by Beth Kephart
In the store itself there was hardly any walking room. Cut flowers were crammed into buckets and pails, they were leaning out of crates and vases, they had their blossoms caught in nets or were already past budding, and they smelled like the colors they were, like tangerine and grape and vanilla and lemon. I remembered coming once into the shop on my father’s shoulders and looking down while he gathered a bouquet. I remember his saying, “Peonies, only peonies,” and taking each one in the store—the white with the yellow center, the mango that was mango through and through, the burgundy—all just for Mom. “We’ll tell her that we love her just because.”
But today wasn’t a just-because day. It was a because day, a living-in day, a planning-the-party-that-was-coming-soon day. “Hello, Annie Pearl,” I called from the front of the store.
Annie Pearl looked up and squinted. “That you, Rosie Keith? All grown up, you are.”
“It’s me,” I said. “How have you been?”
“It’s our busy season,” she said, gesturing toward the floor. “And we’ve got lucky with good stock. What can I do for you?”
“I’m planning my granddad a party.” I just came out and said it. Wove my way between all the flowers to get closer to her counter.
“Are you now?” She smiled.
“I am.”
“And what will you be needing?”
“I don’t know much about the names of flowers,” I said. “I just know that I want color.”
“We’re good at color.”
“I’d rather have a few great flowers than a bunch of little ones. I know that, too.” Annie Pearl took notes on a pad that had been sitting on her counter. “And I don’t really care how much it costs, except if it goes past three hundred dollars.”
“You win the lottery, did you?”
“In a fashion,” I said.
She raised one eyebrow. “Your mother know about this?” she asked.
“She will soon enough,” I said. I took out an envelope of twenties.
“I’m not going to want any of that,” she said, batting my dollars away, my proof of my independent wealth, “until I’ve got your flowers.”
I told her the date. She made more notes. I looked around the store and pointed at flowers that seemed special.
“Rosie,” Annie Pearl said when I was leaving, “I got extra dahlias in.” I turned to see her pointing to a bucket of broad-faced flowers, some of which were orange, some purple. “Do me a favor and take a couple with you. I hate to see them go to waste.” She went back to work on that notepad of hers, made another couple of notes.
“You want me to take these?” I called back. “For free?”
“For the sake of the sunshine,” she said. “For the sake of making the most of the very best of them.” I wound my way back to the dahlia bucket. I stooped down close and did what she had instructed me to do. I chose the very best. Two orange and one purple. I thanked her and walked out into the sunshine.
TWENTY-TWO
THE WINDOWS WERE open at the House of Dance. I could hear the music playing as I took the diagonal across the street, met Annette on the steps, she coming down and I going up. “Max is in one of his moods,” she told me.
“Oh, no,” I said, and we both laughed. Annette had agreed to dance for my grandfather. They were working, I knew, on a fox-trot. Max and I had agreed on a waltz. It was what I was best at, what I could learn with the time that I had. “Hey, Annette,” I said.
“Yes?”
“A dahlia for you.” I handed her one of the three I had taken from the bucket of extras at Bloomer’s.
“For me?” she said.
“Of course. For you.”
“You’re something else,” she said. “And thank you.”
Marissa buzzed me in. I laid the other two dahlias across her desk, then joined Eleanor on the couch. She’d just finished up with Peter; she could use a drink, she said: “And I’m not talking about lemonade, either.” She flopped backward on the couch. She had one dance shoe on and one off. She had painted her toenails blue. She was wearing a long white skirt and a white lace tank, and she’d been working on her tan. “So how are the preparations, honey? Going well, I bet. Of course. You got everything you need right here in town. I wouldn’t throw a party anywhere else. And how about your dance—you got your dance all down pat? You know Max is a genius, Max makes the worst of us look good. Not that you’re the worst, Rosie, I didn’t mean that. I’m just saying don’t you worry. You’re in such good hands with Max.”
Marissa had blown me a kiss for the dahlias by now and handed me the red satin shoes; she kept them behind the desk. “Gorgeous,” Marissa said, about the dahlias.
“Was William here today?” I asked her.
“You just missed him,” Eleanor answered, before Marissa could. “Oh, my God. Those two? Spectacular. You ever see their bolero? To die for, I’m telling you. And oh, by the way, what a terrific twosome of dahlias.”
“William can come for the party,” Marissa said, talking over Eleanor because that’s the only way that anyone could talk when Eleanor was talking. “It’s all confirmed.”
“I don’t even know how to thank him.”
“He wants to do it. He doesn’t need to be thanked.”
“But will you tell him anyway for me? When you talk to him next, will you tell him?”
“Of course.”
“Rosie?”
I turned, and there was Max, halfway down the hall with his arm winged out. I finished putting on my shoes and hurried off toward him. “Time is of the essence,” he said.
“I’m sorry.”
We began to dance the waltz as Max had designed it. I had my head pressed back, my posture as right as I could make it. I had this thought in my head that I could finally make my granddad proud, raise up in him the memories of something sweet and good. But then Max broke our hold and stepped back and said, “Now I want to see if you can count it out for me. I want to know what you know on your own.”
“By myself?” I said.
“By yourself,” he said.
Annette, I thought, wasn’t kidding.
I felt silly all alone out there on the floor, with Max leaning against a windowsill while I boxed and whirled. But he was the boss, the nine-dance champion, and all I could do was slim the dance down to what I could actually do on my own.
“Okay,” he said at last. “Okay. You’re doing a lot of things right. You can do more, though; you can do better. I have a few ideas.” He danced with his own reflection while I watched. He traced out choices. “I know what it is,” he’d say to himself. Then: “No, no, no. It’ll be this.” I imagined him imagining the dance with a true partner, with an Annette or a Marissa, with the blonde whose name was Yvonne. I thought of how tiring it must be to dance at my beginner level.
“Okay,” Max said, pulling me into a hold, “so we were here, and now,” he said, elevating my left arm and placing my right hand on his shoulder, “we’re here. And now you’re walking while I turn, and now you’re running—faster, faster—and now you’re slowing, to a walk. Now you’re planting your left foot, you’re stepping out with your right, shifting your weight.” I had no idea what he was talking about. He made me do it again. It was like running into the wind.
“Your hands are not in the right place,” he said. “And your left arm is supposed to be back. And your count is off. So we’ll do it again. Come on.”
“Is this really necessary?” I said.
“If you want to be good, it is.”
We did the whole thing again, and my head felt slung against itself. There were three of me in the mirror and four of Max in the room, and he was laughing, shaking his head. “We’re going to have to do that again,” he said. “Rosie.” As if he had to remind me who I was.
“I think I’m going to get sick,” I said.
“Try it again,” Max said, and I said, “I can’t.” He looked at me as if he hadn’t heard me right. I said, “No. Really. I can’t,” and now his
next lesson, Julia, was already there, practicing her mamba at the room’s other end. She was the protégée, the studio’s young star. She had less to learn than I did.
“Tomorrow,” I told Max, because I wasn’t joking about getting sick, and because he might have been the boss, but I was the paying client.
“Tomorrow’s your favorite word,” he said.
“Tomorrow. I swear. Tomorrow.”
“All right. Tomorrow then. Keep the moves inside your head, so you can think them through your body.”
TWENTY-THREE
“EVERY DAY’S FOR living in.” That was what Granddad had said. Walking home now, after dance, I felt like rubber that had been left out in the sun, globby and dizzy and so not pretty, but happy too because I really was learning to dance. I really was going to give my granddad all that I could give of color.
I was through the tunnel now and back around to the street on which I lived, and all of a sudden I was thinking about Nick and that one sweet time that we had gone off in search of something big, taken what we wanted, gotten all caught up with time, had ourselves a verifiable adventure. We were thirteen. We’d escaped, when no one was looking, the Tuesday of our Easter break. We had run off to the station and boarded a train, telling no one, not even Leisha, where we were headed. An exhibition of old model planes had come to the city’s science institute. Nick had seen the ad in the paper. I was his accomplice.
The train had been crowded, the morning rush. It was April, but I was wearing a skirt and sandals anyway, hoping Nick would notice, and Nick had his khakis on, out of respect, he had said, for airplanes. We were tight together in the commuter train, and his legs were long, his shoulders wide. He was looking straight ahead, not saying much, because he hardly did, and because he was excited, maybe, and then, when he turned to look at me, it seemed his eyes were made of sky. Every day’s for living in, and that day, sure as the sun came up, was altogether Nick’s.
There was a girl and a mother in the seat ahead of us, and the girl—maybe she was three—was wild. She’d be standing up, then kicking her legs out straight, like an acrobat in free fall. Every time she plopped down, the seat went squish, and she would let out a hiccup and laugh. When she grew tired of jumping, she banged at her mother for attention, who did precisely not one thing. Plain didn’t move. I looked at Nick. Nick looked at me. The sky still in his eyes.
“Some mother,” I said.
“Asleep,” he said. “I guess.”
“Who could sleep through that much racket?”
Nick shrugged. He looked at me, then past me at the world that was rushing by: garbage cans in backyards, dogs behind trees, little backyard sheds with metal roofs, inflatable swimming pool, crushed flat. “Can’t believe we’re doing this,” he said.
“I can,” I said. “Why wouldn’t we?” Because we never had, that was the answer, but Nick didn’t say it.
The girl in the seat ahead was bored, slapping at her mother’s arm and getting nothing. Kicking at the back of the seat before her, until a shined apple of a head from across the aisle asked her to pipe down, please. It was when she turned around to see behind her that she fell at once for Nick. “Hello,” she said, and Nick looked up, and then she saw his eyes.
“Wanna hear me sing?” the girl asked.
“Sing?” Nick repeated.
“Okay,” she said, standing straighter, and Nick, looking at her as if he’d for the first time seen her, got this funny expression on his face. “I’m a real good singer,” the girl said, and she was standing all the way up now, facing backward, facing Nick, planting both feet on the seat and starting in on some song. It was no song I’d ever heard, but it had rhythm and she held the tune, and now the girl was clapping to keep up with herself and smiling white through seashell teeth. All the little braids that spiraled out from her head closed up tight in kitten-shaped plastic clips, and she had some kind of jumper on and a shirt with a tiny collar. You couldn’t not see how she was saying “Dance with me,” and somebody from across the aisle saw it too, joined in with a little nodding rhythm, and now the girl, having found herself a bigger audience, grew even taller in her seat and sang a little louder with her frothy voice. All this while her mother slept, her head slammed against the window of the train, her breath hawing heavily.
The world outside the train kept rushing by. In the seat my thigh was pushing up against Nick’s thigh; and if at first, while the girl was starting her song, Nick didn’t move one inch, just stared, now I saw the big boots on his big feet slide, a sort of shuffle to the right, a shuffle to the left, in time to the little girl’s song. Nick dancing. Nick taking the rhythm in, putting the rhythm out, and all the years I’d known Nick, had lived next door to Nick, lain flat on a roof beside Nick, chased his homemade planes, I hadn’t known that Nick had dance in the bottoms of his boots.
The girl reached the end of her song, blew the last word out of her little-girl cheeks, jumped up, then came down in her seat, popped back up, and said, “Don’t worry, I got another.” Now she was off again into some new tune, and there were more on the train helping her keep up her beat: commuters with briefcases, mothers with kids, other people like Nick and me, but not shiny apple head. Nick’s boots were going left-right-left-right-left-right, and my right sandal foot was going with his left black boot, because we were sitting thigh to thigh, because this was Nick’s day, and Nick had decided to dance.
“I got something,” the little girl said, now that she had us all in the palm of her tiny hand, and Nick said, “What’s that?” and the girl said, “I got these,” and Nick said, “What these is it that you got?”
“These,” the little girl said—said to Nick because he was the one she liked the most, because she wanted to give her special something to him. Before we could guess what she meant, she was yanking at the plastic clips in her hair, the kitten barrettes, yellow and red, that piled up quickly in her hands. She pulled at her hair, but her braids stayed put.
“She shouldn’t do that,” I said.
But Nick said nothing.
“Her mother’s going to freak.”
“Her mother’s sleeping.”
“I got these for you,” the girl said. “For you, for you, for you,” she said, jumping herself silly. She tossed her fistful of barrettes over the seat back, at Nick. They went up like fireworks and down like rain, landing in his lap. She screamed, it was so funny.
“I got more,” the girl said, putting her hands back up to her braided hair, snatching another kitten free. But now her mother finally woke herself up from whatever dream had made her dead, and I could see, but barely, her face through the crack between the seats: her sleep-mussed hair, her anger.
“Honey, I told you,” the mother said, shifting in her seat, changing the fractions of the face that I could see. “I told you, you take those barrettes out, you’re not getting any more, you listen? I told you to leave your hair alone!”
“That’s my friend,” the girl said, pointing to Nick.
“Nobody here’s your friend,” said the mother, not turning. “Now you sit down and say you’re sorry. You sit down. Be good.”
“It’s all right,” Nick said, leaning forward. “She’s a performer.”
“She’s a diva is what she is,” the mother answered. “A circus clown. Can’t sit, this child. Can’t sit. I told her.” Then to the girl: “No more.” The girl was disappearing. Her face bobbing down and then up, then bobbing down. I could hear only her whimper, her crying.
Through the windows of the train the landscape was turning to industrial waste, small scraps of trees, birds on a wire. The empty plastic trash bags that got caught in the wind looked like green and white ghosts, floating. There was a dog on a hill. There was the start of the city. A building built of blue-green glass like a ship berthed in the sun. The conductor was announcing Philadelphia. People were shuffling, collecting things, and the girl and her song were all forgotten, but still there was that shower of barrettes, and when I looked back at Nic
k, I saw how he was stringing them together—red to yellow to yellow to red, a bracelet of hair-clip kittens.
“Nice,” I said, but Nick said nothing, and by the time the train stopped in Philadelphia, Nick stood to let me slip on past. “See you around,” I heard him say behind me, and when I turned, I saw him reach to give the girl her barrettes back. She was fast asleep, curled up against her mother, who was herself asleep again. There were people behind Nick and me, pressing to get out. There was the morning rush.
“Liked your songs,” Nick told the girl, laying the barrette bracelet down on her lap.
“Me too,” I said, now walking forward, ahead of the crushing crowd. I could feel Nick close behind me, in the aisle. I could feel him behind me as we stepped out. It wasn’t far to the institute after that. Down the escalator, through the station, across an old bridge over a brown river past a black tower, through a wind blast. We turned a corner, walking side by side. We took the institute’s wide white steps. We paid with birthday money, each of us. We lived that day, like Granddad said.
TWENTY-FOUR
THE NEXT DAY AT Granddad’s Teresa met me at the door. “He’s had a little setback,” she said. “I’ve got him sleeping.”
I felt my heart jitter up inside the narrow knob of my throat, my hands go clammy. “I’m coming in,” I said. And then, when she didn’t move: “Aren’t I?”