by Beth Kephart
She looked at me so carefully that I wondered what she saw: my tangled hair all scrunchied back, my T-shirt loose, my long shorts baggy. “He needs his rest,” she said. She was wearing a buttercup-colored T-shirt and a gauzy skirt, brown sandals without much of a heel. I crossed my arms in a most outright duplication of hers.
“I’m good at quiet,” I said.
“I know you are, but Rosie—” Rosie. My name, with the Spanish curlicue R, my name spoken as a warning.
“I’m family,” I told her. “Family.” One of the biggest words in any language.
She looked at me for a long time before she finally unknotted her arms. I was past her in a second, around the corner of the kitchen and right there, quiet, next to him, in his prison bed, beside the tangle of wires of a machine—it hadn’t been there before—that was needling something into his veins.
“What is this?” I demanded of Teresa, who’d followed me and was now right there beside me.
“I was trying to tell you.”
“You didn’t tell me this,” I said, thrusting my chin toward the IV.
“He needs it. For the pain. For fluids, Rosie.”
“Yeah. Well. He hasn’t said anything to me about pain.” My heart was a live frog in my throat. The heat of the day was getting stuck behind my eyes. I was mad again, but mad wasn’t right. And Teresa wasn’t wrong. I was.
“We should talk, Rosie,” she said, “the two of us.”
“I’m not,” I said, “going to.” Two words only in each long breath.
“Today we’re managing the pain, yes? We’re managing the pain and the fluids. Today.” Every one of her words playing like music, even the serious ones.
“It sucks,” I said, not taking my eyes for one second off Granddad. “Totally.”
“Yes, sucks,” she said. “I know it sucks. But he’ll want you here where you are when he wakes up. And he won’t want you mad.”
“I wasn’t planning on going anywhere,” I told her, flopping down so hard in the mean-looking wheelchair that I probably bruised my butt.
“Me also,” she said, taking the remaining La-Z-Boy chair, scaring Riot out of a doze. “Nowhere.”
“It’s me either,” I said, “in my language.” I sat looking at Granddad. She sat looking at me. The room was dull brown and white sheets, bed bars and wheelchair metal. I said, “If you want to tell someone about it, tell Riot.”
It was like Mom had said: Multiple myeloma is apocalypse business. Too much calcium swimming around in the blood, bungling the kidneys. Too many plasma cells in the marrow messing with the immune system. Things getting stuck, things drying up, things dying. Hypercalcemia. Pneumonia. Infections. It’s the end-of-the-line stuff for multiple myeloma, the way people die when they’re that sick. Granddad was doing pretty well, considering. But still, Teresa said. Still. Things were changing. He was changing. I had to be prepared. While Teresa talked, Riot walked all around. She jumped from the floor to my knee to the floor. She jumped to the windowsill. She stared at the people walking by outside, the people who couldn’t see us where we were, in a cave of sickness, running out of time.
“Where does he hurt right now?” I asked, for Riot’s sake.
“Everywhere he’s aching,” Teresa told the cat, who swiped just then at something with her monster-sized pipe-cleaner tail, then bent around on herself and nibbled at a hind leg. When Granddad sighed in his sleep, when he shifted just a little in his sheets, Riot’s ears went out like two antennae, a direct tilt toward his bed. She was better than a guard dog. She knew Granddad the best.
“Why does he hardly eat anymore?” For the sake of that cat I asked.
“Too much to ask of the kidneys. And the food—it doesn’t taste so good; it’s more like work.”
“What are you doing for my granddad? What can you do?” My granddad, I’d said. Mine. Because so what if he belonged to Riot? He also belonged to me.
“Make him comfortable. Bring him what he wants.” She was turning a strand of hair around one finger. When she stopped, a curl was there. I watched her. I wondered what would make her care so much about an old man she’d only just met, how much sickness she had seen, and how much dying.
“He wants me to put things In Trust, is what he really wants,” I said. “I know that for a fact.”
“No doubting, Rosie.” She chose another ribbon of hair and twined it around.
“And all I’ve gotten to so far is the books and the things in between the books and the songs. And that’s not much.”
“A lot already.”
“Not enough.”
I felt the heat of the day packing back in behind my eyes. I watched Riot leap from the windowsill, like water falling down. “You don’t know how hard it is,” I told her. “Deciding. What to keep and what to throw away.” I didn’t want to cry. I hadn’t meant to. But all of a sudden I was drying my cheeks with my hands; my hands were wet. Riot had left the floor where she’d landed and leaped right back up to my lap. She was padding my knees, softening them for a nap. I put one of my wet hands on the silk of her head until she finally quieted down.
“A hard job, deciding,” Teresa said.
“And it’s not like my mother has come around to help.” I felt another warm leak down my face. I didn’t dry it.
“Everything in its own time, Rosie.”
“Why are you here?” I asked Teresa, after I’d settled myself.
She thought for a moment. “To make a difference.” She had two long curls hanging beside her face. She was working on a third.
“No, here. In the United States. Why are you here and not wherever you’re from, doing this?”
“Ah,” she said. “Andalucía, you mean.”
“White horses. Red flowers. Black bulls.” Lifted straight from my grandmother’s travel-ogues, which I’d tucked safely away In Trust.
“Well. That is a story.”
“Granddad’s asleep,” I said, knocking away the last of the tears. “And so is Riot.” The Maine coon was purring like a revving car.
“I guess we have time then to tell.”
I scrunched around in the thin-seated wheelchair. I looked at the room, dull brown and sheet white except where the hospital metal caught little pricks of sun. I wasn’t leaving until Granddad woke, and I didn’t want to sit with my thoughts.
TWENTY-FIVE
“GO AHEAD,” I said, and Teresa began with color. Color in the skies, color in the earth, color in the marketplaces, where she would go, she told me, as a little girl to help choose the hard green tomatoes and the not precisely ripe yet plums and the Manchego cheese that was more than three months old and also the youngest partridge, the pinkest pork, the white-bellied sea bass, the red mullet. But the brightest colors, Teresa said, were the flamenco colors, flamenco being more than a dance, more of an invention performed in black boots and dresses that looked like animals no regular body would for one minute trust. Flamenco was back there, back then. It was home.
Teresa’s father had been a banker. Her mother had been a beauty. There had been a cook named Stella and a garden of yarrow, aster, chive, marigold, and in that garden there’d been butterflies—wings, Teresa said, like so many stained glass windows. There had been places to sit in the garden. There had been birds.
But what happened to Teresa when she was ten was the reason she had come to be in my country, in my grandfather’s house at the time of his dying. She had been sitting with her mother on the couch one day. She had been sitting, looking outside at the flowers. Both of them wearing silky white pajamas, both of them just resting.
Then Teresa’s mother had gone upstairs and, after something more than the usual time, had not returned. There was, Teresa said, something wrong all of a sudden blowing through the house, and now she was up off the couch and running across the floor and through the kitchen and up the curving marble steps of that big white house, calling for her mother. And then there she was, her mother on her back, on the black-flecked marble of the bathroom
floor. Teresa had turned the water off in the shower stall and cried out for help until Stella had heard, but there was nothing for it. Her mother had been alive. Next, her mother was gone. One thing, then the other.
After that, Teresa said, she would let no one touch her mother, no one. It was Teresa herself, ten years old, who buttoned her mother into her burial gown and tied her hair in a ribbon and powdered her eyelids with a lilac color and blew the dust from between her lashes. It was Teresa. Afterward there was only sadness in the house and her father working longer hours at the bank. Stella stopped making gazpacho, stopped peeling cloves of garlic, stopped putting the old bread in water to soak, stopped going to the market for clams. The garden grew knotty and cold. The butterflies went elsewhere. Teresa herself woke every morning thinking maybe she would go downstairs and find her mother, dressed in white.
“I’m glad you’re here,” I said when her story was done.
“There is time,” she said. “Still. With your grandfather.”
“I have been planning something,” I said.
“What precisely is it?” she asked.
And I told her.
TWENTY-SIX
ON THE WAY-OPPOSITE end of the strip from where Granddad lived are the places people go to get things fixed. The shoe guy, quick with new soles. A strange wrinkled woman who won’t say much but is purely brainy, people say, with messed-up jewelry and clogged-up clocks. It’s where the town’s big banks sit, and also the fast-serve burger joints and the three gas stations facing off on a single corner, one of them the station where Nick works with his dad in the summer, the two of them scurrying around like crabs on their backs, going face to belly with snagged autos.
The day after Teresa’s stories, the morning after I had danced well, at last, with Max, and before I got to Granddad’s, I went to see Miss Marie—swung up and around and beneath the tunnel, beneath the too-early-for-action House of Dance, and headed west, paralleling the train tracks until I got to where I was going. There was a thick bracelet of jingle bells pinned to the inside of Miss Marie’s door, and when I walked in, that thing rang, a bizarrely winter song in summer. It wasn’t long before Miss Marie appeared, broke through to the front of the store from the back, where she’d been working behind a pair of thick paisley curtains. Miss Marie was like a walking time capsule, stuck in back who knows when, with her dyed brown hair tied up high on her head with a little purple bow. She was wearing a white blouse with a pointy collar and a dark-purple pleated skirt—had on black tights and gray ballerina-style slippers. She looked precisely the way she had looked all those Christmases ago.
“Why, Rosie Keith, hello,” she said, after she had squinted at me through her magnifying glasses. “Have you ever grown,” she said, taking her glasses off and setting them aside. Not a question, so I didn’t answer.
Her shop was long and narrow, like a coffee bar, which is what it was in the old days, my father had told me once, before she took it over. It had two pink chairs at one end, like dollhouse chairs, and a mirror straight between them, and on three round tables with scratched glass tops there were mounds and mounds of fabric samples. A bunch of magazines was flopped on the floor, some teal-green binders, and on the wall opposite the mirror and chairs was a poster of Princess Diana. If anything had changed since I had been there years before, I didn’t see it. Even the tomato pincushion that Miss Marie wore on her wrist was the same; so was the little pair of silver scissors that hung from a ribbon like a necklace.
“Busy, Miss Marie?” I asked.
“Always,” she said. “And always a pleasure to help you.” She sized me up with her eyes, as if she were halfway toward making me some floaty, boy-eye-catching summer dress, and of course I stopped her right there.
“What I need,” I said, “is a wheelchair cushion. Something to take the edge off the hard, thin plastic.”
She frowned for a moment, a thousand pleats closing in around her eyes.
“Everything okay at home?” she asked.
Ha, I thought. Don’t even go there. “It’s for my granddad,” I said. “He’s not been well.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” She looked at me hard, waiting for more, but I was here on a business call and wasn’t about to explain about the apocalypse cancer—the calcium, the kidneys, the bones, the running short of time.
“It’s a troll-ugly wheelchair,” I said. “And it’s hard as stone to sit on. I was thinking of something soft and fancy.”
Miss Marie brightened. “Tassels?” she asked. “Piping around the edges?”
“Something like that,” I said. “Something fabulous. Gallant.” I liked that word, gallant. I had seen it in one of Granddad’s books.
“It won’t have to cost much,” she told me, touching the purple ribbon that was pulled so tight at the top of her funny, pointed head. “I’ve got fabric ends, won’t even charge you for them.”
“Money,” I said, “is not an issue.”
“Size?” she said.
“Got it.” I pulled a crumpled piece of paper from the pocket of my shorts. I had measured the day before, with a twelve-inch ruler I had found in one of Granddad’s kitchen drawers.
“You don’t mess around,” Miss Marie said, “do you?”
“Not when there’s so little time, I don’t.” She put her glasses on now, to look at me again. I let her look as long as she had to.
“I’ll make this a priority,” she said after she’d satisfied herself.
“Thank you. And also?” Here I got shy and a little self-conscious, stumbling a bit.
“Ah,” she said. “Something for you?” she asked.
“A dress,” I said, searching for words. “Something special. Something pure and simple and soaked with color.” She took out her measuring tape, and I lifted up my arms. She brought spools of things from the room behind her. She showed me pictures, patterns, threads. I asked if she worked fast.
“Fastest anywhere,” she said. “Come back in three days, and you’ll have a dress.”
“Don’t forget the wheelchair cushion,” I said.
“Four days,” she said.
The bright-red digitals on the bank read 84º F and 9:46 A.M. when the jingle bells rang me out of Miss Marie’s. Early still in Granddad’s world. Teresa would be wanting him to herself; that’s how she’d put it. For baths, for medicines, for talking to. For whatever nurses do, their secrets.
Already the heat of the day was roofing over everything—the buildings, cars, and sidewalks, the people and the trains. The heat was there, and above the heat was the sky, and in between the heat and the sky a few birds flew. At the gas stations across the street the air was bleary. People looked like water drops. The asphalt leaked away from itself.
The light turned, and I crossed the street on the diagonal. JB’s Automotive, the auto shop where Nick worked summers, was the nicest one of the corner three, with a white, blue, and green striped outside and a brand-new painted inside. You had to walk past the pumps to get to the repair shop, and I did, weaving between two fueling-up SUVs and over the hump of the island and in through the wide-open doors of the shop, where a shiny red Ford Focus was suspended above the concrete floor, like a ladybug on someone’s finger. On the long back wall a row of tools and cans sat arranged, it seemed to me, by size and color, and there was a steel table piled high with catalog stacks and tubes and things, and above the desk there was a bunch of hooks and dangling sets of keys. The place sounded like air being sucked in and cranked out and wheezing. I called for Nick. From out behind the Focus his dad appeared. He was short and muscular with tree-trunk arms. He had a movie-star mustache and thick graying hair, a JB sewn onto his uniform pocket. He took his time remembering.
“Rosie?” he asked after a while. “Rosie Keith?”
“Nick’s friend,” I said. I shifted in my tennis shoes. Pulled a loose strand of hair behind one ear. “From next door.”
“All coming back to me,” he said, tapping one side of his head with a blackened
index finger. Then he said: “Just kidding with you, Rosie. I didn’t forget.”
“Nick around?” I asked.
“Placing parts orders in the back office,” he said. “You want him?”
I felt my face turn red.
“Hold on.”
I stayed put. Watched Nick’s dad disappear into a back room, watched Nick come out behind him a few minutes later. He was so much like his dad, only taller: the same wide arms, the same thick hair, the same gray-blue cotton shirt with the JB sewn onto the pocket, the way of standing there, looking me over, a slow smile crawling up his face.
“Hey,” he said, in the sleepy voice that makes teachers think he’s not listening.
“Hey,” I answered. He put his big arms out to hug me. I hugged his bigness back.
“What’s up?”
I shrugged. “You busy?”
Nick looked at his dad, who also shrugged. Nick heaved his shoulders. “Just the Focus,” he said, looking at me, then turning toward his dad. “Until eleven o’clock, when a Wrangler’s coming in. Right, boss?”
Nick’s dad flicked one big-thumbed, greasy hand toward the town’s center. “Just be back,” he said, “for the Wrangler.”
We walked out of the shade of the shop into the heat of the day, which had sunk down even lower. The commuter traffic was gone, and in its place were all the midmorning moms. “You hear about Rocco?” Nick said when the light turned green.
“What about Rocco?”
“Parents sent him to some college prep boot camp. Can you picture it?”
“No,” I said, thinking of Rocco’s square face and crooked class-clown smile. “I can’t, actually. He’s probably stolen everybody’s socks by now.”
“Probably.”
“Probably tried to flirt with one of the teachers.”
“That would be Rocco.”
We had crossed over to the other side. Mr. D’Imperio was down the street a ways, putting up some ribbon of a sign, and there was a burst of balloons tied to Whiz Bang’s glass front door. Three of the bleached mannequins from the everything store had been dragged outside and dressed with ancient bathing suits, to advertise some summer sale of garden tools and beach rafts. I walked so that a part of me was tucked inside Nick’s shadow. “How’s the auto-repair business?” I asked.