“So what’s a Detroit boy who doesn’t like country music doing all the way down here?” Evie asked.
Dewey had his shoes off and was digging his toes in the sand, as were the rest of us. He stared down at his feet, not answering right away. “I don’t know. I guess we just needed a change. Dad used to have family down here. That was a long time ago.”
His mood had turned somber, and I didn’t think it was just because of the fire.
“Do you like it here?” Mary Jordan asked.
“It’s okay.”
“Do you ever get homesick?” Evie asked.
“I’m not homesick….” We waited for the rest of his thought, but it never came.
I almost asked him about his mom. Now I’m glad I had enough good mind not to.
“What does your dad do?” Mary Jordan asked.
“He’s a painter.” Dewey looked up, seeming relieved for the change in subject. “He’s getting ready to open a gallery in town.”
“That’s your dad?” Evie said. “I heard about a gallery going in.”
“What kinds of pictures does he paint?” Mary Jordan asked.
Dewey picked up one of the sticks we had gathered and began drawing curves in the sand. “A cross between impressionism and abstract, I guess. Right now he’s painting women.”
“With their clothes on or off?” Evie asked.
Dewey smiled, still drawing in the sand. “Off.”
“Seriously?” Evie couldn’t believe it.
“Where’s he getting the models?” I asked.
“Around.”
“Who?” Evie said, her voice on the brink of laughter. She was now on all fours with her hands dug into the sand as if she might douse him with fists of it should he not give up any names.
Now Dewey was laughing. “I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me. It’s not like I’m sitting there watching or anything.”
Evie gave up and sat back in the sand. “We should’ve brought dinner.”
“Hot dogs,” Mary Jordan said.
“S’mores,” I said. I was scooping up handfuls of the brown sand and letting it run between my fingers. “Do you believe God knows how many grains of sand are on this beach?”
“Where did that come from?” Evie asked.
“I was just wondering.”
“You wonder about strange things,” Evie said.
“That’s one thing really different about Detroit and here,” Dewey said. He tossed the stick into the fire. I looked at his drawing, resembling giant waves.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“There are all kinds of beaches on Lake Huron, but the sand is finer. If you took an hourglass in Detroit and one from here, the sand from Detroit would move a lot faster. Time moves more slowly down here. Like at the bank the other day. The teller was having a conversation with the woman in front of me about the advantages of using dishwashing detergent on laundry stains. I must have stood there and listened to them a good ten minutes.”
“Dewey, you’re weird, but I like you,” Evie said.
I don’t know how long we sat there talking, but before we knew it, the blue sky had softened to a delicate smear of pink and violet, and the tide was pulling out. We left the fire and waded in the water, walking west along the beach. That’s when Dewey found the kite, a little battered, but still in one piece, though the string was a tangled mess, and so was the tail. He broke the string off and carried the kite with him.
“A lot of people fly kites along the lakes in Michigan,” Dewey told us. “They’ll spend hundreds of dollars building all kinds of frames and designs.”
“Did you and your dad do that?” I asked.
“No, but I always wanted to.”
“I flew a kite with my dad once,” I said. “We got it up really high. Then the wind snapped the string and the kite took off till we couldn’t see it anymore. That was five or six years ago. I’ve always remembered something he said.”
“What’s that?” Mary Jordan asked.
“He told me that a kite string was like people’s lives. In one way you could look at the string as holding a person back, but he said you could also say it kept the person grounded, like family, or having a place where you belong, or friends. That without it, a person can get lost.
“I like that,” Dewey said.
“As long as the string’s not all tangled up,” Mary Jordan said.
“You guys are getting too deep for me.” Evie turned and started back toward the fire.
Evie’s family had been a tangled-up mess for years, and I knew that’s what she was thinking. Evie was tough on the outside. And though part of her was tough on the inside, too, there was also a part of her that was sad. She just didn’t like to show it.
“Hey, Evie, wait up,” I said. The rest of us turned around and walked with her back to the fire.
Naked Ladies
The next day after our evening at the beach, Mary Jordan and Evie and I decided to check out the new gallery Dewey’s dad was opening. Mr. Savoi had rented an old building right on the square. Though the door was unlocked, when we walked inside, we didn’t see another soul around. Lighted fans were suspended from the ceiling, which was as high as a church. The walls were horsehair plaster and painted stark white. Different displays by regional artists had already been arranged along the walls. The floors were a light hardwood, and all around the room were white pedestals that looked like Roman columns cut into three-foot sections. Classical music was playing from somewhere toward the back of the building.
Not a one of us said a word. It was as if we were standing in a cathedral. We just wandered around looking at all the paintings.
Toward the back of the room was a display by Dewey’s dad. Each piece was of a naked woman holding some sort of flower.
“They’re beautiful,” Evie said.
I stared at those paintings, from one to the other, letting my eyes travel over each brush stroke, the contour of each woman’s body. At that moment, something happened to me, and for the life of me I don’t have the words to describe it. Maybe it was something spiritual, maybe it was physical. Maybe it was both. My lips tingled, gooseflesh settled upon my skin, and a yearning came upon me that left me weak in the knees and stomach. I had no idea what that yearning was for, but I knew I’d never wanted something as much.
I looked at Mary Jordan. She held a hand to her breast, her thumb stroking her collarbone back and forth against the neckline of her shirt. I looked at Evie, her mahogany eyes transfixed on the rich oil painting of a heavyset woman with long brown hair, holding a rose against her face, her body backlit by a warm orange glow. As sure as I was standing there, I knew I would never be the same again, and in the silence that hovered between my friends and me, I knew they were experiencing the same thing.
We might have stood there like that for a couple of decades if a sound from somewhere at the back of the building hadn’t gotten our attention. It was a woman laughing. Not the kind of laughter that explodes out of people when they’re watching a funny movie or when someone tells a joke. The laughter I heard reminded me of when Tommy Pierre picked me up for a spring formal back in April, before he moved to Texas and I never heard from him again. I was wearing a pink dress with spaghetti straps. He’d brought me a corsage from Daddy’s shop, made of three baby white roses, only he couldn’t decide where it was he was suppose to pin it. As he stood there looking down at my breasts, I felt the perspiration under my arms and let out a giggle. That’s when Mama told him she’d get some elastic and I could wear the corsage on my wrist.
Or the little laugh I heard from Mama the night I walked up on her and Daddy in the chaise lounge on the back porch, wearing only their birthday attire.
“Oh my heavens,” I said.
“What?” Evie whispered.
I walked to the back of the building as quietly as I could. Evie and Mary Jordan stayed right behind me. There was a door cracked open just a smidgen. I held my breath and peeked through the crack. Lo and behold
, there in front of me was my own mama, her bare bottom so close I could have touched it if I’d had a ten-foot pole. I couldn’t see the man in front of her. He had a canvas set up on an easel. I wheeled my body around and pinned my back against the wall. Then I realized I was still holding my breath. Evie and Mary Jordan had already taken off to the front of the store, walking on their toes just as fast as they could. They were out the building before I decided to breathe again.
By the time I joined them, I felt like my heart was riding the fastest merry-go-round on this side of the planet, and my voice had taken leave to Tibet. Mary Jordan took my hand and led me down the alley alongside the building. The three of us crouched to the ground with our backs pressed against the warm brick. We just sat like that, not a one of us saying a word. Then Evie reached for a strand of my hair and tucked it behind my ear.
“Dewey told us his dad paints naked women,” Mary Jordan finally said.
I still couldn’t find my voice, so I just nodded.
“We’ve never had an artist like that in town before,” Evie said. “It’s kind of like somebody giving us a pair of ice skates and telling us to go play hockey.”
Mary Jordan was sitting on the other side of me. “Evie Thibodeaux, I swear you don’t make a bit of sense.”
“I make as much sense as Lucy’s mom standing butt naked in there.”
I finally managed to talk. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying we don’t know a thing about art or people who go and call themselves artists,” Evie said. “Just ’cause your mom didn’t have a stitch of clothing on doesn’t mean she was doing anything wrong. Look at all those paintings in there. It didn’t seem to me like there was anything wrong with them.”
“They were beautiful,” I said.
Mary Jordan said, “I think your mama’s beautiful.”
“So that’s it.” I’d been holding my knees up tight against my chest. I stretched my legs out in front of me. “They weren’t doing anything wrong. He wasn’t touching her or anything.”
“He wasn’t close enough to touch her,” Evie assured me.
“He’s just making her into one of those works of art we saw on the wall,” Mary Jordan said.
I said, “Oh no.”
Evie and Mary Jordan said, “What?”
“He’s gonna put Mama up on the wall. Everybody’s going to see her naked body. Everyone will know who she is.”
Evie said, “How will they know who she is?”
“People aren’t blind!” I declared. “Who else looks like Mama in this town? Who else has her black hair and black eyes?”
Evie laid her hand on my shoulder and her face lit up, letting me know she’d gotten one of her bright ideas. “We could steal it,” she said.
“You think he keeps the door locked?” I asked.
“It wasn’t locked when we walked in,” Evie said.
“Even if it was locked, Dewey could get a key.” Mary Jordan gave me a smile, coy and subtle.
“All you have to do is put your hand on his leg and look into his eyes,” Evie said.
I said, “Maybe I will.”
Queen of Sheba
As the afternoon wore on a heat wave settled in. Tryouts for the play were that night and it was a hot one, the kind where a person’s greatest fear in the whole wide world is that the air conditioner will break.
When we walked into the auditorium, Mr. Banks was sitting on the stage in a pair of cutoff shorts.
Evie said, “Why can’t any of the boys around here look like that?”
We sat a couple of rows back from Ms. Pitre and some of the other ladies from town.
Evie had worn a purple silk scarf over her head and around her neck, saying the attire would complement her performance.
“Aren’t you suffocating?” I asked her. The air was so hot in that auditorium, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. The school had air-conditioning, but it was kept somewhere above eighty degrees to save on money.
Evie loosened the scarf a little from her neck. “It’s all in one’s state of mind,” she said.
Then Dewey walked in and took a seat beside me.
“Flown any kites lately?” Evie asked him.
“No, but I’m working on it.”
“Working on what?” Mary Jordan said.
“The kite,” he told her.
As I was listening to Dewey, all I could think of was Mama’s white buttocks staring back at me, and I knew there wasn’t any way I could let the town see her in the nude. “How’s your dad’s gallery going?” I asked him.
“Good. He’s got an exhibit planned for his open house on Monday.”
“What kind of exhibit?” I asked.
“Some of his own work.”
“What kind of work?” I asked.
“The kind that had all of you so curious last night.” Dewey smiled, kind of bashful, and with his face so close to mine, I noticed how nice his teeth were, and no sooner did I notice his nice teeth than the strangest feeling came over me. All of a sudden I wanted to run my tongue over his pretty smile. I wasn’t even sure I liked Dewey, not in that kind of way, at least. I pulled my shoulder away from his, all the heat in that auditorium driving me crazy. Not to mention the seats in front of me were suddenly feeling entirely too close to my knees. I stood up and edged my way around Dewey. Once in the aisle, I sat down and stretched out my legs, the floor cool beneath me and the dust particles sticking to my damp skin.
“You okay?” Dewey asked me.
“Yeah. Just feeling cramped.”
Mr. Banks started talking, thanking everybody for coming. “I’m going to have two people try out at the same time,” he said. “As I mentioned the other night, I’ve chosen the dialogue between Hermia and Lysander in Act I, Scene I, beginning with line 128.”
He asked for volunteers. Evie raised her hand. Dewey offered to come up with her.
Once on the stage, Dewey held out his hand for Evie, escorting her up the steps. Dewey bowed to Evie before they began. Mr. Banks had taken a seat in the front row next to Ms. Pitre. He nodded at Dewey to begin.
“‘How now, my love? Why is your cheek so pale? How chance the roses there do fade so fast?’”
Dewey was a natural. Every person in the room was riveted by his voice. He moved with such ease, stepping toward Evie, brushing the fingertips of his outside hand against her cheek.
Evie raised her face toward him, her eyes pained. “‘Belike for want of rain, which I could well between them from the tempest of my eyes.’”
“‘Ay me! For aught that I could ever read, could ever hear by tale or history, the course of true love never did run smooth….’”
We all clapped boisterously when they had finished. Mr. La Roche whistled from the back row. That got Mr. Banks’s attention. He paired Mr. La Roche with Ms. Pitre next.
“Nice job,” I said to Evie and Dewey.
Dewey sat on the floor beside me, pulling his knees up in front of him.
“Did you act in Michigan?” I asked him.
“Yeah. I never was very good at sports.”
Just as we were talking, a man walked up and laid his hand over Dewey’s head.
“Hey, Dad,” Dewey said.
His dad was smiling. “Good job,” he said.
Mr. Savoi’s voice was rich and deep and eloquent. His face was somewhat thin; he had a distinctive jaw line, and a nose like Miss Balfa’s—dignified. His hair receded from his low forehead, and his eyes were as gray as his hair. I’d never seen gray eyes before. There was a weight to his lids, and deep wrinkles etched into the surface of his cheeks and toward his temples like the rays a child makes when drawing a sun.
Dewey proceeded to introduce us. His dad shook each of our hands.
“Do you want to stay?” Dewey asked him.
He was now kneeling next to his son. “I can’t. I’ve got someone stopping by the house.” He then looked at the rest of us. “It was nice meeting you.”
“It was nice meeting you,
too,” Evie said.
And then Dewey put his arm around his dad’s shoulder and hugged him casually, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. I’d never seen a teenage boy hug his father like that before. “Thanks for coming,” Dewey told him.
Mr. Savoi stood to go, walked up the aisle, and closed the door quietly behind him.
“He seems nice,” Evie said.
Dewey didn’t shrug off her words the way other boys might. Instead he smiled and nodded. “He is.”
Suddenly, I wanted to know Dewey’s story. I wanted to know what made his dad and him so close. I wanted to be Dewey’s friend.
He started to chuckle.
“What?” I said.
He inclined his head toward the stage. “Ms. Pitre’s nervous.”
Dewey was right. Her face and neck looked like a tie-dyed shirt for the Crimson Tide. Her voice quivered so much she might as well have been a woodpecker trying to sing while perched on a tree trunk and pecking a hole. My heart ached.
“I can’t do this,” I said.
“Come on. Sure you can.”
“I should have worn a turtleneck.”
“It’s a hundred degrees outside,” Dewey said.
“Ninety-seven point eight, but I still should have worn a turtleneck.” I pressed my fingers against the hot skin rising from my collarbone to my chin.
“You’ll be great,” he said.
“I’m already getting splotchy. I can feel it.”
Dewey reached for one of my hands and pulled it away to take a look. Then he stood up and removed Evie’s scarf from her shoulders. “I need to borrow this,” he told her.
He wrapped the scarf around my neck, tying the ends together underneath my long hair. “There. Now you look like the Queen of Sheba.”
I felt my neck blush even more.
Mary Jordan was called next. Lo and behold, out of nowhere, Doug Hebert appeared on the stage. Mary Jordan looked as if she would die on the spot. Her face turned as white as chalk.
“This could be bad,” I said.
“What’s going on?” Dewey asked.
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