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The thing is, ever since my fight with Nick, she's been clucking around me like the mother hen.

Maybe she figures I got in some gang fight, so she keeps asking me where I'm going and who with.

Also, I guess she noticed I don't go to Nick's after school anymore.

I come right home.

So she asks me do I feel all right.

You can't win.

Right now, I can see she's going to begin asking who is Tom and where did I meet him.

It occurs to me there's an easy way to take care of this.

I turn around to Tom again.

"Say, how about you come up and I'll introduce you to Mom? Then she won't start asking me a lot of questions."

"You mean I look respectable, at least?"

"Sure."

We go up to the apartment, and Mom asks if we'd like some cold drinks or something.

I tell her I ran into Tom when he helped me hunt for Cat around Gramercy Park, which is almost true, and that he sometimes plays stickball with us, which isn't really true but it could be.

Mom gets us some orangeade.

She usually keeps something like that in the icebox in summer, because she thinks cokes are bad for you.

"Do you live around here?" she asks Tom.

"No, ma'am," says Tom firmly.

"I live at the Y. I've got a summer job in a filling station over in Brooklyn, starting right after Memorial Day."

"That's fine," Mom says.

"I wish Davey could get a job. He gets so restless with nothing to do in the summer."

"Aw, Mom, forget it! You got to fill in about six-hundred working papers if you're under sixteen."

"Listen, Mom, what I came up for—we thought we'd make some sandwiches and go up to Inwood Park."

"Inwood? Where's that?"

So I explain to her about the Indian arrowheads, and we get out the classified phone book and look at the subway map, which shows there's an IND train that goes right to it.

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