Billy
“You don’t look very happy,” Billy said to her, the minute she walked through his door.
To further underscore her mood, she did not make a beeline for his special tap shoes. Just shook out her sad little umbrella and flopped on the couch.
“Unh,” Grace said.
“What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“Why, Grace Ferguson. I never pegged you as a liar.”
“I’m not a liar! What a mean thing to say! Why would you even…Oh. Right. That. Yeah. I guess maybe there’s a little something up.”
He sat down beside her on the couch.
“Talk to me,” he said.
In a small and guilty way, he found himself grateful for the diversion. He’d expected her to come bounding through the door all ready to dance, forcing him to deliver bad news, in which case the only bucket of ice water to hit that childlike enthusiasm would have been him, and his neuroses.
It was raining. That was the problem. It was raining, and Billy was unwilling to risk letting her dance any place but the front balcony. The uncovered front balcony.
Maybe he would be lucky and it wouldn’t even come up.
Grace sighed theatrically. “It’s just this thing Mr. Lafferty said.”
Billy felt his small daily measure of peace slip away at the mention of that name.
“What did that horrible man say to you? When did you even see him?”
“Just now. Out in the hall. I was coming in the front door with Felipe, who was teaching me the Spanish word for door — which is puerta, by the way, just in case you didn’t know that — I didn’t know that, until just now, so I thought maybe you didn’t know that, either. I don’t know how much Spanish you—”
“Grace,” Billy said. “Focus.”
“Right. Mr. Lafferty was in the hall. And he looked at me, and he looked at Felipe, and he shook his head, and he said all we were doing with my mom was just enabling her.”
“Oh,” Billy said. “I’m surprised you know that word well enough to get depressed over it.”
“Well, I didn’t. Exactly. But he just kept talking. And then it was pretty easy to see what he meant. Like, he kept saying he’s known a lot of people who have problems with alcohol and drugs, and he said they almost never get better, but when they do it’s because they have to. When they’re about to lose something they just can’t stand to lose. He said even their house or their car or their job probably isn’t enough, because some people’ll just go live under a bridge so they don’t have to get better. He said it’s always when they’re about to lose the person they’re married to, or their kids. He said that before, when the county was about to come get me and take me away, she might’ve had a reason to clean up her act. But why should she now? He said that you and Rayleen and Felipe are taking over all her responsibilities for her, so why would she get better? She doesn’t even have any reason to try. So I guess that’s enabling.”
“Right,” Billy said, finding her depression contagious. “That’s enabling.”
“He’s not right, though, is he?”
Billy didn’t answer.
“I mean, he’s a jerk, you said so yourself, right?”
“Not in so many words,” Billy said.
“But you don’t like him.”
“Not even a little bit.”
“So he’s wrong. Right?”
Billy looked at the rug and didn’t answer.
“OK, never mind,” Grace said. “Let’s just get to the dancing lesson. That’ll make me feel better.”
“Oh. The dancing lesson. OK. Prepare not to feel any better. I’m not really comfortable with letting you dance on my kitchen floor any more.”
“Why? Because of my mom?”
“Yes. Because of your mom. Because I don’t take it well when people come to my door and yell at me.”
“She didn’t exactly yell.”
“But she will the next time. Because the next time she’ll figure she asked me nicely once already.”
“But she almost always sleeps through stuff like that,” Grace said, right on the fine razor’s edge of whiney.
“Right. Almost always. We just have no way of knowing when we’ll hit the exception to the rule. And, frankly, that’s the kind of suspense I’m just not cut out to live with.”
Grace sighed.
Billy noted her lack of resistance. He knew what it meant, too. She was getting to know him unfortunately well. Well enough to know there was no point trying to reason with his anxieties.
They sat, side by side, slumped on the couch, for a long time. Without talking. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe more. Just staring out at the sheeting rain.
“This day sucks,” Grace said.
He looked over to see Grace’s hand clamped firmly over her own mouth.
“It’s not that bad a word,” Billy said. “I mean, as words go.”
“No, it’s not that. It’s that I complained.”
“So? Everybody complains.”
“Rayleen says I never do, and that’s one of the things she likes about me.”
They fell back into silence, and the watching of the rain, for a moment or two.
Then Billy said, “Your secret is safe with me.”
“Thanks. Maybe I’ll just dance on the rug. It’s better than nothing.”
“OK, go get your shoes on. I mean, go get my shoes on.”
He didn’t even watch this time, as she plunged into the drawn-out process of trying to make his old tap shoes fit. He had been that completely sucked down into the darkness of the mood.
What seemed like too short a time later, he looked up to see her do a stomp, followed by a flap step, followed by falling on her butt.
“Ow,” Grace said.
“Careful,” Billy said, lifelessly. “It’ll be slippery on the rug.”
“Great time to tell me,” she said, pulling herself to her feet.
She flapped another time or two, testingly, still leaving her weight on her planted foot.
“This sucks,” she said. “Oops. I complained again.”
“One more time and I’m telling Rayleen.”
Grace’s face fell pathetically.
“Really?”
“No, not really. I was kidding you.”
“Oh. Don’t kid. I’m not in the mood. This doesn’t work at all. It’s too slippy. And I miss the taps.”
“Me, too,” Billy said. “Only I’ve been missing them since before you were born.”
She came back to the couch and sat again, slumped, staring out at the rain.
“I heard it was gonna rain all week,” she said.
“There is one thing we could do. But I have no idea how we’d accomplish it.”
“What?”
“Well. It’s not hard to make a little dance floor to practice tapping. All we’d need is a big piece of plywood. Five feet square, six feet square. Whatever we could get. And we can put it right here on the living room rug, and the rug would muffle the sound. Keep it from sounding so sharp by the time it went through the floor. So if we had that, we’d be golden. But that’s sort of like saying, all we need to do is route the freeway though my living room. Easy, right? I don’t go out. You can’t walk to a lumber yard by yourself…”
“I could ask Felipe!”
“Does he have a car?”
“I don’t think so. But maybe he’d walk or take the bus.”
“Big thing to carry home.”
“I could ask him,” she said, already halfway to the door. “If he hasn’t left for work yet.”
“The shoes,” Billy said. “My shoes.”
Grace looked down at her feet, crestfallen. “But I have to hurry, though.”
A tough pause.
Then he said, “Right. Go. Hurry.”
The minute she tapped out into the hall, he felt the deep pang of separation. As if he’d just let her leave the house wearing his dog, or his baby. That is, if he’d had one of either to lose. He stared at the rain for a few minutes, purposely breathing into the anxiety in his chest, trying to honor it without adding to it.
Then Grace slipped back in. Literally. Came through the door, slipped on the rug, and landed on her butt again.
“I’m getting tired of doing that,” she said, still down.
“Maybe you better take the shoes off for today.”
Grace sighed, and began to undo the laces.
“He says he can’t. He says it’s miles and miles to the closest lumber place. And he must know, because he used to work doing construction. He says it’s way too far to carry something that big home. And it would be too big to go on the bus with it. He says Mr. Lafferty has a pickup truck. But he said he doesn’t talk to Mr. Lafferty, which I can sort of understand why, because Mr. Lafferty isn’t very nice to him. Felipe says it’s because he’s from Mexico. Do you think it’s because Felipe’s from Mexico?”
“Probably so, yes.”
“That’s not a very good reason.”
“I agree.”
She sat on the couch beside him, the tap shoes in her hand, and then set them down gently on the couch between them. As if she saw them as being like a baby or a dog, too.
“So he says he won’t ask Mr. Lafferty, but I can ask Mr. Lafferty. If I want.”
“Does Rayleen have a car?”
“Yeah. Rayleen does.”
“Oh. Good.”
“But it’s broken, and she doesn’t have enough money to get it fixed.”
“Oh. Bad.”
“What do you think I should do?”
“I think you should wait and talk to Rayleen before you do anything. Especially before you talk to Lafferty.”
“K,” Grace said.
And they stared at the rain for several minutes more.
“This is really boring,” Grace said.
“I would tend to agree.”
“What do you do when I’m not here?”
“Pretty much this.”
“Let’s play a game,” Grace said.
“I’m not sure I’ve got the energy.”
“It could just be a talking game. You know, like a truth or dare sort of a game.”
“Ooh,” Billy said. “I don’t know. Sounds dangerous.”
“It’s just words. How can words be dangerous?”
“You have a lot to learn about the world, baby girl. Nothing is more dangerous than words.”
“That’s stupid. What about a gun? A gun can kill you dead.”
“Only your body,” Billy said. “It can’t kill your soul. Words can kill your soul.”
“Well, maybe we could just stay away from those words. You know. The dangerous kind.”
“Which ones did you have in mind?”
“I had a friend once. Well, I have a couple of friends, but not anybody I see outside school or anything. But I had a really good friend, Janelle was her name, but then when I was in first grade, she moved with her family to San Antonio. That’s in Texas.”
“So I hear,” Billy said.
“We used to play this game at sleepovers. Like she’d sleep over at my house or I’d sleep over at hers. This was when my mom was clean, and the house was clean, and there was food and everything, and it was OK to have people over. So we’d be in bed, under the covers. We’d pull the covers up over our heads like a tent, like this tent that we could both fit into—”
“We’re not doing that part,” Billy said.
“Right, I know, stop talking. Don’t interrupt.”
“Sorry.”
“So then the game was just two questions. What do you want more than anything? And what do you not want more than anything? Like, what scares you really bad, worse than anything else?”
Billy rose to object, but it felt like too much trouble.
“You go first,” he said.
“OK. What I want more than anything is for my mom to get better. And what scares me most is what Mr. Lafferty said, about how people almost never do. Because then I got to thinking that maybe she never will.”
Silence. The rain fell harder, if such a thing were even possible. Like water falling from a chute, all at once and not even separated out into drops.
“That was a fast turn,” he said.
“Your turn.”
“I know. That’s what I was just complaining about. OK. Here goes. What I want the most is…nothing. That’s the problem. Everything I ever cared about is behind me, and there’s nothing left to want. And, by the way, that’s also what scares me. No future. Nothing to want. That’s no way to live, let me tell you, baby girl.”
They watched the rain in silence for a few minutes more.
“Usually the game makes me feel better,” Grace said.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“This day sucks.”
“No more so than usual, if you ask me.”
“Next time I won’t, then,” Grace said.
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