Love Among the Walnuts by Jean Ferris Page A

minutes to get ready."
    "I want to go out," Boom-Boom said around his thumb.
    "Good," Sunnie said. "That shows how smart you are. You know what's good for you."
    Boom-Boom beamed.
    It was more like an hour before Sunnie got everyone, including Dr. Waldemar, bundled up and out the door to the backyard, but she did it. She herded them ahead of her like a flock of recalcitrant sheep, with Sandy and Boom-Boom as the enthusiastic sheepdogs, pulling Eddy's cart and keeping everyone else in line.
    Dr. Waldemar, after messing around with a pile of snow for a few minutes, decided it was too cold for him and went inside. Lyle and Virgil tried to follow him, and so did L. Barlow Van Dyke and Mr. Moreland. But Sunnie stopped them. She said Dr. Waldemar was the boss and the oldest—heavens, he must be eighty—and so he had special privileges. The four men turned around but not without grumbling, at least from three of them. Mr. Van Dyke contributed a virtuoso scowl.
    An hour later the yard was populated with a crowd of snow people. Mr. Van Dyke and Mr. Moreland had made two rotund snow tycoons facing each other, their round tummies touching. They each smoked a corncob pipe—goodness only knew where Opal had found them—stuffed with Monopoly money. Lyle and Virgil made identical snowmen, so close together it was impossible to tell where one left off and the other began. Boom-Boom's creation was a snow woman with a snow child tucked into her side. All of Graham's snowmen were slender—with wide shoulders—wonderfully sculpted, and hardened into ice with water he'd brought in a pitcher from the kitchen. Sunnie and Opal between them made a throng of people, in a multitude of shapes, sizes, and genders. Sunnie even made a few four-footed snow creatures of pet size. Opal's figures tended to be less rounded than Sunnie's, but they definitely had energy and originality. She stuck cigarettes in all her snow people's mouths, and Sunnie went around taking them out. Everett didn't make any snow people of his own, but he helped everyone else with theirs. Poor Eddy didn't do anything, of course, but he made an attentive audience, which every performer needs.
    Sandy horrified himself by making two snowmen in the shapes of Bart and Bernie—which wasn't hard, because Bart and Bernie were shaped just like snowmen—and then knocking their heads off. As angry as he was, he was ashamed to lower himself to the point where he was acting like they did. He put heads back on his snowmen, but before he knew what he was doing, he had knocked them off again. It felt wonderful, he realized with guilty glee. He did it a few more times before he was satisfied to put the heads back on and let them stay.
    His life at Eclipse had been so placid, so tranquil that the strongest negative emotions he had ever felt had been annoyance when he couldn't get the top off a jar of pickles and mild irritation at the prospect of having Bart and Bernie for dinner once a month. In the past few weeks, he had discovered an entire catalog of feelings he hadn't even known existed: terror at the thought that Horatio, Mousey, Flossie, and Attila might ... he couldn't even
think
the word; fury and hatred toward Bart and Bernie, plus a real fear that they might try something on Sandy himself; soaring joy at the new things he was learning to do—drive, understand high finance, beat Mr. Moreland at cards without feeling guilty about it. The way Sunnie made him feel occupied a whole category all by itself. Knowing she regarded him with the same fondness she felt for everyone else at Walnut Manor filled him with a sadness that was new to him, too.
    He sighed and punched his snowmen in the stomachs, leaving fist-shaped holes.
    "You've made the buttonholes too big," Sunnie said, coming up behind him. "They should be just big enough for a piece of coal. Of course, we don't have any coal, but I think the barbecue briquettes look nice, so square and all. You want some? I'll help you fix the holes