First time Adrian Boyle heard Mary Smith she was screaming.
She was screaming at Jehovah’s Witnesses “I don’t need your religion, and I don’t need you on my porch!”
Boyle started walking toward Mary’s house.
He didn’t know her name then, or anything else about her other than her voice sounded like a Ruttman motor with a half-ounce of metal shavings in it.
He didn’t know what a Jehovah’s Witness was either, but he was gonna ask the lady with the crazy voice if she wanted him to beat up the man in the dark suit and hat for coming up on her porch. He wasn’t gonna ask about beating up the woman with the man, carrying the little comic books, but if Mary Smith had asked, he was willing to beat the woman up too for a few bucks.
The first time Adrian Boyle really saw Mary Smith, not just her unruly hair and angry lips leaning out her screen door, was Mary Smith running across her lawn toward the man and woman who had pissed her off.
Damn, Boyle thought, she’s got a piece of metal in her hand, she’s about to beat the dogsnot outta both of them people herself.
Then Mary slowed down, and said “Excuse me.”
The woman turned first, then the man.
Mary said, “I’m sorry.”
The metal she was carrying was a cookie sheet.
“I just baked these. Take a few. Take “em all if you want. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled at ya.”
The man smiled, took something off the cookie sheet and put it in his mouth.
Boyle guessed correctly that it was a cinnamon roll by the way the man had to take his pinkie knuckle and wipe icing off his face.
Boyle couldn’t help but notice that the woman carrying the little comic books looked at the man like he was crazy. He started to hope they would fight, but it didn’t seem likely.
Mary Smith told the two people, “Have a beautiful day and I mean it.”
She turned and walked back up her walkway, flat stones in a left, right, left pattern, not exactly in a straight line.
Boyle’s foster father laid concrete. Maybe he could–
“You want a cinnamon roll?” Mary had stopped in the middle of her walkway, she was looking right at him.
Boyle thought it was a dumb question. He only had a cinnamon roll once in his life, at one of his foster aunt’s baby showers, but he looked at ‘em in the window of the bakery all the time. Who said no to a cinnamon roll?
“You’re Adrian Boyle, right?”
The question scared him a little. Why did she know his name? Maybe she guessed he was scared, because she changed expressions on her face real quick, like I’m not gonna hurt you. He had seen that face on social workers and potential foster families.
The thought of someone seeing him scared scared him too.
“I just like Boyle,” he said. “Like the hot water that can burn you.”
Mary Smith sucked in a laugh that she would let out hundreds of times in the future telling that story at The Hibernian. A twelve-year-old boy trying to be tough,” like the hot water that can burn you”, then eating a cookie sheet full of cinnamon rolls like they were one saltine cracker.
“I’m Mary Smith,” she said.
Mary invited Boyle up on the porch and got him a glass of milk.
Boyle still had the last of the cinnamon rolls in his mouth when he asked “How come you said sorry to them people? They came up on your porch. They shoulda said sorry, not you. I woulda beat ‘em up.”
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