* * * * *
I slept until nearly noon.
Vesta worked out on the porch. She was was flush with excitement, snapping beans so fast she was missing the bowl as she tossed them down. “A talent scout called,” she said. She said the agent was the very one at the Celtic festival spying out talent the year prior. “The rumors were right, of this I’m certain.”
I took over snapping the beans since it was evident she was not going to finish with any orderliness.
“This agent is grooming a singing act of brothers, said bands will soon be all the rage. They’re going on tour this fall. They expect they’ll be a big hit with teenagers. But the good news for us is that they want dancers in the act. They want you.”
“But school,” I said.
“You’ll do your schooling on the road, on the bus,” said Vesta. “I asked all of that and the agent, Shirley Flaherty, explained it. Show business kids take their lessons from a tutor on the road.”
“I’ve finished the beans,” I said, handing her the bowl.
“There you’ll be in the midst of celebrities networking and making a name for yourself,” she said.
A set of black shoeprints marked the porch’s floor. I had walked it in from the blackened ground this morning before dawn. I grabbed a mop and set to cleaning before she saw it.
“Mopping now? Are you listening?”
“I’m making plans for college. I’ve got my application already,” I said stubbornly.
“Graduation is for average kids not gifted kids like you,” she said.
The telephone rang. I answered it hoping the Mother Ship calling to rescue me from my earthly alien captors. “For you,” I said, handing her the phone.
It was Grooms’ office again.
She answered the questions asked of her. But once she finished that call, she immediately called Myrna Halcott. Her news about pressing charges against Theo Miller had apparently repaired her severed relationship with the bridge club. She was back in good standing.
News to me.
She told Myrna, “Grooms says that once they develop the land behind us, our home will quadruple in value.”
When she got off the phone, I said, “I guess this means you’re back in Myrna Halcott’s good graces.”
“No thanks to you,” she said.
“What difference does it make if our house goes up in value?”
“Let me spell it out,” she said. “We’ll sell the house and buy a bigger one. Who knows but what we’ll all end up in California.”
“Why does everyone want to live in California?” I asked. I thought of Alice’s infatuation with the West coast.
She asked me, “Who else wants to live in California?”
I never answered.
* * * * *
I heard the milkman clinking up the sidewalk later than usual. I slipped downstairs to claim a bottle of chocolate milk for myself. But when I walked out onto the porch, a car was parked out in front of our house. I looked around, but seeing no visitor, prepared to tote the milk delivery inside.
Hui Lin, also fetching her milk, waved me over. She greeted me cheerily and then said, “I know you’re friends with the Millers. What has happened to them, could happen to me? Yes?”
“Oh, no. It won’t.”
“Who can stop them?” she asked.
I had no answer, so I asked her, “Do you know who parked in front of our house?”
“A surveyor. He is measuring for the sale of the Miller’s land.”
I assumed he was too afraid to park on Battalion Street so he chose our street instead.
“I saw the authorities come and take Theo Miller that day,” she said, “handcuffs, police looking like the Chinese authorities coming into his house and taking him away. I followed behind in my car. Ms. Dorothea fell to her knees, weeping inside the police station. I sat with her while she wept bitterly.”
I dropped the whole basket of milk bottles.
“Where is Daddy?”
“I’ve sent him with a grocery list,” said Vesta. “You’re going back on your special diet. This is real, Flannery,” she said, but it seemed more like it was happening for her.
I shut myself in my room. Turning on my lamp, I noticed Vesta had pulled out my leotards and laundered them. They lay in a stack on the foot of the bed including a new set, the tags still dangling from the neck and waist. She had scrawled a note in a note card and left it for me. It read, I’ve never been more proud of you, Flannery. Love, Vesta.
Finally by nightfall the door opened downstairs. Daddy had been gone all day. I dressed for bed half-expecting he would come upstairs to knock on my door. We would commiserate, and he would tell me that Vesta was just in a tailspin, give her time and she would forget the whole idea of signing me away to some show business act, like a performing poodle.
When he didn’t come upstairs, I climbed into bed and pulled out my book of colleges. I thumbed through the pages reading my notations—I’d made them by the hundreds.
On the Wilmington page, there in Claudia’s scrawled handwriting was penned “Our first dorm room” with an arrow pointing down at one of the campus halls. “School at the beach!” She wrote at the bottom of my page. I half-smiled, not realizing until now that Claudia had left the note behind for me to find.
I made a new page for Chapel Hill.
Fate did seem to close a door in one place only to open in another. Theo had said that, I was certain. But I was firmly resistant to the one opening downstairs. I was a lot like the lost seagull that had flapped outside my window. Surely I would only circle California and then fly back home again. But what if this was one of those strange twisted turns, what if fate was dictating to me—pay close attention to the goodness about to return to you, Flannery Curry. Was I only resisting because it was Vesta bearing the good tidings? What if my real mother and I were both being drawn to the same place for a reason?
I wanted to summon Theo from his poetry or Siobhan from heaven. I would ask either of them how I might know that any of this was the right path?
As much as he hated me now, I called Billy. He didn’t answer.
I continued thumbing through my binder, thinking about all that had transpired when another thought struck me. I had not divulged to Alice the man they were looking for at the club was Claudia’s daddy, Dwight Johnson. If I arranged another meeting with her, I could ask her about him. She knew all of the men who were regulars.
A shudder rolled through me. What if Alice’s rich suitor was Dwight? Horrified, I rummaged through my diary and found the note where I had stuffed Alice’s number. I started dialing. No, I decided, I had not thought it through long enough. I couldn’t act as if she were his mistress. I couldn’t let on. I should mention his name casually.
Then I got angry all over again. Dwight looked solidly grounded in their home on Pinehurst Number Two. If Alice thought he would leave her for his life with Irene, she’d better think twice.
Confronting wasn’t going to work over the phone. I turned off the lamp and slid under my quilt.
The door opened and a bit of hall light illuminated Daddy. “Are you already asleep?” he asked.
I sat up, comforted by his presence finally.
“Too excited to sleep?” he asked.
“Where were you?”
“Lots to do, all that,” he said. He came into my room and sat on the side of her bed. “I know we haven’t discussed what is going on with Vesta. She filled me in.”
I pulled on my eyeglasses. “Tell me to my face that you want to send me off.”
“I want you happy.”
“But you’re getting your hours back at work,” I said, giving him every opportunity to turn the course of life around for the Currys and navigate us home.
“I could never be happy knowing I had held you back from something that’s so much bigger than what I could give you,” he said so thoughtfully I felt nauseous.
Then I blurted out the question I had wondered so much of late
. “Why don’t you know what you want?” I asked, angry that he was placing the responsibility for the dancing troupe opportunity solely onto my shoulders.
He let out a sigh. “I have what I want. My daughter, my wife, and a roof over my head.”
It was my turn now. He had to know, I wasn’t going.
“I wish your mother could see how you’ve turned out,” he said.
I bit my lip.
“Vesta wants you rested for your early day tomorrow. Big things happening from now on,” he said, kissing me good-night. He turned off my lamp and went to bed.
“I just wanted to tell you, Daddy, I’m not going,” I whispered into my pillow. I slept soundly.
* * * * *
Almost as if he had been summoned, Billy was at the front door Saturday morning. No sooner had I answered the door than he said, “Let’s go for flapjacks.”
I had met Billy’s daddy only a handful of times. He had reared Billy on his mechanic’s pay and a Spartan’s gift to an only son, a roll-up-your-sleeves work ethic. Their ranch house sat on a street overgrown with towering pines, pine needles ankle deep in some places. Each house of brick and frame had a smiling screened front porch shaded by a shingled overhang, a few shingles hanging by a nail. Vesta would call the Thornton’s neighborhood an eyesore, but the families seated out in the front yards waved gaily at every passing motorist or at neighbors out for a walk.
Inside the Thornton’s house, the faint smell of motor oil and Brylcreme substantiated evidence of the two men living under the same roof who seldom connected.
Billy mixed pancake batter next to a pin-up girls’ calendar hanging from the kitchen wall on a nail serving as their bill minder. Next to the calendar, a tattered list of dance classes hung thumb-tacked onto the page. The kitchen table collected the things not put away, an empty milk bottle, a handful of found keys, some dropped bolts and nuts. Littering the faux oak top were clean work shirts dumped from the dryer, a tool belt, and a box of opened caramel corn. Billy cleared it away expertly. Then he got out two white plates, chipped but useable, a couple of forks, a roll of paper towels, and two mismatched glasses for orange juice.
He warmed syrup in a tiny pot over the gas range.
“Blueberries or chocolate chips?” he asked me.
“Chocolate chips,” I said, happy to desecrate my diet.
“Me too. We’re celebrating.” He stirred chocolate chips into the batter and flipped a browned hotcake singed too dark on one side.
“That’s mine,” I said, claiming the flawed one. I poured two glasses of milk and filled the juice glasses from the bottle. “Celebrating what?” I asked.
“To us,” he said, toasting with the milk glass. “And doing what we want.”
“Okay,” I said, clinking his glass with mine. “Us?”
“I’m leaving the country,” he said, his eyes wide and brimming with the hope he had held back for who knows how long.
I slumped into one of the old chrome chairs, stunned. “You can’t go.”
“Haven’t I been threatening to travel Europe all these years?”
“I thought you were kidding,” I said. “Besides, Europe is for the rich, isn’t it?”
Billy slid the spatula beneath two pancakes and placed them on the plate in front of me. “Not if you know how to travel. I’ve been researching hostels and public transportation the whole past six months. I figure the money I’ve saved will keep me in soup and a warm bed a good two years. I’ll work odd jobs for whatever else I need.”
“All these weeks you never said a word,” I said, composing myself to try and hide my grief over his crushing news. “You’re smart, Billy? Why not apply to the university?”
“Not saying I won’t.”
“Am I the only one who loves the idea of going away to college?”
“I don’t hate school. I’m just done with it for now,” he said.
Having Mr. Thornton for a dad had not exactly groomed Billy for higher education. “If you’re going to travel, go with me.” I could hardly stop myself.
“To Los Angeles?”
“You know?” I asked.
“It’s all the buzz at the studio. But you aren’t going, are you?”
I shook my head. “No.”
“It’s not the life for me either.” He seemed proud of himself for having it all figured out. “I could wake up one day and be someone I never intended to be. I’m not letting that happen,” he said. He had an odd way of connecting the loose threads of destiny to his lust for life as a vagabond.
A part of me wanted to beg him to take me along. I bit into my pancake although the tears threatening made chewing difficult. I brought the napkin to my eyes.
“Don’t be upset,” he said gently. “I thought you’d be happy for me.”
I managed to swallow the bite of pancake and then said, “I’m happy for you.”
“You really are upset,” he said. He pulled his chair around facing me and placing his hands on both my arms. “You love me, don’t you?”
“You know I do,” I said, but I didn’t mean as his little sister.
“Allow me a selfish impulse then. If I don’t get out of here, I feel as if I’ll end up some place awful like working in my daddy’s auto repair shop. Not that he has a bad life. It’s good for him,” he said.
“I know. Like my daddy, he likes his job fine. But it isn’t the life for me. I know why you’re doing it. But Europe’s a half-planet away.”
We agreed to finish breakfast talking about more pleasant things. Then I helped clear away the breakfast clutter expecting he would take me home.
“I want to show you something,” he said, leading me out of the kitchen.
I followed, of course, but was surprised when he led me to his bedroom. Truth be told, I had never seen Billy’s bedroom. The walls were a fading blue, probably left from when his mother was alive. I imagined she had painted it that color when she was pregnant. The shade’s softness made it seem as if she had planned it for Billy’s nursery not ever believing that she would leave her baby boy when he was only two.
But the reality of the moment standing here next to him, hearing him laugh and talk to me as he had always done, made it clear that I was nothing more than a surrogate little sister to Billy Thornton. I was safe in his bedroom, neither a lover nor a peer.
“This is the real reason I asked you here—to my boudoir.” He opened his dark closet and pulled down on a length of twine to light the cramped space from a naked overhead bulb. He rummaged around the top shelf by touch as neither of us could see beyond the high shelf. Finally, he lifted a brown paper bag and pulled it down. “Here it is,” he said, opening the sack.
I was more than curious, assuming he was giving me a going-away gift.
Billy stuck his hand into the bag and then let out a sigh as if it troubled him to bring out the contents. When he did, pulling out something made from cloth, he had to step out into the room for better light. “I found this the day of the festival. I guess you don’t know I followed you back to the parking lot.
I didn’t say anything.
I saw it all. Siobhan mad as all hell. She didn’t want to be there and I felt partly responsible,” he said. “I knew Siobhan had more than a growing hatred of dance.”
“I know. But don’t take it out on yourself. I’ve carried the blame this whole year. What’s the point?”
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” he said, clasping me by one wrist. “I found it when I went back for my drum.” He laid the red cloth in my hand. “I found her sash. I’ve had it this whole time but when to give it to Vesta, I didn’t know.”
I let the sash unfurl dangling nearly to the floor. I brought it to my nose and smelled it. Any trace of Siobhan’s smell had evaporated from it just as it had from our bedroom. I pressed the sash next to my nose until I felt my eyes moisten. Then I lifted my eyes, saying, “I feel her here, Billy.”
I hugged him and he let me cry for I did not know how long. He held me and sai
d nothing at all. There was nothing left to say.
I finally sat on his rumpled bed to compose myself. I spread the sash across my lap and could not take my eyes off it, as if a sacred artifact lay here within my keeping.
“I thought it would mean more if you were the one to give it back to Vesta.”
I tried to imagine it. Then I smiled. “You’ve done the right thing,” I said. “I’ll figure out something.” Truly, not a thought came to me as to how I might present it back to her. I was the last person who should hand the sash to her.
Chapter 13
Claudia called me around the noon hour, first telling me, “I have to see you this morning,” and, “no, it can’t wait. Can you meet me in the village, you know our coffee spot?”
“Claudia’s going through some things,” I told Daddy. “She needs someone to talk to.”
Vesta overheard me and said, “If the two of you are not into a fight, you’re conspiring. Have you told her you’re leaving?” she asked. “She has a right to know.”
Daddy drove me there.
I picked a booth in the farthest corner next to the window. I was staring out the window and had not yet ordered my coffee when Claudia bustled into the café, breathless. I ordered for us and brought her a plated donut. My hair was combed into a headband. “Don’t look at me, I haven’t showered.”
“My parents got into a fight last night. Not in front of me, but I could hear them in their bedroom. I felt so guilty. It wasn’t like I imagined, not Daddy making up to her and telling her it was all a mistake.”
“What did he do?”
“He left. Not a word to me. I think he’s blaming me,” she said, dabbing her eyes.
“He wouldn’t do that,” I said, but every passing day since our first visit to the Gentleman’s Pleasure only underscored I knew so little about the real Dwight Johnson.
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