by Beth Kephart
“Good decision.” He didn’t open his eyes.
“Are you getting hungry?”
“Tired more than hungry.”
“You can sleep, you know.”
“I’m becoming a champion sleeper,” he said.
“Do you want the windows shut?”
“I’m starting to like the sound of that guy’s whistle.” He let his head fall back against the cushion. His hand stopped drawing halos over Riot’s puffy head. The point of his chin dropped low toward his neck. His head began to bob, then stilled. The only thing alive about him was the coming in and blowing out of his breath.
I spent the rest of the afternoon shaking the pages of all those volumes loose, sorting the fragments and bits. A lot of the time a book had been made thick with a tear of newspaper that cracked when I tried to unfold it. I wondered whether Granddad even remembered any of this stuff. I thought maybe he was like a squirrel, burying the green walnuts in autumn so that they could rot come spring.
But he had left the sorting up to me; that was my job, and after a while I had a system involving three of the baskets that had been stacked up by the TV. One was for In Trust. One was for Toss. One was for Deciding Later. A whole wad of stuff showed up in the D.L. at first, to buy me thinking time. I tossed old newspaper stories because news belongs to anyone. I tossed old labels, the buds of flowers that had turned brown, bookmarks that seemed to have been set aside for their usefulness and not for any kind of beauty. Into In Trust I put the feather and a stash of antique coins and braided ribbons and buttons and even embroidered collars taken from old clothes. I put decks of photographs that had somehow melted, one picture into the other, photos I’d one day steam apart. I put postcards and letters that someday I’d read. I put pressed leaves when the leaves still looked like nature. I put recipe cards on which were written the secrets to favorite pasta sauces, lists of exotic spices, best-sounding desserts from foreign places, a list of favorite herbs. I put whatever looked like something I could hold on to later, whatever I thought might tell a story about a man who had loved and lost and dreamed adventure but never traveled far.
Outside, the day got warmer, and inside, the sun changed places in the room. The triangle of heat that had been spilled against the floor was now spilled across the couch where Granddad sat, turning the tallest fuzz of Riot’s fur gold and pouring a splash of almost orange across Granddad’s chest and chin. He had hardly moved since he’d fallen asleep. The whistler was gone, and now there were so many different sounds outside that I couldn’t tell one from another. It wasn’t silence, but it felt like silence. It felt like being alone.
I needed a chair to reach the shelves that held the highest stuff. I grabbed the nearest one, stood up there, and collected my balance, and now I shook the past out of the books up high, until I got to the stash of old black vinyls—records inside cardboard sleeves that spelled the names of artists. I’d heard of some. Frank Sinatra. Charlie Parker. Sammy Davis Jr. Benny Goodman. Duke Ellington. The Count Basie Orchestra. Ella Fitzgerald. Johnny Mercer. Irving Berlin.
The cardboard sleeves were beat up, and the pictures were faded, and if I was ever to free the songs on them, I’d have to fix the old record player. Still, I knew that these were In Trust treasures. That music was part of my granddad’s mystery. That this music could bring back parts of his past. I pulled the records from the shelves, three and four at a time. I piled them beside the coffee table. I felt sweat roll down my neck, saw Riot give me one of her most suspicious looks.
Granddad never woke back up that day; he was still sleeping when I left. I poured a tall glass of water over lots of chunks of ice and put it right where he would find it. I set a bowl of pretzels beside the water, in case he changed his mind about food. I wrote him a note that said, “Coming back tomorrow.” Then I kissed the tallest two fingers of my right hand and pressed them to his forehead.
“Mom?” I called when I got home.
But there wasn’t any answer.
SEVEN
ONCE I FOUND MYSELF SPYING on Mr. Paul and my mother. It wasn’t done on purpose. I’d gone to Leisha’s house, seven blocks and a better neighborhood away from mine, to work on some social studies project called Seeing. This was in our ninth-grade year, and Leisha and I were project partners. The purpose of the exercise was to gather evidence about the so-called human condition, to come up with a list of things that make us one connected species. Leisha and I sat around for a while, eating extra-hot Doritos, and then we set off for a walk up and down the streets of Leisha’s neighborhood. Being tall and model thin, Leisha’s not afraid of strutting. She has a spray of freckles over milky chocolate skin, wears hats to keep her color fast. When you go walking with Leisha, you walk with style. You know she’ll tell you what she sees from where she sees it, which is up high.
So we’d gone out that day, for the sake of Mr. Marinari’s class. We’d gone through streets of old houses scrubbed up to look like new and down a short, squat strip of beigeugly condos, and we had a lot of things on our list that we’d seen: gardens, little Do Not signs, fences, rocking chairs on porches, and big TVs, all of which said something or other about people’s needs.
It was a good-enough list, but not a great one. By then we’d gone maybe five blocks north of Leisha’s house to a street of mismatched architecture: turrets on some houses; cinder blocks for some garages; a brand-new mini McMansion faced with stucco between two old-time ugly ranches. Leisha was doing her reporting from up high, tattling out random sights, as if she were peering in through so many frosty snow globes: Woven doilies over couches. Posters in thin frames. Cat on sill. All-alone boy playing with toy. Old man and even older woman in total-vomit red-plaid room. Empty flower vase. All of which I was taking down in the notebook we’d brought along for that purpose, until Leisha said, “Oh, my God,” then nothing.
“What?” I said, but Leisha was stuck on the sidewalk, saying nothing else, just staring.
So I stared where she was staring, toward a perfectly ordinary house: brown brick, black shutters, concrete square of a stoop, no real doodads I could see, nothing for our Seeing list. Then I looked through the afternoon glare past the window into the ordinary living room, and that’s when I saw what Leisha had seen: my own mother and Mr. Paul, taking a break from window washing. My mom in her overalls and Mr. Paul in his, mashing his fat lips to hers. My mom still had one of her tangerine-colored gloves on. She had herself so up against him that there was no air between them.
“I thought,” Leisha said, “that Mr. Paul was—”
“Yeah,” I said, “he is.”
“I thought your mom was—”
“Don’t ask me about my mother,” I said. “I don’t have the first idea.”
“I thought—”
“Forget it, Leisha. Forget it, okay?” I started walking fast, but Leisha just stayed put, staring and staring. I went back and yanked at her skinny arm until she started moving. “We’re a whole honking lot of out of here,” I said. “Got it?”
“But—” she said.
“And you didn’t see that, right?”
“Whatever. Sure.”
“No buts,” I said, “and no whatevers.” And don’t even ask me what I never wrote down on that list that cataloged our shared human condition.
EIGHT
SOMETHING YOU CAN RELY ON is Pastrami’s water ice. Cherry and lemon and Welch’s colored grape, for a dollar fifty, sold middle of May straight through September. They scoop it like ice cream into a paper cone, and they give you a spoon and three totally recycled napkins, and if you need to change the flavor of your day, you order yourself up one. It was getting past five in the afternoon. I’d been at Granddad’s forever. Mom had put ten dollars on the kitchen counter before she’d left for work in the so much earlier morning, saying, “Don’t count on me for dinner.” That’s it. Period. Not even an “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t worry,” I didn’t say back.
Granddad had been getting tired. He had told me several diffe
rent versions of how I should be on my way, but I had nothing and nobody to go home to and nothing to lose by savoring every single spoonful of Pastrami’s grape ice. Mr. D’Imperio himself had scooped out my cone, giving me extra for free, telling me how you had to feed the corporation, which was his fancy way of designating the stomach. “How’s your grandfather?” he’d asked me, and I’d simply said, “Fine,” and he’d said, “You tell him Mr. D. says hi,” and I’d said that I would, tomorrow.
“You won’t forget now, will you, Rosie?”
“I forget nothing,” I said, which was hardly a lie.
“A chip off the old block,” said Mr. D.
“Which block?” I wanted to know.
“Grandfather’s block on your mother’s side,” Mr. D. answered. He was holding his stomach as he sometimes did, as if it needed the bracing of his hands to keep it high. “We go back,” he said, “a very long time.”
I nodded.
“I never knew your grandfather to forget a thing,” he said.
“Doesn’t throw much away either,” I said. I felt my face go hot, despite the ice, but Mr. D. was not offended; he just laughed his big it-all-begins-at-the-stomach laugh.
“You’re all spice, Rosie,” he told me.
I nodded again, as if I were sure that spice was the best possible thing you could be. “Good batch of grape ice,” I said, backing up toward the door.
“We have it all summer long at Pastrami’s.”
By now I was out in the late sun, standing with my back against the redbrick wall that divided Pastrami’s from Whiz Bang. The road was rush-houred over with cars and trucks. Peak-hour trains came and went. Sidewalks on either side were overwhelmed with walkers. I was nothing to anyone passing by, as see-through as an early shadow, and I was thinking of Leisha at the shore, and I was thinking about Nick working the innards of cars, and I was thinking about Rocco on his ten-step program to get smart. I was thinking as well about how I myself was not having what you’d call a typical teenage summer, but then again, I thought, how many summers actually are? How many summers aren’t in some secret way lonely?
The grape ice had sent a fist of cold to the right side of my head. I twirled what was left with my spoon and drank it down. Time, I thought, to be on my way. Time. I tossed the paper cone and the plastic spoon into a trash receptacle and found my place inside the rush-hour crowd, which was mostly streaming the opposite way, back toward Granddad’s, making a hot burst of wind.
I began to focus on the little in-between places inside the commotion: the single halves of strangers’ cell phone talk; the wedges of nothing in and around people’s shoulders; the mini puzzle pieces of undisturbed air; the things that didn’t move set against all the things that did. I remembered my envy of Leisha’s height, her special way of seeing. And then I tilted my own eyes high, to find a slice of sky. That was how I discovered the cluster of balloons—the bobbing silver, white, and pink with the sunbeams trapped inside.
They could have been clouds, scraping close to earth. They could have been poppies after they’d bloomed or tears on the face of the moon. They had that gleam inside them, and there were maybe eight or ten, knocking softly against one another above a pair of legs that I noticed only after the legs had left the crowd and crossed, a diagonal northwest, to the other side of the street. The legs, the balloons went west. They stopped at the door to a studio above and cut in away from the street.
I followed the white, the silver, the pink. I came to the studio door. I pushed through. There was a flight of stairs up: very long, very narrow. There were brownish-reddish–colored walls. There were photographs of dancers—aquamarine and yellow and red gowns, men in black tuxedos—on every available wall. “House of Dance,” a bright painted poster said. House of Dance. I stood there undetected, listening to the music and the throb, the very slight and very sweet bobbing together of balloons.
NINE
AFTERWARD, WHEN IT was getting past dusk and my mother hadn’t yet come home, I picked up the pink Princess phone my father had once sent me with a note, “Call anytime.” Yeah. Right. I carried the phone to the center of my bed, sat down, and dialed Leisha’s cell, even though she was what she called an emergency cell phone user, which no girl in Somers High or perhaps the whole world could understand except for me. Leisha’s an in-person kind of friend. She’s a big hit or miss on the phone. But I was lonely, and I took a chance, and after five long rings she answered, a little out of breath.
“Leisha,” I said, “it’s me.”
“Hi, you.” I could picture her with her hair falling down around her shoulders, a T-shirt on, a pair of silky shorts cut high on her long, lovely legs. She might have been smoothing after-sun butter lotion on, or polishing her toenails with her signature color, which is dark purple tending toward black. She might have been finishing a bowl of orange sherbet, which was something she had almost every night and never gained an ounce.
“How are the little terrors?” I asked.
“Rotten,” she said. “Want to know how rotten? Jake managed to get his head stuck in a sand bucket today. Yanked the thing on like a marching-band hat and then couldn’t get it off. Had to take him back to the house to cut him free, and he screamed every step of the way.”
“Pretty,” I said.
“Totally Jake,” she said. “Thank God no one I know is down here.” She was whispering, so I had the phone pressed hard against my ear. I imagined her turned away from where everyone else was, curled around the secret of our conversation in a house at the beach where the air outside smelled like breeze and the air inside was all damp towels and little-boy screams and clumps of sand. “Lucky for you,” she said, “that you’re cousin free.”
“I guess,” I said.
“Then again,” she said, “there’s this lifeguard. Totally and completely hot. Take Nick and times him by a hundred.”
“Do you talk to him?”
“No, I don’t talk to him. I just look at him, and that’s enough.” I pictured Leisha down at the beach with her perfect model body. If she’d seen the guy, then he’d seen her. There was no doubting that.
“So what’s with you?” she said. “What’s up?”
“I wanted…” I began, and then I didn’t know where to start, how to explain how my summer was going, what it was that I felt, why I’d called in the first place when I had to know that she would be busy, that she wouldn’t have the time to talk. “My granddad’s been sick,” I said fast. “And my mother’s my mother. And Nick is never home. Stuff.” I wanted to tell Leisha about the House of Dance and the balloon bouquet. About the dancers I’d seen through the window. About my grandfather reading magazines on places he would never ever get to. “Music and throb,” I wanted to say, but that would have been stupid, so I still kept hunting for words, and then, before I knew what words to use, all hell was letting loose.
“Oh, my God,” Leisha said, whispering no more.
“What?” I could hear crashing and scampering, someone bawling his eyes out.
“I think Jake’s just flushed his brother’s swimsuit down the toilet.”
“You’re kidding me.”
“No. I’m not. Oh. My. God. It never ends. I have to go, Rosie. I’m sorry.”
“Eight more weeks and we’re juniors together,” I said.
“Heaven,” she said. “Compared to this.” It was getting louder and louder where she was. As if she were taking a walk in a zoo right around feeding time.
I hung up the phone, and the skies were dark. I lay down and hoped that I would fall asleep sooner than I could start to cry.
TEN
THE VERY LAST TIME I saw my father, he was standing in the shadows. There was the bigness of a moon shining in through my bedroom windows, but all I saw was half of his face and the thumb that he was pressing to his earlobe. He thought I was asleep, and even though I was pretty sure he was leaving for good—I had heard what he had said; I had heard my mother crying—that’s what I let him think, that I was
asleep, because he didn’t deserve to know how much I was going to miss him.
My father was a big, tall guy and half Italian, and he was more celebrity than anything else, made you feel as big and special as he was when he was in the room. Then he’d leave and wouldn’t come home for days, and he’d make you feel forgotten. When I was little, I told Nick, Leisha, and Rocco that he was an astronaut. I told them that he rode elephants in India. I told them that he was digging up a new Egyptian mummy. I told them that he was far too famous to spend much time at home. But when he left for good, I told them nothing except that life was better without him. “More room for me in my house” is what I said, and my very best friends made like they believed me.
The first year was the hardest: the first birthday of mine, the first birthday of Mom’s, the first Thanksgiving, the first Christmas. Granddad would come, but my mother still was crying or about to start crying, tears streaking down her face and globbing her mascara. I think it was after Christmas when Granddad started to say that it was time that Mom moved on, that life was to be lived, that there was a big wide world to see, and maybe, he said, my father’s running off had been some kind of hidden blessing. My mom didn’t appreciate that, not at all. “You never liked him,” she would answer, “so don’t pretend you understand.”
“I know something about loss,” he’d say, “and I know something about not living.”
“Mom never stopped loving you,” Mom would say. “My loss is bigger. My loss is learning that everyone else is loved more than you are. Don’t think you know what I’m going through or that you can make it better.”
“You’re young, Jeanine,” he’d say. “Trust me.”