Grace
Grace stood in the hall in front of Mr. Lafferty’s door, balanced on one foot, and scratching the instep of her other foot through the three layers of socks. She’d put Billy’s wool ones on the inside, because they were the ones that bunched up the most when you tried to pull tap shoes over them. But, on the inside, they itched.
The door opened, and Mr. Lafferty looked over her head, frowning, but then he looked down, and the frown disappeared.
It seemed odd to Grace that he was ready with a frown for anybody tall. Only Grace didn’t seem to bring that out in him.
“Oh, it’s you,” he said, sounding like she was an OK person for it to be.
“Yeah, it’s me, Mr. Lafferty. I came to ask you a favor.”
“Are you OK? Are you in trouble?”
“No, not really. It’s just that nobody else in the whole building has a car that works—”
“You need a ride someplace? Where do you need to go?”
“Just let me tell you,” she said, trying to hide her frustration.
If it had been Billy, or Rayleen, she wouldn’t have tried to hide it. She would have just said, “Stop it! Stop interrupting!” But this was Mr. Lafferty, and you had to be a little more careful with him.
“Sorry,” he said, which surprised her.
“I need somebody to go to the lumber store and get a big piece of wood.”
“What kind of wood?”
“I’m not sure.”
“How big?”
“Billy said five feet. Or six feet. Either one.”
“That’s not quite all I need to know, though. Five or six feet in which direction?”
“Hmm,” Grace said, probably because it’s what Rayleen always said at times like this.
“I better go ask him.”
“No!” Grace said. Well, she’d meant to say it, but ended up shouting it. “No, please don’t go knock on Billy’s door any more, please. He hates that.”
She watched Mr. Lafferty’s eyes narrow, and she wasn’t sure what to make of that, but it seemed to have something to do with the look she’d seen on his face before he found out it was only somebody short knocking on his door.
Why did everybody hate it when their door got knocked on? Grace thought she would like that. A new person, maybe, or a good surprise. She wondered if she would outgrow that openness when she got older, since it seemed everybody else had.
Then Mr. Lafferty said, “Let’s try this. Why don’t you tell me what it’s going to be used for, and maybe that’ll help.”
“Oh. Sure. It’s for a dance floor. Because I’m learning to tap dance.”
“Ah,” Mr. Lafferty said. As if that explained a lot, as Billy would have put it. “So you need a sheet of wood. Like plywood. Like a big plywood square.”
“Yeah!” Grace shouted, excited now. “That’s what he said! He said plywood, and he said either five feet square or six feet square!”
“Sure,” Mr. Lafferty said. “I could do that.”
“You could?”
“Sure.”
“Wow. I’m surprised.”
“If you didn’t think I’d do it, why even come ask me?”
“Well, it never hurts to ask.”
“Where are your shoes?” he asked, with a little bit of an air of disapproving of things like that.
“I left them down at Billy’s. I was wearing his tap shoes. I need to get my own tap shoes, though, because I can only use Billy’s when I’m at his place. I can’t take them home. And I really need to practice at home, and at Rayleen’s, because I’m not getting enough practice, and besides, they don’t really fit me right at all, but I don’t have the money for tap shoes, and I don’t think Billy or Rayleen do, either. And I know my mom doesn’t, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to do about that, but if I had the wood, at least I could go back to practicing some. You know. Like, at all.”
“Fine,” he said. As if that could be the end of the conversation.
Grace just stood there. She wanted to ask, “When are you going to get the wood?” But it seemed rude. After all, he’d said he would, which was shocking enough, and it didn’t seem right to ask any more questions than that.
“OK, thanks,” she said.
Then she padded along the hall and down the stairs in her sock feet.
She got down to the first floor just as Rayleen was leaving Billy’s. She ran into Rayleen out in the hall.
“He said yes!” she screeched.
“Really?”
“Really! He said yes!”
“Well, I’ll be damned. When is he going?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
“Am I supposed to give him some money for it or something?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t ask.”
“What exactly did you ask?”
“If he would do it. And he said yes!”
Rayleen put a hand on Grace’s shoulder. She seemed to be feeling down, Grace noticed. She hadn’t seemed down when she came home, but now she was. Maybe she had caught it from Billy. And Billy had caught it from Grace. So maybe it was all her fault.
“Come on inside,” Rayleen said to her. “I have to think of something to make us for dinner. I had a client cancel on me today, and another was a no-show, so we can’t afford to order out.”
“Oh. That’s OK,” Grace said.
“I’m not sure what we’ve got to eat.”
“What about when Mr. Lafferty comes back with the wood? Do we have enough money for that?”
“I have no idea,” Rayleen said. “I don’t even know what plywood costs.”
But Grace could tell she was getting lower and more depressed.
They went inside her apartment, and Rayleen rummaged around in the cupboard and the fridge.
“I think it’s going to have to be cereal or eggs,” she said.
“Oh. That’s OK,” Grace said.
But it made her think again about this day sucking worse than most days, even if Billy didn’t think it sucked any more than any other. But then she reminded herself about the wood, and then she knew it wasn’t fair to think about it sucking, because it isn’t every day when somebody goes out and gets a dance floor for you.
“Can we have both?” Grace asked.
“Sure. Why not?”
Rayleen said it like she didn’t have any energy. Then she put crunchy oat cereal and an almost-empty carton of milk in front of Grace, and started breaking eggs into a bowl to scramble them, and she did all of it in that same way, like she didn’t have any energy.
Grace poured a huge bowl of cereal, because there was lots, a whole box, but she only used a little milk, because she wanted to save some for Rayleen.
Meanwhile Rayleen was standing at the stove, watching this over her shoulder.
“You want more milk than that, don’t you?”
“What about you?”
“I’m just having scrambled eggs. But thank you. That was very nice.”
“I can finish it? Are you sure?”
“I’m sure,” Rayleen said.
And she didn’t say one other thing until quite a bit after she sat down at the table with two plates of scrambled eggs.
“Is there any ketchup?” Grace asked.
Rayleen got up and got her a bottle of ketchup out of the fridge.
“Thanks,” Grace said, and started squeezing it over her eggs.
And Rayleen said, “Whoa. That’s a lot of ketchup.”
Then they just ate, and were quiet after that.
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About fifteen minutes after they’d finished eating, right around the time Rayleen had the last of the dishes dried and put away, they heard a knock at the door.
Grace ran and opened it, but there was nobody there.
She stepped out into the hall, still in her three pairs of socks. She looked both ways, but the only thing she saw was a big piece of plywood. Very big. Taller than she was. It was leaning against the wall near Rayleen’s door.
She turned to run inside, to tell Rayleen, but smacked right into her immediately.
“Well, that was fast,” Rayleen said.
“But a piece of wood can’t knock on the door,” Grace said.
“I don’t think the wood knocked on the door. I think Mr. Lafferty knocked on the door and then left.”
“Oh. Yeah. That does make more sense. What was I thinking, huh?”
“I’m pretty sure you weren’t. You know what this means, don’t you?”
Grace didn’t. But she knew by the tone of Rayleen’s voice that it wasn’t good. It seemed it must mean something very not good.
“No. What does it mean?”
“It means he did something nice for us. And so now we have to go tell him we appreciate it.”
“Oh, is that all?”
“Sounds bad enough to me.”
“Want me to go alone?”
“No. I’ll come. It won’t kill me to thank him, too. Besides, I probably need to pay him back for it.”
“What if it’s more than you have?”
“Cross that bridge when we come to it.”
“Right,” Grace said. “I still don’t know what that means.”
But Rayleen just locked the door behind them, and then took Grace by the hand, and they walked upstairs together.
Rayleen knocked on Mr. Lafferty’s door.
He answered with that same frown on his face. Only this time he saw Rayleen, and he kept the frown. He leaned on his door frame and just looked at her, and not in a very happy way at all.
“We came to say thank you,” Rayleen said.
“I liked the idea of her learning tap,” Mr. Lafferty said. “She needs the exercise. That’s a good hobby, too. Wholesome, you know? Not like the crap kids are into these days. It sounded like a step in the right direction for her.”
“It was a very nice thing to do,” Rayleen said. “Especially so fast.”
“Yeah, it was really fast!” Grace said.
Mr. Lafferty just stared at Rayleen a moment, still not looking very happy.
Then he said, “I can be a nice guy.”
Rayleen took a big deep breath before she answered, like she needed to count to ten first. Then she said, “Obviously so. Obviously you can. So, what do I owe you for that?”
“If I’d wanted my money back for it, I’d have taped the receipt to it. And I wouldn’t have just left it down there and come back up here. I would have come to your door and told you what you owed me.”
He sounded a little bit unhappy, like there was some kind of problem, but Grace couldn’t see why, because everything seemed to be working out really well.
“Thank you very much,” Rayleen said, like she was all done talking.
And Grace said, “Yeah, thank you very much.”
Then Rayleen took hold of her hand and walked her down the hall. But before they could get to the stairs, Mr. Lafferty called after them.
He said, “Did Grace tell you what I said about what you guys are doing? Did she tell you I said you’re only enabling her mom to stay addicted?”
Rayleen stopped dead, and Grace kept walking until she hit the end of the reach of Rayleen’s arm, and then she bounced back again. Rayleen was looking back at Mr. Lafferty, but not saying anything.
Then after a second, Rayleen said, “I heard about it, yes.”
“Did you lie to her and tell her I was wrong?”
Another long pause. It made Grace nervous. She kept wondering why Rayleen didn’t talk faster. The way she usually did.
After much too long a time, Rayleen said, “No.”
Then she took Grace by the hand and they went back downstairs.
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