Beginners Welcome

by Cindy Baldwin

  I was smart enough to know that I’d be in trouble if Mama ever knew I sometimes snuck out while she was at work. But if she knew I’d snuck out and met up with a strange man who knew my name? That might break her trust in me into so many little tiny pieces that I’d never, ever get it back.

  “I don’t want you going down that way, by the woods,” said Mama, putting her arm around me and herding me toward the car. I squirmed out of Mama’s grip and slid into the passenger seat. My heart felt like it was climbing up into my throat at the idea of Mama learning about my trips to Brightleaf Square, about Ray.

  Whatever else happened—with the life insurance, with school, with Mama’s job—I couldn’t let her find out about that.

  11.

  The next morning at breakfast, Mama cleared her throat. “I ran into Carol McBride at the bank yesterday morning. She asked how you were doing. Said she misses seeing you around her house.”

  I pulled my spoon through the milk in my bowl, the little whirlpool dragging cereal into its depths. One of the things I missed about the Before Time was getting name-brand Cheerios, the kind that didn’t dissolve into mush when they hit the milk or taste more like cardboard than honey and nut. My family hadn’t ever been rich, but before Daddy had died, we’d never bought off-brand cereal.

  “I’ve been wondering about that, myself,” Mama went on. “You haven’t seen Meredith or Monica in a long time, have you?”

  “They’ve been busy.”

  Mama sighed. “I guess we have been, too. If I could just find that life insurance! The school district’s looking into it for me again.” She looked up at me, brown eyes pleading. “Once we’ve got that, I can cut back my hours a little bit. Go back to school so I can get a better job—maybe even beauty school. Things won’t be like this forever, I promise.”

  I nodded, my eyes drilling into my cereal bowl. My fingers itched to reach into my pocket and rub the quarter, but I didn’t want Mama to see.

  After the doctor had told Mama and me that they couldn’t save Daddy, the ER nurse had given us a little bag with Daddy’s clothes and things that he’d had with him when they brought him in. That night when Mama wasn’t paying attention, I’d snuck into her room and fished the quarter from the pocket of Daddy’s basketball shorts.

  Somehow, that quarter was like a symbol of everything my daddy had been—the kind of person who was so sure he could make things go his way that the only coin he’d carried on him was a magic-show prop, one where the only answer was yes.

  Keeping it in my own pocket felt like carrying a tiny little part of him with me. And maybe it was selfish, but I didn’t want to share that with Mama. Ever since the Bad Day in June, it had felt like Mama had filled our apartment with her tears and sadness and memories. Selfish or not, the quarter was something I wanted to keep just for me. Besides, Mama had packed all Daddy’s magic stuff into boxes after he died, planning to sell it on eBay as soon as she had a spare minute.

  I sighed, just the way Mama had a minute ago, and put my spoon down. “I think I’m full. Gonna go finish getting ready for school.”

  I didn’t know how to tell Mama about Monica and Meredith. I hadn’t talked to either of them in more than a month. What could I even say? We hadn’t had a fight, not exactly. Mostly, after Daddy died, none of us knew quite how to act. Their questions about how I was doing had felt like thorns in my bruised-up heart, and when they got excited about starting middle school or talked about what it might be like to kiss a boy someday, I’d been mad at them for forgetting Daddy so quickly.

  One day, Meredith had been upset about getting grounded for something she figured was unfair. We’d all been sitting on her bed while she went on and on about how mean her parents were. Are you even listening right now, Annie Lee? she’d snapped, and I’d snapped right back that at least she got to have both parents, alive and well.

  The more time passed, the more it felt like they were in a world I couldn’t share anymore.

  The world of the M&Ms. Best friends forever.

  And slowly, just about as slowly as autumn comes to Durham, they’d pulled away, so that by the time August rolled around it almost didn’t matter that I’d moved downtown and that we were starting different middle schools, because I hadn’t talked to them in weeks anyway.

  I missed Monica, the way she could give hugs that made you feel as loved as you could ever be. I missed her house, the way nothing was ever quiet with all those pets.

  I missed Meredith, the way she took up a whole room with her personality, the way she could get on a stage and convince anybody in the world that she was Annie or Dorothy or Cosette.

  And maybe most of all, I missed the me that I had been when they were around. I’d never been loud and dramatic like Meredith or fun and funny like Monica—but back then, I’d known how to be happy.

  Mitch ate lunch with me every day that week, in the corner beside noisy Malik and Juan Diego. Sometimes we talked, and sometimes we just ate in silence, and sometimes she pulled out a book of her own and read alongside me—but she kept on coming.

  By that Friday, it wasn’t even a surprise when she plopped her tray down by mine.

  “So,” I said, slurping chocolate milk through a straw, “what’s your real name? Is Mitch short for something?”

  Mitch scowled, spearing a piece of broccoli with her fork like it was a lethal weapon. I swallowed. I mostly didn’t feel scared of her anymore, except when her face looked like that.

  “Never mind,” I mumbled quickly.

  “Listen,” said Mitch, looking up at me with an expression that could’ve stopped the heart of a small animal, “because I like you, reader girl, I’ll let you in on a secret. Nobody else in the whole school knows this, you hear?”

  She leaned across the table, casting a furtive look at the totally clueless kids near us. “Mitch is short for something.”

  “Oh yeah?” My heartbeat started returning to normal.

  Mitch nodded slowly, gray eyes round. “Yep.”

  I waited for a long minute, pushing chicken tenders around my plate.

  “But,” said Mitch at last, sounding more dramatic than Meredith at her very best, “if I told you that, I’d have to kill you and dump your cold, dead body into the Eno, so my lips are staying sealed.”

  At the sight of my face, she started laughing. “You should see the look in your eyes right now, reader girl. You should just see the look in your eyes.”

  And for the second time that month, that long-gone smile inched back onto my face, whispering all the way down to my heart.

  12.

  That afternoon, I went to Brightleaf.

  I knew it might be a bad idea. Both times I’d gone before, Ray had noticed me—and we’d had a real conversation on Tuesday when I’d run into him at the cemetery. If things kept up like that it wouldn’t take long for him, or somebody else, to start asking me where my mama was. And I knew deep down in my bones that if Mama ever found out how I’d been sneaking out, she’d be madder than I’d ever seen her.

  But I couldn’t stay away.

  When I got to Brightleaf Square, Queenie was gone from her salon. The only people inside were one of Queenie’s stylists—an older white lady with gray hair cut short and gelled up into a fauxhawk—and the customer she was working with. Queenie herself was in the atrium, leaning against a pillar and watching Ray with one hand up over her heart. I could tell, just from that hand and the way her head tipped to one side like she was drinking the music in, that she felt it as deep down as I did.

  “Sorry, sugar,” she murmured as I slipped past her, but even Queenie, who noticed every little detail about the people in her salon, couldn’t see me right now. I wasn’t sure if it was my invisibility cloak or just that the music was impossible to look away from, but I was grateful.

  Once, a year or two ago, when I was upset about some test I’d taken at school, tears had leaked out of my eyes before I could stop them and I’d started crying at the dinner table. My hair had fall
en forward, waving in front of my face until it was wet with my tears. I felt about as pathetic as I possibly could have been.

  But then Mama had reached over from her seat next to me and gently, gently tucked my hair behind my ears for me, her fingers soft and light like butterfly kisses on my face. And somehow, that one little touch had started to heal all that sadness inside of me.

  Today, Ray’s fingers on the piano were like that—gentle, sweet, slow, so full of goodness and kindness that the notes that came from them were like warm rain. The magic lights swirled and shifted above the keys, silver and gold and a particular shade of rich yellow-brown that was like sunlight through honey.

  I reached my hand into my pocket, rubbing my fingers against Daddy’s two-headed quarter and the slip of paper I’d been carrying around since I’d been to see Ray play last weekend. Cash prizes. Beginners welcome. I watched and listened until Ray’s fingers had stilled, and the last echo of the last note had faded away, and the light had winked out and left behind empty air.

  “Hello again, Miss Annie Lee,” Ray said before he’d even turned all the way around to see me.

  “Mr. O—I mean, Ray. Could you—” I said at the same time that Queenie came forward and grabbed Ray’s hand and said, “Oh, Ray, you play like you are straight out of heaven.”

  For a minute all three of us stood, frozen in surprise. And then Queenie looked over and saw me—really saw me, this time. “Hello, child. What’s your name? Any friend of Ray’s is bound to be somebody special.”

  My face went so red that even my hairline prickled. Please, please, please, don’t ask about my parents. “Annie Lee,” I whispered.

  Queenie nodded, her amber eyes looking straight into mine, serious and warm. Her hair wasn’t in braids today; it was loose, in crinkly waves that made the purple streaks stand out even more. “I’m Queenie Banks. It’s lovely to meet you, sugar.”

  Ray cleared his throat. “You had a question, Annie Lee?”

  My tongue felt thick as a boa constrictor. “Yeah. I mean. Could you teach me? Piano. Can you teach me to play, like you do? So beautifully, and—” I stopped. I wanted to wave my hands at the space above the keyboard where the lights appeared whenever he played, and ask him to teach me that, too, but just the thought of it made me feel hot and embarrassed. Could Queenie see the lights? Would she think I was making them up?

  Ray reached down and picked up his baseball cap from the floor beside him; today it had a handful of coins and one lone bill, I guess from people who’d trickled by before I did. He poured the coins into his hand and then shoved them into his pocket. His movements were slow, his fingers clawed and crooked as he pulled them back out of his pockets. I wondered if his arthur was hurting him.

  “Your mama around here? She okay with this?”

  He and Queenie both looked at me, waiting. My stomach dropped from my middle all the way down to my toes.

  “Yeah. She’d be fine with it. She’d be excited! She works near here. At—” I thought fast. Not a restaurant, and definitely not anything inside the mall. And not a gas station, because even though I didn’t know if Ray had a car, he might’ve gone to the convenience store. “She’s a housekeeper.”

  Queenie’s face relaxed. “At the hotel?”

  I nodded real fast.

  “Poor thing. Those are long hours.”

  She didn’t even know the half of it. At least I hadn’t had to lie outright. It felt like every lie I’d told this summer was piling on top of me, heavier and heavier.

  “How ’bout your daddy?” Queenie asked.

  I rubbed the quarter in my pocket. It never, ever got better, having to say those words aloud. It was like ripping off a Band-Aid—no matter how much you prepared your brain for it, it still hurt. “He’s dead.”

  “Oh, Lordy, I’m sorry to hear that,” said Queenie, and I could tell from her voice just how sorry she really was. Her sorry was different, somehow, from the way other people said it. In June, after the funeral, Meredith had come up to me and wrapped her arms stiffly around my shoulders and said, I’m so sorry, Annie Lee, with this face that looked like she was a girl in a play whose best friend’s dad had died—hollow, somehow, like as soon as the curtain went down she’d be back to laughing and smiling like normal.

  Right in that moment, it had hurt almost worse than seeing Daddy’s coffin lowered into the ground. How could my whole world have shattered, and Meredith didn’t even know how to look for-real sad?

  Queenie knew. I could see in her eyes that she understood a thing or two about the kind of sadness that could split you in two. “I expect that’s been hard on you and your mama both,” she said.

  “Yeah.” There was something about Queenie, with her warm voice and her scent of hair spray, that made it easy to tell her things. “You’d like Mama. She used to want to go to beauty school. So she could cut hair. Like you.”

  The surprised grin on Queenie’s face was like the sunrise. “You don’t say!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I’m real glad to have met you, Annie Lee.” She reached out and gave my hand a little pat. Her dark-brown skin was warm and soft. “If Ray here agrees to give you lessons and your mama needs somebody to vouch for him, you tell her to come stop by and say hello. I’ve known Ray almost two decades, and he’s one of the finest, gentlest human beings I’ve ever had the pleasure to spend time with.”

  “Queenie’s who got me this volunteer gig in the first place,” Ray interjected.

  Queenie laughed. “Pure selfishness, I promise. I just liked the idea of being able to hear his glorious music while I was working. This man’s got more magic in his little finger than most people have in their whole bodies.”

  Ray shook his head, putting the baseball cap on. “Y’all are such flatterers, my head will get too big for this hat if you don’t stop.”

  “Good,” Queenie said, then leaned in and kissed his cheek. Queenie liked to touch people, I could tell. I wondered what it would feel like for her to wrap her arms around me in a hug.

  “So—will you teach me?” I asked Ray again, as Queenie hurried back to her shop.

  “Hmm.” Ray looked at me for a long minute.

  My fingers snaked into my pocket to rub the quarter, and I imagined my daddy saying, Sometimes it pays to carry your own luck, Al. Wasn’t that what I was doing, right here and now? If I could learn to play like Ray, maybe it would be a little like bringing my daddy back. It would make me feel close to him. Certainly closer than when I went to Maplewood Cemetery to put chrysanthemums on his grave.

  And maybe, just maybe—

  Cash prizes. Beginners welcome.

  “All right then,” said Ray, putting the cap on his head. “What day do you want to do ’em? I still gotta have time for playing myself, since it’s close to all the income I’ve got. But if you tell me what day works for you, we can figure it out.”

  “Um,” I said, panic rising in my throat. I hadn’t even thought about a schedule when I’d asked him my impulsive question, but he was right; when I’d had lessons with my old piano teacher, they’d always been on the same day at the same time. Still, how could I sneak off to Brightleaf at the exact same time each week without Mama noticing something was up, or Mrs. Garcia asking too many questions about where I was going? It was hard enough getting past her apartment now without her popping out to say hello or ask me what I was doing. It would be worse if she could tell I was always gone at the same time, since anything she said to Mama about my regular appointment could destroy my whole house of cards.

  And if Mama figured out what I was up to, I could kiss my lonely afternoons goodbye. It would be me and Mrs. Garcia every day until Mama got off at dinnertime.

  “Yeah?” Ray prompted.

  “Could we maybe, like, change up the days?” I said, my thoughts racing. “Sometimes I have, uh, school projects I have to work on in the afternoon. And Mama’s shifts aren’t always the exact same. If things are slow at the hotel, she can’t pick up any shift
s. And sometimes she covers for other people if they need, so she can earn extra.”

  “All right, I guess we could make that work. How ’bout each lesson, we’ll figure out when to meet the next week. We could start tomorrow. Does your mama work Saturdays?”

  I nodded.

  “What time does she start?”

  “Um—nine,” I said, hoping that sounded like a realistic time for a person who worked in a hotel to start at.

  “You meet me here tomorrow at nine, then, Annie Lee, and we’ll dive in.”

  13.

  Ray was at the piano when I got there the next morning. Even that early, the atrium was filling up with people. This morning the music was the kind that made your feet itch to dance. All around the piano, people clapped their hands in time and smiled at each other, and I didn’t think I’d ever in my life seen so many people looking so real, like all their secret armor was down and only their truest selves were left.

  Maybe Ray did that to everyone, saw right past the invisibility cloaks we all pulled around us.

  The magic lights rising from Ray’s fingers sparkled blue, like sunlight on a lake on a summer’s day. I stood hugging my folded scooter to my chest while he finished. He didn’t hurry—he let the song go and go as long as it wanted to, getting bigger and then smaller and then bigger again, finally thundering down into the bass notes for a grand finale before he played one last sharp, crackling chord and lifted his hands off the keys like they had wings.

  The clapping turned from rhythm to applause. People were laughing, rushing up to fill his cap with change. Ray stood and turned to face his audience, his gnarled hand on his heart.