by Tommy Hays
“Nothing,” Sam said.
“Since my mother died?” Grover asked. “Is that what you mean? I got serious when Mama was hit by a car?”
Sam turned and started back in the direction of the sledding.
Grover ran up in front of him. “It is sort of serious, Sam. When your mother gets killed, it doesn’t make you feel all that great! In case you hadn’t noticed.”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Sam said quietly and stepped around him.
Grover stopped, watching his old friend walk away. “Sam!”
Sam kept walking.
“My mother is dead!” His words echoed off the white hills and came back to him as hard and cold as the snow-topped headstones.
Sam turned around. “So what, Grover?”
The words hung in the air between them.
Sam took a couple of steps back toward Grover. “You stopped riding bikes with me, stopped skateboarding with me, stopped coming to our house.” He shrugged. “Stopped being my friend.”
“I already told you—”
“Just because your mother’s dead doesn’t mean you have to be.”
The boys looked at each other. Grover was surprised that their friendship had meant that much to Sam. Sam had all kinds of friends.
“I’m sorry I stopped coming up to your house,” Grover said.
Sam looked at the ground.
“Will you help me?” Grover said.
Sam gave a big sigh. “All you have to do is wait till you’re by yourself with Emma Lee and ask her to the Christmas Waltz.”
“Who said anything about Emma Lee?”
“You’re hopeless.” Sam started up a path up a big hill, pulling his sled with him.
“Okay, okay, so it is Emma Lee.”
Sam stopped and waited for Grover, and together they walked up a path lined by great shaggy hemlocks, their limbs bowed with snow. Grover’d gotten more than a few of his limbs for his tapestries from up here. Jessie’d said these trees were the oldest in the cemetery and had been here hundreds of years before there were graves. Grover sometimes thought about all the generations of people these trees had seen buried.
“I held her hand,” Grover said.
Sam stopped. “Emma Lee’s?”
“Once,” Grover said, holding up a finger. “Sort of. When we were going through the Wolfe house.”
Sam raised his eyebrows like he was impressed.
“I’m not even sure she really noticed,” Grover said.
“Oh, she noticed,” Sam said.
“How do you know?” Grover asked.
“Girls never not notice. Noticing is one of their main things.”
“How do I ask her to go with me?” Grover reached inside his coat and pulled out his little sketchbook and his mechanical pencil.
“You’re taking notes?” Sam asked.
“What do I say first?” Grover clicked his pencil, getting ready to write.
“ ‘Hello’ is usually a good start,” Sam said, watching Grover scribble in his notebook. “I can’t believe you wrote that down.”
“What next?”
“Don’t ask her right off. You need to make small talk first.”
“Small talk?” Grover asked.
“You need to talk about other things.”
“How do I do that?”
“Talk about what you usually talk about. I see you talking to her on the playground and in class too sometimes.” Sam looked away. “In fact, you talk to her more than you talk to anybody else these days. Her and her brother.”
It had never occurred to Grover that Sam might be jealous of the Roundtrees. “They’re just around,” Grover said. “It’s not like I go get them. Clay just comes over, and he likes the Bamboo Forest. So does Emma Lee.” He kicked at the snow. “But it all feels different now with Emma Lee,” Grover said, closing his sketchbook. “After last night.”
“Last night?” Sam asked.
“Nothing.” No way was Grover going to tell Sam about seeing Emma Lee in her nightgown. “So,” Grover said, lifting up his notebook, getting his pencil ready to write.
“You don’t want to rush into asking her.”
“ ‘Don’t rush’,” Grover said aloud as he wrote the words and circled them.
“You don’t want her thinking it’s a big deal to you,” he said. “Just be talking to her about whatever it is y’all usually talk about, and then ask her like you just thought of it right then, like it’s no big deal.”
Grover wrote the words No Big Deal in his notebook and underlined them twice. “I never knew asking a girl was so complicated.”
“Girls are more complicated than algebraic equations,” Sam said.
“Algebra isn’t complicated,” Grover said.
“Okay, Einstein, so girls are more complicated than … than … quantum physics.”
Grover closed his notebook. “I’ll never be able to do this.”
“I didn’t mean that about quantum physics,” Sam said. “I don’t even know what quantum physics is.”
“I can’t do it,” Grover said.
“You need a little practice.”
“Practice?”
“Role-playing. My dad uses it with his patients. I’ll be Emma Lee.”
Grover laughed.
“Ask me to go out with you.”
“You’re serious?” Grover said.
“It’ll help, I swear.”
“I’m not asking you to go to the waltz with me.”
“You won’t be asking me, you’ll be asking Emma Lee.”
“This is totally random,” Grover said. He tugged on a low limb of a hemlock, bringing snow down on both their heads. “Did you know that hemlocks might be wiped out in ten years? The woolly adelgid, a tiny insect from Asia, is killing them.” Grover looked at the limb. “This would go good in my tapestry.”
“You’re stalling,” Sam said.
Grover let go of the limb. “So what do we do?”
“Let’s say you’ve rung Emma Lee’s doorbell.” Sam stepped between two headstones and opened an imaginary door. “ ‘Oh, hello, Grover.’ ”
“Do you have something in your eye?” Grover asked.
“I’m flirting with you,” Sam said.
“Gross.”
“It’s role-playing.”
“Emma Lee doesn’t blink her eyes like that. You look like an owl.”
“Let me try again.” He turned away, then after a minute turned back. “Hi, Grover.”
“You make a terrible girl.”
“Okay, okay,” Sam said, turning his back to Grover again. “I think I’ve got it now.” Then he turned around. Before he could get a word out, Grover was shaking his head. “She doesn’t fake smile. There’s nothing fake about Emma Lee.”
“I don’t think I’m going to get Emma Lee right for you,” Sam said. He lay down on his sled on his stomach and aimed it down a steep hill. “Can you give me a push?” He held up his legs.
Grover took hold of his boots. “What am I supposed to do?”
“You’ll figure it out.”
Grover ran, pushing Sam over a little hump and then the sled took off on its own. His friend expertly steered the sled between a couple of headstones and then around a big hemlock. He remembered going to the funeral of Lee Sullivan, a tall, redheaded boy who back in third grade had been sledding down a street and slammed into a parked car.
A bunch of crows started cawing loudly overhead. At first Grover didn’t see the red-tailed hawk. He just heard its high fierce screech. Then he saw the hawk at the center of all the confusion, getting dive-bombed by a dozen angry crows. What impressed Grover was the way the hawk calmly continued circling, keeping its mile-seeing eyes to the ground, looking for prey.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
SUIT YOURSELF
When the doorbell rang a little after seven, their father answered it. The door nearly flew open from the wind. Leila came in first, followed by Clay and then Emma Lee, who had a book under one arm.
Did she plan to read through Thanksgiving dinner?
“That wind is something fierce,” Leila said, pushing her hair back out of her face.
Their father helped her off with her coat. “You look great,” he said.
She wore a deep red dress that somehow showed up her face. She had on lipstick and sparkly earrings. Grover felt betrayed to see his father’s eyes linger on another woman the way they used to linger on their mother.
“Let me take your coat,” Sudie said to Clay.
“Thank you kindly,” Clay said, handing her his coat.
Grover stood looking at Emma Lee, who hadn’t looked up at him.
“Help Emma Lee with her coat,” their father said.
Emma Lee took her coat off herself and held it out to Grover without a word. He’d worried all day that she’d seen him last night standing at her window, staring at her in her nightgown. He carried the coats to his bedroom and laid them on his bed. His bedroom had been where they had always put guests’ coats, back when they used to have people over. The wind rattled the bamboo outside his window, a loose shutter flapped against the house and the lights flickered.
Back in the main room, Leila and their father and Jessie sat around the roaring woodstove, sipping from glasses of wine. Jessie had spent the day in the kitchen cooking. Their father had come home mid-afternoon, put leaves in the dining room table, brought up extra chairs from the basement and split a big pile of wood. Sudie and Grover had cleaned the house, shoveled the front walk and picked up limbs that had fallen and piled them in the woodshed for kindling.
Sudie had taken Clay back to her bedroom to show him her night-light collection. That left Grover sitting off to the side, sipping eggnog while Emma Lee sat by the fire reading her book, her long hair curtaining her face. The fire in the woodstove sputtered when a gust of wind whistled down the chimney.
“This reminds me how it used to get up on the Roan after a big snow,” Leila said, looking toward Emma Lee. “We had some mean winds up there, didn’t we?”
Emma Lee didn’t look up from her book.
“Sometimes it’d blow so hard it seemed like it might shove the cabin right off the side of the mountain,” Leila said.
Grover wandered back to Sudie’s room. Sudie had been collecting rock night-lights since she was little. Different colored stones and crystals with lights inside them. She had collected dozens over the years, including a couple of lighted fountains with running water. At night, a warm glow came from Sudie’s room.
“This room is something else,” Clay said, bending down beside one of the night-light water fountains.
Grover sat on a beanbag in the corner. Sudie bent down beside Clay and showed him how, with a flick of a switch, she could make the lights on the water fountain change color.
“Emma Lee’s gotta see this,” Clay said, getting up. Then he stopped. “On second thought,” he said, “maybe another time.”
“What’s wrong with Emma Lee?” Sudie asked. “She looks sad.”
Clay glanced at Grover, and Grover thought, He knows about me standing out there too! Maybe the whole family knows!
Sudie’s windows rattled with a big gust of wind.
“Our daddy died on Thanksgiving,” Clay said.
How could he have forgotten? Grover’d been so ready to feel guilty about last night that he hadn’t considered the obvious reason.
When everyone sat down to Thanksgiving dinner, they took hands around the table. Sudie and Clay, who sat on either side of Grover, took his hands. Jessie sat where their mother always had. He’d changed into a nice shirt and his bolo tie. He’d let his hair down and combed it so that it fell gray and shining down to his shoulders. He reminded Grover of a distinguished Civil War general. Jessie bowed his head and so did everyone else. Grover began to feel like he was spying, and besides it was Jessie doing the blessing, so he closed his eyes and bowed his head out of respect.
“Father,” Jessie began, “we thank You for the food we are about to receive.…”
The wind howled down the chimney and the windows rattled.
“We thank You for the many blessings You have showered upon us. We thank You for being our rod and our staff as we’ve traveled through a valley we know all too well.…”
Grover felt a tingle of warmth up his spine and across the back of his head. Holding hands like this, with his family and Jessie and the Roundtrees, made him feel part of something bigger. It was the same feeling he got in the Bamboo Forest.
“And we thank You for looking after our departed loved ones until such time as we can be reunited in Your presence. In Your name we pray, amen.”
“Amen,” everyone said, including Grover.
Emma Lee smiled at Grover, like she’d felt what he’d felt. Everyone was smiling, like they’d all felt it. Something about Jessie’s blessing had lifted something from all of them.
“Can y’all please pass the crescent rolls?” Sudie asked, sounding desperate.
The wind howled in the chimney a long time, the lights flickered and then they heard a slow huge crash, a kind of thunderous tearing sound, like the earth itself was being torn out from under them. The house shook and dishes rattled. Stories Grover had read in the paper about earthquakes and tsunamis in far-off places flashed through his mind. The lights flickered some more, went off, came back on, then went off for good.
People had come out, some with their flashlights, to look at the huge tree that had fallen across the street and darkened the neighborhood. Jessie said it was a tulip poplar. Its roots had pulled up out of the ground in a perfect rectangle. The hole reminded Grover of the neat graves Charles dug with his backhoe. After parents had made sure there were no fallen wires, neighborhood kids climbed onto the tree as if onto a fallen giant. Sudie and Clay joined them, disappearing into the maze of limbs. Grover walked up its great trunk, stepping on limbs that only an hour before had been forty feet in the air. Somewhere in that labyrinth of limbs, a hand took Grover’s and pulled him up. It was Emma Lee. She pulled him onto a big limb where she was standing.
“Look.” She lifted her eyes to the sky. Stars had poured into the space where the tree had stood.
Grover looked at her but she was still looking up. It went through his mind to tell her he’d stood outside her window. He opened his mouth but what came out was “Clay told me about how your father died on Thanksgiving.”
She looked at him, then back up the sky.
“And how you light a candle for him.”
“He’s such a blabbermouth,” Emma Lee snapped.
“You were the one who told me we can’t keep the dead to ourselves.”
She looked back up at the sky and her face softened. After a minute, she pointed to a very bright star. “That’s the Dog Star. I know that much.”
Back inside, their father had lighted candles around the living room and kitchen. They finished their Thanksgiving meal by candlelight and moved into the den to eat dessert. He opened the doors to the woodstove so that it lit up the room. He refilled Leila’s wineglass and his own.
“I forgot to get Merlin in tonight,” Jessie said, sipping from a mug of hot tea.
“Will he be all right in the snow?” Clay asked.
“He’ll find him a warm place to curl up or slip into somebody’s house.” Grover watched Emma Lee, who’d already finished her pecan pie and picked up her book again, sitting close by the stove to read.
“Leila,” Jessie said, “they won’t be getting our power back on tonight, and all y’all have is that electric baseboard heat. I have a kerosene heater I could bring over.”
“We’ll be fine,” Leila said. “We’re mountain people.”
“Why doesn’t everyone spend the night?” their father said. “We’ve got the woodstove to keep us warm.”
Grover looked at his father. He was so different these days. It would’ve been their mother who suggested everyone stay over. More and more, Grover’d gotten the feeling that his father was trying to do what his mother wou
ld’ve wanted him to.
“I’ll be okay.” Jessie looked at Leila. “I’m worried about y’all.”
“Please stay.” Sudie put her hands together. “It’ll be like an indoor camping trip.”
“Let’s spend the night, Mama,” Clay said.
“We don’t want to put you out,” Leila said.
“Clay can sleep in Grover’s room and Emma Lee in Sudie’s,” their father said. “And you can sleep in the guest room.”
Emma Lee whispered something into her mother’s ear.
“Sweetheart,” Leila said, “I think it’ll be all right not to light it one night.”
“No, it won’t,” Emma Lee said under her breath. “Especially not tonight.”
Leila sighed. “Honey, please …”
“Not tonight,” Emma Lee said again.
“Emma Lee,” her mother said, “our house will be colder than a meat locker.”
“But, Mama …”
“That’s enough, Emma Lee!” Leila said sternly.
Emma Lee went back to where she’d been sitting, picked up her book, but didn’t open it. She stared into the fire with a kind of look like she’d made up her mind about something, then opened her book.
Grover had told Clay he’d be happy to sleep on the floor in the sleeping bag.
“I like sleeping bags,” Clay’d said, wriggling down inside it. “Reminds me of the couple of times me and Daddy camped.”
Their father had put a candle in Grover’s room, telling him to be sure and blow it out before he went to bed.
“I like your room,” Clay said, glancing out Grover’s window, where they could make out the ribs of the bamboo by the flickering candlelight. “Feels like we’re in the middle of a canebrake.” He eyed the bamboo critically. “Some of that needs pruning. I’ve got a new pair of loppers.…” He yawned and scooted down into his bag and turned on his side, facing away from Grover.
“Grover?” he said, turning halfway back.
“Yeah?”
“Just so you know.” His eyes met Grover’s for a second, then he turned away again. “My sister likes you.” He scooted down into his sleeping bag.
Grover felt a tightness in his throat. “She said that?”
“With Emma Lee, it’s what she doesn’t say that you need to listen to.” Clay yawned. “She talks to me about most things but she hasn’t said one word about you.”