“Well, then,” said Ray quietly. “Are you sure about quitting today, or are you ready to be brave?”
23.
I went to Mitch’s house again on Friday after school.
“You know, pretty soon we’re going to have to actually start dropping these things and seeing if any of our theories work out,” said Mitch.
“Maybe we can divide and conquer—we each take half. We can work on them this weekend.”
Today we were supposed to be writing up paragraphs on why we thought each of our different designs might protect the egg from impact—a demonstration, Mr. Barton had said, eyebrows bristling harder than ever, of your comprehension of the scientific method. The presentations were starting in less than two weeks. Even though ours wasn’t till close to the end of October, exactly three weeks away, I was beginning to have the itchy feeling that Mitch and I had spent a little too much time creating theories and not enough time actually practicing.
Mitch wrote furiously in our notebook. Her handwriting was kind of like her face—unexpectedly sweet, the kind of thing you only noticed if you could get past her scowl and beanie and sidle in close. All the letters were even and round. I half expected her to dot her i’s with little hearts, the way Meredith did.
Or used to. I had no idea what Meredith did now.
“There,” Mitch said, writing a ferocious final period. “That’s done. I say we call it good for today. So, reader girl, do you ever do anything but reading and falling off longboards?”
Sometimes when a moment hits that might change the course of your life a little bit or a lot—it sort of comes over you in a prickling flush, starting at your toes and making all your hair stand on end. This was one of those moments. I sat in my chair, my heart all full up of Ray’s words from a few days before:
What would you do if you were ready to be the bravest, wisest version of Annie Lee Fitzgerald you could be?
I took a deep breath, just like I had when Ray had asked me that question to begin with.
“I’m learning piano.”
“Cool,” said Mitch.
“I can show you how, if you want. I mean, if you’re interested. If you don’t already know. Which you probably do, since you have a piano and everything.”
Mitch shrugged. “Nope. The piano is Nana’s. She used to teach lessons and play in concerts and stuff, but Dad never learned and when Nana tried to teach me when I was six, she gave up and said I was as stubborn as a twice-cussed ox and had the musical ear of a warthog.”
“Wow. She said all that to your face?”
“Yep. Did I mention I was only six?”
I pictured Mrs. Harris five years younger with fire in her eyes. “Scary.”
“Nana can be a dragon when she wants to.”
Maybe that’s where Mitch got it from.
“C’mon. Show me what you know.” Mitch jumped up from the table and swept our egg-drop notebook and all the other stuff we’d had spread out into her backpack, like a hurricane that left things cleaner in its wake instead of messier.
Mitch’s brother, Jacob, was lying on the floor in the living room when we got there, a giant hidden-picture puzzle spread out in front of him. He’d circled five hidden objects so far: a comb disguised in a horse’s tail, a firework hidden in a sprinkler, and a couple other things I couldn’t identify.
“Scoot,” Mitch said, nudging him with her toe. “We’re going to use the piano.”
Jacob scooted. I followed Mitch and sat down next to her at the piano bench. The wood was warm and glossy. For just a minute, I wondered what it would be like to be Mitch: a family with enough love for lifetimes, a little brother who hung on everything you ever said.
A mama who didn’t just ask how you were doing over cereal in the morning while her eyes drifted to her phone, but who actually sat down with you on purpose and met your eyes and talked to you. Every day, not just once every few months.
I swallowed hard.
“So, what can you play?” Mitch asked, flipping open the piano’s lid. The keyboard suddenly seemed bigger than the one in Brightleaf. Shinier. Scarier. I thought of Ray again, telling me to be the bravest, wisest version of Annie Lee Fitzgerald.
“Hardly anything yet. I’m learning a song by Beethoven, but I’m not too good at it yet. And I just got sheet music for a new one, a minuet in G Minor by Bach, but I only played that once and messed it up pretty bad. I gotta practice, though, because my teacher entered me in a piano competition in December.” I thought about adding that practicing was easier said than done, since I had to sneak out to Brightleaf to do it or content myself with pretending my kitchen table had a keyboard, and that thinking about competing against students who had pianos in their homes that they could practice on anytime they liked made me feel kind of sick to my stomach.
But I didn’t know if I was ready to open my heart up that much yet.
“What do you have to play for the competition?”
“Those two pieces and two scales. One major, one minor.”
“What, like snake scales?”
I stared at Mitch. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I told you, my nana gave up teaching me a long time ago. I don’t remember any of it.”
I placed both my hands on the keyboard, finding middle C and the C one octave below it. The ivory felt like warm silk. “So, every piece of music has a key signature,” I said. “That means the set of notes that you play in that piece—whether there are any black keys, what note you start and end on. Like, in the key of C, there aren’t any black notes at all, and you start and end on C.”
“Okay.”
“So, a scale is when you play all the notes in that key in order. Up and then down again, like stairs.” I played the C major scale: one-two-three, cross my thumb under, one-two-three-four-five—then back down again five-four-three-two-one, cross my middle finger over, three-two-one.
“So . . . what’s the point?”
“It helps get your fingers used to playing, for one thing. And it trains your ear so you know what things should sound like when you’re playing a song in that key signature. Like, the new song my teacher gave me is in G minor, right? So the first thing he had me do, before I even looked at the music, was to learn the G minor scale. Like this. This one has two black notes, see? B-flat and E-flat.”
“It sounds spooky,” Mitch said.
“That’s because it’s in a minor key. In a minor key, you lower the third, sixth, and seventh notes in the scale. It can sound sad or spooky.”
“Huh.” Mitch paused, looking at my hands on the keyboard. “What made you want to learn piano?”
I put my hands in my lap, scratching at the skin around my nails.
What would you do if you were ready to be the bravest, wisest version of Annie Lee Fitzgerald you could be?
“My daddy,” I said. “He loved music, all kinds of music, but especially piano. He couldn’t play very well—he had a really hard time reading music, said the notes didn’t stick in his brain. He had the same problem with math. But he loved to sit and mess around. And he had all these old records of his favorite piano songs. He used to listen to them a lot.”
“I bet you miss him.”
“All the time.”
“What was he like?”
“He was . . . funny. Everyone loved him. He was one of those guys who walk into a room and everyone looks toward them. His name was Robert, but everybody called him Fitz. For Fitzgerald. He had the kind of laugh that filled up a whole room.”
Mitch was still and quiet on the bench beside me.
I had hardly said anything about Daddy for months, but once I started, it was like I couldn’t stop. “He always called me Al, too. You know, for my initials—A and L. Sometimes he would sing me that old Paul Simon song, you know, ‘You Can Call Me Al.’ He loved old music, especially the kind that sounded a little bit sad. And he did magic. Magic tricks, I mean. He’d been collecting all these different tricks—all these props and stuff—my whole life
. He had trick cards and that kind of thing. And this.”
I pulled the two-headed quarter out of my pocket and showed it to her: heads up, either way you turned it. Mitch laughed. “That’s cool. You keep it with you now?”
“Yeah. It’s kind of like my good-luck charm, I guess.”
“Hey. Reader girl.” Mitch’s gray eyes met mine square on.
“Yeah?”
“Thanks for telling me.”
Then she reached out her right hand and played a C major scale, just the way I’d showed her.
I flipped the quarter between my fingers: heads, heads, heads, and thought about Ray.
It felt kind of good, being the brave, wise version of Annie Lee Fitzgerald.
No invisibility cloak required.
Mrs. Garcia was out on the landing that evening, watering the plants she grew in pots outside her front door, when Mitch’s mom took me home. Mama had texted to say she’d be a little late, and I should go ahead and get dinner.
“Hi, Mrs. Garcia,” I said. It felt like the bubble of happiness from Mitch’s house was still inside me, warm and soft and nice.
“Annie Lee!” said Mrs. Garcia, smiling. “I was beginning to think you weren’t my neighbor anymore. You’ve been gone so much in the afternoons! Your mamá said you have a new friend?”
I smiled back. I felt more like the old Annie Lee today. “Yeah. We’re doing a project together for school, so I’ve been going there a lot to work on it.”
“I’m glad for you. It’s no good for a little girl to be alone so much. Better to have friends.”
I gave a little wave and let myself into the apartment. The radio was on, the soft guitar notes of “Annie’s Song” harmonizing with John Denver’s liquid voice while he sang about his senses being filled up.
But right now, even the ghost couldn’t wipe the smile off my face. I turned off the radio and opened the fridge.
Mrs. Garcia was right, I thought as I made myself a turkey sandwich (dry, because we’d run out of mayo and Mama said we didn’t have money for any more until her next paycheck came in). Ray was right.
Better to have friends.
24.
What’re you doing, honey? You sure look like you’re concentrating hard.”
Mama came up behind me and put her hands on my shoulders, like she was about to give me a massage. I shrugged them off. I was packing an egg into a plastic container filled with cotton balls—the third idea from my half of the list of theories that Mitch and I had agreed to test out the day before yesterday.
Ideas number one and two had already resulted in big, fat splatters.
“Trying not to break more eggs,” I muttered as I sealed the Tupperware carefully, adding a little bit of duct tape to the rim just to be sure. When Mama and I had bought this carton of eggs at the store last week, we’d paid two dollars and ninety-seven cents for a dozen, which meant that—according to the calculator on my phone—each egg had cost us nearly a quarter. I’d already cracked half a dollar on the complex parking lot, dropping my contraptions off our balcony. I still had three ideas left to test after this one, and then probably more, once Mitch and I figured out ways to make our prototypes stronger.
How many dollars was this project going to eat up before I was done? Probably more than mayo. Or a load of wash at the Laundromat. Or any of the other things Mama had said we couldn’t afford. We should be putting this money into Mama’s New Washer Fund instead of splattered eggs.
I finished taping up the lid and carried the container out to the balcony. Mama followed. I closed my eyes and held the Tupperware out over the railing.
Then I opened my fingers and let the container go.
It hit the ground a minute later with a muffled thump. Even from this high up, I could see the yellow of the yolk leaking through the cotton balls.
This had been one of our best ideas. How could anything be safer than a whole lot of padded plastic?
I gripped the balcony railing hard.
“What’s the matter, Annie Lee?”
I’d seen the way Mama’s lips had gone thin every time she’d gotten the mail to find more bills. I’d seen the big dark bags underneath her eyes when she came home from working all day cleaning other people’s houses. I’d seen the way she checked her email and her phone messages over and over again, hoping each time that the district secretary would be there, telling her they’d found the proof that the life insurance company owed us five times more than what they’d paid.
I clutched the railing until my hands went white, the blue veins popping out on them like roads on a map. “I just—keep—wasting—eggs! I’m too stupid not to!”
“Learning always takes some practice, honey. That’s what science is all about—finding all the things that don’t work, so you can figure out what does.”
Practice. Just like Ray had said the day we’d talked about the Durham Piano Teachers Association competition. It seemed like just about everything in life came down to practicing. But what were you supposed to do when you couldn’t practice? When eggs cost money and pianos cost even more?
I looked down at the Tupperware, now starting to leak yellow yolk through to the pavement below. “I’ll pay for the eggs, I promise. I’ll figure out a way to get the money. Maybe I could walk dogs, or—”
“Annie Lee Fitzgerald, you will not,” said Mama, sounding more woke-up than she had maybe since the day Daddy died. “I won’t allow it. We’re not so bad off that I need to take money from my eleven-year-old. I promise, a few dollars’ worth of eggs isn’t gonna break our bank, honey. I know I’ve been pretty stressed about money. With the life insurance, and me trying to figure out if I’m going to be stuck cleaning houses forever, and all that—I get that money’s been stressful around here. But you listen to me, Annie Lee.” She snaked an arm around me and pulled me close. “Those are grown-up worries, okay? Let me handle them. In fact—”
Mama turned and disappeared back into the apartment, but not before I caught the tiniest hint of a grin on her face. A real, true grin. When was the last time I’d seen her smile that way? When was the last time I’d seen her look like anything except a sleepwalker? Mama had always been quieter than Daddy, more prone to nervousness and stress. But before he’d died, she had smiled more than she’d frowned and laughed more than she sighed.
When she came back out, she had the carton of eggs in her hand. With almost theatrical slowness, she set it down on the tiny patio table, opened the lid, and drew out an egg, holding it up for me to inspect.
“See this?” she asked, and before I could nod, she’d raised the egg up high over the railing and thrown it down to the asphalt below. SMACK.
Mama giggled and pulled another egg out. SMACK again.
“See?” she said, still laughing like she was my friend, not my mama. Like Queenie might have laughed with me. Like Daddy might have laughed. “Now I’ve wasted a pair of eggs, too. And it was kind of fun.”
Mama had left the sliding door half-open, so we could both hear when the oven beeped its preheat warning, and smell when the scent of butterscotch cookies rose up in the kitchen and wafted its way out onto the patio. We looked at each other for a long minute, our faces mirroring each other: eyebrows up, mouths in little O’s of confusion.
I hadn’t put any butterscotch cookies into the oven, and I was pretty sure Mama hadn’t either. But they’d been Daddy’s very favorites.
Ever since that day in June, I’d been clinging to the memory of Daddy as hard as I clung to his two-headed quarter. Moments like this felt like he was clinging right back. But somehow, all that clinging didn’t make me feel closer to Daddy; it made him feel further away, like every memory the ghost turned real just served to show how gone he really was.
Without saying anything at all, Mama slipped through the door and opened the oven with a face like she was the one who’d been turned into a ghost.
The oven was empty.
All the breath in my chest turned to ice, like it had forgotten
how to move in and out of my lungs. Was Mama going to burst into tears, there in front of the empty oven? Was I?
But instead, Mama closed the oven door and hit the power button hard, and then she looked up at the ceiling and shook her fist at it, like she was berating someone who lived just upstairs.
“Not this time, Fitz,” she said, and her voice didn’t sound like it was full of tears at all. It sounded strong, and angry, and brave. “You just leave us alone today, you hear me?”
And then she came back through the sliding door onto the patio, and closed that door so hard that it bounced off the frame and she had to close it again. But when she looked up at me again, her hands were steady and the smile on her face looked like a real smile, like it held the memory of the way she’d been laughing before.
Had I ever seen Mama smile quite like that? At me?
She pulled out another egg from the carton and pressed it into my hands. “You try it.”
The egg was cool and heavy in my hand, smooth with just the littlest hint of grit. Monica had told me once that that grainy feeling was the pores of the egg, the teensy holes that air and moisture could pass through so the growing chick inside it could breathe. The Hsus had had chickens, of course, and on mornings after she and I had had a sleepover, we’d go out together and collect any eggs the hens had laid, so that Mrs. Hsu could scramble them up for a breakfast that tasted like sunlight and fresh air.
I lifted the egg just the way Mama had and then brought my arm down hard and quick, so that when the egg hit the pavement, it was going way faster than any of the ones I’d tried and failed to slow down. SMACK.
A grin inched its way onto my face. I could see why Mama had giggled—it was strangely satisfying, that great big smack, the way the egg pooled out from its shattered shell in a glistening creep.
“See?” Mama asked, but her voice was quiet and gentle. “No harm done, honey. I promise you that.”
I wasn’t certain if she was talking about the cost of all the eggs my project had broken so far or the ghost with its butterscotch cookies.
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