throwing a ball. It was my stupidity, running out there like that. Why should you have to die on account of me? It ain't fair."

The Blue Man held out his hand. "Fairness," he said, "does not govern life and death. If it did, no good person would ever die young."

He rolled his palm upward and suddenly they were standing in a cemetery behind a small group of mourners. A priest by the gravesite was reading from a Bible. Eddie could not see faces, only the backs of hats and dresses and suit coats.

"My funeral," the Blue Man said. "Look at the mourners. Some did not even know me well, yet they came. Why? Did you ever wonder? Why people gather when others die? Why people feel they should?

"It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it misses someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed.

"You say you should have died instead of me. But during my time on earth, people died instead of me, too. It happens every day. When lightning strikes a minute after you are gone, or an airplane crashes that you might have been on. When your colleague falls ill and you do not. We think such things are random. But there is a balance to it all. One withers, another grows. Birth and death are part of a whole.

"It is why we are drawn to babies . . ." He turned to the mourners. "And to funerals."

Eddie looked again at the gravesite gathering. He wondered if he'd had a funeral. He wondered if anyone came. He saw the priest reading from the Bible and the mourners lowering their heads. This was the day the Blue Man had been buried, all those years ago. Eddie had been there, a little boy, fidgeting through the ceremony, with no idea of the role he'd played in it.

"I still don't understand," Eddie whispered. "What good came from your death?"

"You lived," the Blue Man answered.

"But we barely knew each other. I might as well have been a stranger."

The Blue Man put his arms on Eddie's shoulders. Eddie felt that warm, melting sensation.

"Strangers," the Blue Man said, "are just family you have yet to come to know."

WITH THAT, THE Blue Man pulled Eddie close. Instantly, Eddie felt everything the Blue Man had felt in his life rushing into him, swimming

in his body, the loneliness, the shame, the nervousness, the heart attack. It slid into Eddie like a drawer being closed.

"I am leaving," the Blue Man whispered in his ear. "This step of heaven is over for me. But there are others for you to meet."

"Wait," Eddie said, pulling back. "Just tell me one thing. Did I save the little girl? At the pier. Did I save her?"

The Blue Man did not answer. Eddie slumped. "Then my death was a waste, just like my life."

"No life is a waste," the Blue Man said. "The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."

He stepped back toward the gravesite and smiled. And as he did, his skin turned the loveliest shade of caramel—smooth and unblemished. It was, Eddie thought, the most perfect skin he had ever seen.

"Wait!" Eddie yelled, but he was suddenly whisked into the air, away from the cemetery, soaring above the great gray ocean. Below him, he saw the rooftops of old Ruby Pier, the spires and turrets, the flags flapping in the breeze.

Then it was gone.

SUNDAY, 3 P.M.

Back at the pier, the crowd stood silently around the wreckage of Freddy's Free Fall. Old women touched their throats. Mothers pulled their children away. Several burly men in tank tops slid to the front, as if this were something they should handle, but once they got there, they, too, only looked on, helpless. The sun baked down, sharpening the shadows, causing them to shield their eyes as if they were saluting.

How bad is it? people whispered. From the back of the crowd, Dominguez burst through, his face red, his maintenance shirt drenched in sweat. He saw the carnage.

"Ahh no, no, Eddie," he moaned, grabbing his head. Security workers arrived. They pushed people back. But then, they, too, fell into impotent postures, hands on their hips, waiting for the ambulances. It was as if all of them—the mothers, the fathers, the kids with their giant gulp soda

cups—were too stunned to look and too stunned to leave. Death was at their feet, as a carnival tune played over the park speakers.

How bad is it? Sirens sounded. Men in uniforms arrived. Yellow tape was stretched around the area. The arcade booths pulled down their grates. The rides were closed indefinitely. Word spread across the beach of the bad thing that had happened, and by sunset, Ruby Pier was empty.

Today Is Eddie's Birthday

From his bedroom, even with the door closed, Eddie can smell the beefsteak his mother is grilling with green peppers and sweet red onions, a strong woody odor that he loves.

"Eddd-deee!" she yells from the kitchen. "Where are you? Everyone's here!"

He rolls off the bed and puts away the comic book. He is 17 today, too old for such things, but he still enjoys the idea—colorful heroes like the Phantom, fighting the bad guys, saving the world. He has given his collection to his school-aged cousins from Romania, who came to America a few months earlier. Eddie's family met them at the docks and they moved into the bedroom that Eddie shared with his brother, Joe. The cousins cannot speak English, but they like comic books. Anyhow, it gives Eddie an excuse to keep them around.

"There's the birthday boy," his mother crows when he rambles into the room. He wears a button-down white shirt and a blue tie, which pinches his muscular neck A grunt of hellos and raised beer glasses come from the assembled visitors, family, friends, pier workers. Eddie's father is playing cards in the corner, in a small cloud of cigar smoke.

"Hey, Ma, guess what?" Joe yells out. "Eddie met a girl last night."

"Oooh. Did he?"

Eddie feels a rush of blood.

"Yeah. Said he's gonna marry her."

"Shut yer trap," Eddie says to Joe.

Joe ignores him. "Yep, he came into the room all google-eyed, and he said, 'Joe, I met the girl I'm gonna marry!' "

Eddie seethes. "I said shut it!"

"What's her name, Eddie?" someone asked.

"Does she go to church?"

Eddie goes to his brother and socks him in the arm.

"Owww!"

"Eddie!"

"I told you to shut it!"

Joe blurts out, "And he danced with her at the Stard—!"

Whack.

"Oww!"

"SHUT UP!"

"Eddie! Stop that!!"

Even the Romanian cousins look up now—fighting they understand—as the two brothers grab each other and flail away, clearing the couch, until Eddie's father puts down his cigar and yells, "Knock it off, before I slap both of ya's."

The brothers separate, panting and glaring. Some older relatives smile. One of the aunts whispers, "He must really like this girl."

Later, after the special steak has been eaten and the candles have been blown out and most of the guests have gone home, Eddie's mother turns on the radio. There is news about the war in Europe, and Eddie's father says something about lumber and copper wire being hard to get if things get worse. That will make maintenance of the park nearly impossible.

"Such awful news," Eddie s mother says. "Not at a birthday."

She turns the dial until the small box offers music, an orchestra playing a swing melody, and she smiles and hums along. Then she comes over to Eddie, who is slouched in his chair, picking at the last pieces of cake. She removes her apron, folds it over a chair, and lifts Eddie by the hands.

"Show me how you danced with your new friend," she says.

"Aw, Ma."

"Come on."

Eddie stands as if being led to his execution. His brother smirks. But his mother, with her pretty, round face, keeps humming and stepping back and forth, until Eddie falls into a dance step with her.

"Daaa daa deeee," she sings with the melody, ". . . when you're with meeee . . . da da . . . the stars, and the moon . . . the da . . . da . . . da . . . in June . . ."

They move around the living room until Eddie breaks down and laughs. He is already taller than his mother by a good six inches, yet she twirls him with ease.

"So," she whispers, "you like this girl?"

Eddie loses a step.

"It's all right," she says. "I'm happy for you."

They spin to the table, and Eddie s mother grabs Joe and pulls him up.

"Now you two dance," she says.

"With him?"

"Ma!"