The Big Splash by Jack D. Ferraiolo

pay you to give him to me after you do.”
    â€œWhy? So you can fill his pants with chocolate?”
    â€œJust hand him over to me.” His eyes looked as dead as an unfed goldfish’s.
    â€œHe’d have a better shot if I threw him off a bridge.”
    â€œThat won’t be your problem.”
    â€œAll this time we’ve known each other and you still don’t have a clue about me. I have a pretty good idea whatyou’d do to that kid, so if I hand him over to you, I might as well do it myself. And I’m not about to cross that line.”
    He was off of the sofa and in my face. “And
you
don’t know
me
very well. I’ll get to him regardless, with or without you. My way, you’ll have a little money to show for it.”
    â€œGo home, Kev. Vengeance isn’t good for your complexion.”
    â€œGo to hell, Matt.”
    He slammed the door on his way out.
    I glanced at a photo I kept in a frame on the corner of my desk. My mom had taken it two summers ago. Younger versions of Kevin, Liz, and me smiled and mugged for the camera, each of us holding an oversized ice cream cone. Liz’s in particular looked ridiculously huge in her small hand. Kevin and I had teased her that there was no way she was going to finish it before it fell to the ground. She ended up having the last laugh. Both Kevin and I lost ice cream that day, while she polished hers off without a problem. Kevin said later that we had gotten our “just desserts.” All of us had groaned while Kevin smiled proudly, knowing that the only reason we were groaning was because we wished we had thought of that horrible pun first.
    The moment that photo had captured was typical of our friendship. On the surface, there was nothing special about it: just three kids smiling and holding ice cream cones. Yet I treasured that day, along with all the other days we had spent together, doing “nothing special.” I had recently come to realize that it was extremely rare to find friendships in which doing “nothing special” was the most fun thing you could ever hope to do. For a moment, I thought about calling Kevin up, telling him I’d help, and confiding in him that I missed being friends. For a moment, I wanted to go back to the way things were between us.
    Instead, I sat back down to eat my dinner. No dice … I wasn’t hungry anymore. I turned on the radio to see if I could catch the end of the Sox game, but they had already lost to the Twins, 8 to 6. I regarded this as a sign that my day wasn’t going to improve, so I went upstairs to bed. I stayed awake until I heard my mom’s key in the door, sometime around 2:30. She came into my room.
    â€œGo to sleep,” she said, kissing my forehead. She didn’t have to tell me twice.

I woke up the next morning, my mom had already left for work. There was a ten-dollar bill and a note on the counter: “Sorry, hon—I had to get to work early this morning. Quarterly reviews—hooray! Also, I have to go right from the office to the restaurant tonight. Mr. Carling needs me to set up for a party. I won’t see you until late. Here’s some money. Treat yourself to dinner. Be careful and I love you. Mom.”
    My jaw clenched and locked. Mr. Carling was Albert Carling, Kevin’s father. He was the general manager of
    Santini’s, the restaurant where my mom worked nights and weekends. His wife, Roberta, owned it, having inherited it from her father, who kicked off before I was born. Kevin always said that if he asked his dad which he loved more, his son or the restaurant, his dad would say his son, but only after giving it a lot of thought.
    Mr. Carling was a hard man to get a bead on. When I was friends with Kevin and Liz, I saw him all the time. He was always pretty nice to me, asked me how I was doing in school—all the typical “adult to kid” chitchat. When my mom got a job waitressing at