by Beth Kephart
“Same.”
“Anything good about it?”
“You’re funny, Rosie. Real funny.”
“You like Sweet Loaves cinnamon buns?”
“Haven’t had one for forever.”
“Weird,” I said.
We’d gotten as far as Sweet Loaves, and I pulled open the door. Nick stood behind me, held it. “Well, if it isn’t Miss Keith,” said Jimmy Vee, the proprietor’s son. He was twenty-three, tall and sweet, with that blond-brown hair color that doesn’t go by much of a name, and he had raisin eyes that squinted to tiny when he smiled. Jimmy Vee worked for his dad in the summer. The rest of the time he was getting his Ph.D. He had graduated number one from Somers High, and his picture had hung in the valedictorian display case ever since, the teachers still speaking of him as if he belonged to them, as if they had made him who he was. “One?” he said. “Or two?” He gestured toward the wedge of glass case that was devoted to buns.
“Two for now,” I told him. “One to go.”
“You expanding your repertoire?” Jimmy asked me, bending down to half his size to pull a tray of buns from the case. I didn’t know how he could stand it, working summers alongside such sweets. I’d have had to eat three buns a day at least. I’d have had raisins for ears and a snout.
“You know Nick?” I asked.
“Seen him around,” Jimmy said. The two nodded at each other over the counter.
“JB’s Automotive,” Nick said, as if that explained him.
“Rosie here is one of our VIP customers,” Jimmy said, speaking directly to Nick now, as if I weren’t even there. He put two of the buns on plates, lowered the other into a crisp white bag.
“She’s something else,” Nick said, and I felt my face blush. Dug into my pockets for cash.
“My treat,” Nick said.
“Nope,” I said. “I invited. I insist.”
“Get her next time,” Jimmy said, taking my dollar bills and my change.
My face was a furnace getting hotter and hotter. I grabbed our stuff and moved it to one of the round tables with the ice-cream parlor chairs. Nick sat down across from me. I smiled stupidly. He reached for his plate.
“You eat these with your hands?” he said.
“Leave nothing behind,” I said.
We sat for a while eating, not talking. We watched some customers come and go, moms buying bread for their families, dads buying doughnuts for themselves, one funny-looking man with too-long hair in a Hawaiian shirt requesting a custom cake for later that week. “Vanilla,” he kept saying, “with pink doodad flowers. A girl’s cake. Real sweet. That’s what I want.” When it got too busy, Jimmy’s dad would push through the silver doors that divided the customers from the bake shop. He was as wide as Jimmy was tall. Jimmy, we all thought, had been adopted.
“Nick?” I finally said.
“Yeah?”
“I kind of have a question.”
He lifted his broad shoulders, let them fall back down. He looked at me, straight on, eyes in my eyes. It was like a fishhook dropping down my throat and snagging my gut. It took me a second or two to remember what it was I’d meant to say.
“My granddad”—finally I got it out—“is dying.”
“Oh,” Nick said. His eyes hooked even deeper into mine. It felt as if I’d fallen straight through sky.
“And my mom—”
“I know.” He stopped me to save me from having to say. “I’ve seen her.” He looked at me, looked at me so hard I heard myself swallow, fishhook in the gut and all, nerves from toes to ears.
“Remember the girl from the train?” I said.
He thought a second: “The performer? With the barrettes?”
I nodded. “Remember you dancing?”
“I wasn’t dancing.” He looked away from me, out through the glass door, to the street, which had quieted down now that the trains had gone off peak. He turned to look at the counter where Jimmy Vee was standing, but if Jimmy had heard me talking dance, he didn’t let on. He was using glass cleaner on the counter and cases, making room for the bread.
“Your feet were,” I said, soft as I could.
“Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.”
“Your feet were good.”
“I wasn’t watching my feet.”
“I was.” I knew I was trespassing deep into the danger zone. I kept trespassing. “I’m dancing now, Nick. I’m—” I sort of turned in my chair and made a gesture toward the vicinity of the House of Dance.
“Well, that’s cool,” he said, but I could tell he was confused. I could tell he was mostly worrying about what this had to do with him.
“Yeah. Well, I’m kind of having a party.”
He looked at me, quizzical. He pushed back against the ice-cream parlor chair. Crossed his arms over his chest and his JB’s Automotive logo, let his eyebrows drop low, and waited, while I sat pinned to my seat, hunting for words.
“My granddad,” I said again, “is dying.”
“I know,” he said. “You told me.”
“Dancing is the opposite of dying,” I said.
He looked at me strangely, a look of wonder on his face. A look that said, “Come on, Rosie. Say it.”
“Dancing is going somewhere without packing your bags. Like you did on the train when the girl sang. Dancing is the thing I’m giving Granddad.”
“You’re a good soul,” Nick said, after a very long time.
“I want you to come to a party,” I said. “A dance party, right down the street. At my granddad’s house.”
“I’ll come,” he said.
I leaned across the table then and gave him a big kiss. “There’s something I want you to see,” I said. “Can you meet me at Granddad’s tomorrow?”
TWENTY-SEVEN
I DIDN’T GET TO GRANDDAD’S HOUSE until noon that day, and when I got there, he was sleeping. Teresa was sitting nearby, with one of his faded magazines open in her hands. She looked up when I walked in. Smiled at me, sadly.
“How is he?” I asked
“Something over the weather,” she said, chewing her lip a little.
“Under,” I said, my heart falling right down into the cave of my chest. “Under the weather.” Granddad had a T-shirt on, soft cotton pants with a drawstring belt. There was a little white box of eyedropper-shaped tubes nearby, and beside the tubes a bowl of what seemed like red sponge lollipops. Tanks like those that astronauts wore were propped up on the floor. A thin plastic line of oxygen snaked up and settled in his nose. Another line snaked from somewhere else and down into a plastic bag.
“He’s comfortable,” she said. “Sleeping.”
I shook my head to fight back tears.
“Last night was a hard night,” she said.
“But there’s still time? You said there was time?”
“Of course.”
I sat down on the hard-as-a-pan wheelchair, and out from between the tanks of oxygen Riot appeared. Nudged her face against the wheelchair wheel, then jumped up onto my lap, one pretty arching leap, nearly crushing the Sweet Loaves bag that I’d been carrying around in the July sun since leaving Nick a little while before. “For you,” I said, leaning past the cat and toward Teresa, surrendering the bag. I smacked a few hot tears off my cheeks, then settled back and put one hand on Riot. The cat pressed her front paws into my lap and mewed. Tried to touch her nose to mine. I bent toward her.
“Well, Rosie,” Teresa said, “how about that?” She opened the bag, releasing the cinnamon smell. “Nothing like this,” she said, “where I come from.” She tore off a piece of bun to taste. She licked her sticky fingers.
“What do we do now?” I asked, and she knew what I meant.
“What we can,” she said.
“Take care?”
“Take care.”
My grandfather looked smaller than ever inside the silver-railed bed, and the room seemed wider and longer than just a month before, when it was the two of us and the cat and the newspaper towers and the brow
n-cow couch and the coffee cups and the magazines and the jammed-up things on things. Stripped down that way, I could know at last how my granddad and grandmother might have seen the house when they were young, a couple in love, not parents yet, no places not gone, no dances not danced.
“I never got around to cleaning out Granddad’s closet,” I confessed to Teresa.
“He’s fast asleep,” she said. “You wouldn’t be disturbing.”
“You think?” I said.
“A promise is a promise,” she said.
I put my hands under Riot’s big belly and, as gently as I could, lifted her up, then over onto Teresa’s lap. The cat did a quick rub of a cheek with a paw, walked a tight circle, then went back down to sleep. I pushed myself out of the wheelchair and crossed the room to the heavy paneled closet doors, put my hands on the brass knobs, and pulled.
Every square inch inside was jammed with shelves. Every shelf was jammed with things. A box of rusted garden tools. A sleeve of nails and hooks. A bag of lipstick tubes. Sweaters with tags. Sweaters without tags. Boxes of Kleenex. Rolls of snowman wrapping paper, rolls of angel wrapping paper, a bag of golden ribbons, a crushed red bow, an off-color roll of Scotch tape. There was a can of mosquito spray, and some bottles of lotion. Two bags of crushed birdseed. A carton of lightbulbs. Stacks of orange paper cups. A pair of brown shoelaces. A box of envelopes and a roll of stamps and some staples, pink erasers, boxes I couldn’t see into, stuffed-fat brown paper bags, more newspapers, more magazines all tied together with string. It all seemed bigger than a King Tut dig. I stood staring—high and wide.
“There’s some Hefty,” I heard Teresa say behind me, “in the kitchen.”
But I didn’t turn, and I didn’t answer, and I didn’t know what to feel at first, because down on the closet floor, set aside from all the rest, the sun beaming it bright with a spotlight, was a miniature wicker basket, like a cradle, and inside that cradle a fabric doll tucked deep and safe. The doll had blue button eyes and dark yarn hair, and she was staring up at me, her little pink-thread mouth all caught up in a bow, or in a rose, her mouth like a rose. She wore a faded yellow dress with a lacy petticoat. Her fabric feet were bare. She was old and worn but new to me, and I scooped her into my arms.
“Rosie.” I heard my name behind me now, my granddad’s voice, a sleepy whisper.
I turned. He was facing in my direction, his eyes halfway open, his legs loose in the bed.
“Your mother’s favorite doll,” he said, his voice small.
I stepped toward him, gently cradling the doll. “This doll was named Rosie?” I asked, perplexed.
“That doll’s your namesake,” Granddad said. “Made for your mom by your grandmother even before your mom was born.” I was standing at his bedside now, on the not-sick side of the silver railing. His face seemed paper-thin in places, shone straight through by the sun. His words had a different way about them. There were stretches of silence between sounds.
“She knew she was having a girl?”
“She was sure.”
“She made this doll?”
“Sewed up every inch.”
“And Mom?”
“She loved that doll more than anything. And then she grew up. And then she had you.” He closed his eyes when he was saying that, began fanning one hand in front of his face, as if the sun were a creature with wings and he could chase it past him.
“I’m cleaning out your closet, Granddad,” I said, and now there were tears I couldn’t fight on my face.
“You’re one brave girl.”
“I think there’s going to be a ton of In Trusts,” I said, sniffing.
“You’re in charge, Rosie Keith. You know best.”
“I’m thinking more is better than less.”
“I like the way you think.”
“Mr. D. says I’m a chip off the old block.”
“Better than this block,” he said.
“Nope. As fine as. Through and through.”
“I got lucky three times in life,” he said. “Your grandmother. Your mother. And then you.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
NICK MET ME AT MY GRANDDAD’S back step, just as we had planned, and we walked without talking for a while, because I couldn’t talk, couldn’t say the things that I was thinking. I had finished cleaning Granddad’s closets, and I knew what that meant. I had made a party, and the party was soon, and after that would be the thing that no one anywhere could stop from happening. Nick was on the sunny side, and he kept me in shade, and when the sidewalk got crowded, he walked just slightly ahead, steering the people off, it seemed to me, for the sake of my protection. I had invitations to the party in my bag, and whenever we got to the door of an invitee, I’d slip a note through the mail slot. Nick didn’t ask me about my day. He understood; we understood each other.
At the House of Dance Nick followed me, through the street door, up the long steps, through the door to the studio lobby. “You can’t be shy here,” I told him, “because at the House of Dance they will not let you.” And right like that, at that very instant, Nick and I and our quiet mood were all rearranged by dancers. Eleanor had taken it on herself to chuck Nick under the chin and Annette was laughing and Marissa was saying, “Will you give them room?” but it was Max who got things in order.
“Aren’t we here for some sort of rehearsal?” he asked, and everyone nodded, and Nick looked at me, and I looked back at him, but I said nothing. “I want one run-through of every single dance, and then we will put them in order,” Max said. Julia was wearing her best purple shoes. Peter wore a shirt that was the greatest goldfinch color. Teenie had come all dressed up in the brightest splash of pink.
“I’ll go get Nick his seat,” I said, for I was getting nervous, and this was almost it, and I hooked my arm into his, and the dancers moved to either side so that Nick and I could pass through. His boots made funny sounds on the wood floor. We walked all the way to the wall of windows. “Best seat in the House,” I said, pointing at the sill. But he didn’t even see the sill; he saw the town that we’d grown up in.
“Bird’s-eye view,” he said, his eyes wide and sky blue.
And I said, “I knew you’d like it.”
“Higher than my roof.”
“It is.”
“Better perspective.”
And I watched him look in all directions—up at sky, down at the town, across at the birds and at the people—while behind him Max took up his post in the music booth and the dancers formed a line, and while beside Nick I felt my stomach clench into a painful knot.
“My granddad’s dying,” I said.
“I know,” Nick said.
“I only have one chance to make his party right.”
“Maybe,” Nick said. “But I’m betting on you.” And then he faced my way and kissed me. Held me as if it didn’t matter that all the world could see.
TWENTY-NINE
ONCE WHEN I WAS five-getting-close-to-six, my celebrity dad, my mom, and I went to the shore for a whole seven-day week. We all got new bathing suits, and I got new buckets, and there was a chocolate-brown raft with a pair of yellow strings that we rode, the three of us, as if we were riding a horse straight across the white-fenced sea. We were the Keiths, and we were something. My dad dug the deepest hole of all the sand holes, deep enough for me to stand in. He tossed torn-up bread bits to the gulls to get them speaking English. He talked the lifeguards into letting me sit up high, where they sat, so that I could get a glimpse of the horizon. We ate ice cream every night—two scoops a cone, ordering by way of colors instead of flavors. “A white and a purple for the little miss,” my dad would say. “A pastel pink and a touch of springtime yellow for my very beautiful wife. Please.” He gave the ice-cream girls five-dollar tips. They knew our names in no time.
On the second-to-last night we all got dressed in our vacation best—a pink sundress for me, a white one for Mom, a lime-green shirt with yellow stripes for my dad. “Boardwalk time,” Dad said. We all piled in
to Dad’s blazing red convertible, Mom and Dad in the front and I in the back, leaning so close over Mom’s bronzed shoulder that her black hair tangled up with mine. I must have asked a thousand different times if we were there yet. “Are we there?” The moon was pale in the dusk sky. There was a salty ocean breeze. After a while there was a splatter of white and red lights in the distance. “When we get there”—my father pointed—“we’ll be there.”
When we got there, I discovered some kind of circus by the sea. I could see helicopters being lifted on big crane arms. Roller coasters screaming through space. Carousels and rocket ships and the dizzy spin of color. We parked in a gravel lot and climbed out of the car, and I took both my parents’ hands. I stayed sandwiched between them as we hurried up into the sweet and salty smells, the crowds. There were haunted houses and bright fudge shops and counters full of bleached starfish on one side of the boardwalk, and there was the ocean on the other, and there was the prettiest sound I’d ever heard, the sound of bike wheels spinning fast over the walk’s worn planks. I’d never seen anything like it before. I felt famous in a famous place. The dusk had become night; the moon was bright.
“The first thing you do at a boardwalk,” my dad told me, after we’d gone past bumper cars and miniature golf grounds and taffy shops, through clumps of friends and lovers and families and kids in swerve races on bikes, “is take a spin on the giant Ferris wheel.” He seemed to know where to go—how far down the planks the Ferris wheel was, where to stand in line for tickets, where to stand in line for the ride—and my mom said that a first Ferris wheel ride was so exciting and important that it was best if she watched from down below. “So that I can cheer for you,” she said, giving me a kiss on my forehead, and even though I remember feeling scared, I acted brave, holding my father’s hand and joining the very long line and waiting without fussing for our turn while the big wheel went around with all its screaming passengers. Finally we were first in line when the big wheel stopped, and on we climbed: I in my pink sundress, my dad in his lime and yellow shirt. A man wearing a red suit and a backward-pointing cap closed us in behind a rusted metal bar.