? ? ?
“Guess what?” Grace shouted to Rayleen as she hit the bottom of the stairs, because Rayleen was standing right out in the hall.
Then she saw the lady.
The lady was wearing a suit with a skirt, in a dark color, and she looked like a business lady, and definitely like she didn’t belong in Grace’s building.
Grace froze in her tracks.
Rayleen said, “Grace, this is Ms. Katz. She’s a social worker, and she came by to see that you’re OK.”
“On a Saturday?” Grace said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Sure, we make visits on Saturdays,” Ms. Katz said, smiling in a way that didn’t look real. “Your babysitter tells me you were upstairs talking to the old woman who lives in the attic apartment.”
Grace took two steps closer, because it seemed safe enough, and she figured she should.
“Yeah. Mrs. Hinman. I went up to visit her because I was worried she might feel left out. She has nobody, and it’s not even her fault. It’s just that she’s eighty-nine, and she lived longer than all the other people she knew.”
“That was sweet of you,” Ms. Katz said.
“And guess what? She sews! She let me go through this pattern book of all the different clothes I can have, and I picked a few out, and she’s going to make them for me. Isn’t that nice of her?”
“Very nice,” Ms. Katz said. “You’re lucky to have such nice neighbors.”
“Oh, I have the best neighbors! Billy is teaching me to tap dance, and Felipe is teaching me Spanish, and Mr. Lafferty bought me wood for a dance floor and new tap shoes — but then he passed away. And Rayleen got me this nice haircut, and look at my nails.” She held her hands out for the social worker lady to see. “Oh, poop, I lost a nail already.”
“I can fix it,” Rayleen said.
“It’s a lovely haircut,” Ms. Katz said. “So you’re doing OK, then?”
“I’m fine,” Grace said, a little worried about what would happen if she didn’t answer just right.
“That’s good,” Ms. Katz said. “I’ll be dropping by every now and then to check and see that you’re still OK.”
“Like when?”
“Just here and there.”
“Oh,” Grace said.
She wanted to say, “No, don’t,” but was pretty sure that would be a wrong thing to say.
Then Ms. Katz left, and not a moment too soon. Rayleen let out her breath like she hadn’t breathed in an hour, so she must’ve felt the same way.
Billy’s door opened a crack, and he peeked out.
“It’s OK,” Rayleen said. “She’s gone.”
“Good thing Grace wasn’t really in trouble,” Billy said. “She could have died waiting for that woman to show up.”
“That’s the county for you. They never do enough, except when they do too much.”
Grace couldn’t help noticing that Rayleen’s hands were shaking. And Grace was pretty sure they hadn’t at any other times, at least since that first time when Rayleen was on the phone in her apartment. So there weren’t too many things that could make Rayleen shake like that, and they were always from the county.
They went back inside Rayleen’s apartment, and Rayleen turned on the TV and sat Grace in front of it. A minute later Grace looked around for Rayleen, and saw her slumped down on the floor in the corner of the kitchen. And she was crying.
Billy
On Monday, Grace came slouching into his apartment at the usual time, wearing her tap shoes. He could hear the clicks they made on the worn hardwood of the hallway, and when his carpet muffled the taps, he mourned the loss.
He expected her to go straight to her plywood dance floor. Instead she sat on the couch with him and sighed.
“I don’t think I should dance today,” she said.
“Because…”
“Geez, Billy. Do I really have to tell you? Somebody died!”
“Right,” he said. “Got it. How come you have your tap shoes on?”
“Cause I love them.”
“Ah.”
“Billy? Do you think I could be a dancer?”
“I think you already are.”
“How do you figure?”
“Well, you dance, don’t you?”
“I meant like a real dancer.”
“So you figure you’re just a fake dancer so far.”
“Stop it, Billy! You know what I mean!”
It was not a teasing tone on her part. It was a flash of genuine anger. He tried to shake it off, laugh it away in the silence of his own gut. But he was stung, and he couldn’t get out from under it as easily as all that.
“Yes. I do know what you mean. So I’ll give you an honest answer. Maybe. If you’re willing to work incredibly hard. I mean, the kind of work you’d have to do, I’m guessing you probably didn’t even know this much work existed in the world. You’re not a natural. But you could still get there.”
“What’s a natural?”
“Somebody who dances pretty much the way they breathe, like it’s just what their body was built to do. It’s almost as if they’re not even learning it so much as just brushing up on it. But then there’s a whole other group. The pluggers. They have to work a lot harder, but they can get there eventually, too.”
“Were you a natural or a plugger?”
“I was a natural.”
“Hmm,” Grace said. “So I guess being a natural’s not all you need to get there.”
“Ouch.”
“Sorry.”
“True, though. Painful, but true. The hard work is the lion’s share of the battle. Hard work can sometimes substitute for natural ability, but natural ability almost never makes up for not being willing to do the work.”
“I didn’t get the part about the lion, but never mind. I know how weird you talk. But you weren’t lazy, though. Were you?”
“No.”
“You were scared.”
“Let’s talk about something else. Did you ever stop to think that Mr. Lafferty might want you to dance, even at a time like this? Or especially at a time like this?”
“Think so?”
“He gave you the tap floor and the shoes.”
“True. I’m just not sure I even feel like dancing after somebody just died like that. Oops. You know what? Never mind. Forget I even said that. I forgot, I’m a plugger. I better get to work.”
She shuffled carefully across the rug to her plywood tap floor and took her position. She raised one foot. But before she could even lower it again, they heard her mother calling for her in the hall.
“Grace? Where are you, Grace?”
They looked at each other, frozen, and a little scared. They’d both seen this moment coming, and they both knew what it meant. The first time Grace’s mother got her head up, she was going to hear the news. It was all they’d been waiting for.
Grace said, in a broad stage whisper, “Told you it wasn’t a good day for dancing.”
? ? ?
“OK, I called Rayleen at work,” Grace said, letting herself back in and hanging the key to Rayleen’s apartment around her neck again.
“Is she coming home?”
“Soon. As soon as she can. She’s just finishing up her second-last manicure, and then she says her last client of the day is a friend, so she can call the woman on her cell phone and reschedule her. And then she’ll be right home.”
The voice stopped their conversation — Grace’s mom’s voice, this time calling from the sidewalk out in front of the building.
“Grace! This isn’t funny any more! Come home!”
Billy tried to ignore it as best he could, but it wasn’t easy. In fact, it was nothing but an act. And Billy wasn’t nearly the actor he used to be. He glanced over at Grace to see if she appeared as unhappy as he felt. She looked as though she might be about to cry.
Another shout from Grace’s mom.
“Grace!”
Billy could feel the strain of the experience in his midsection, like Grace’s mom’s voice was pulling all the aliveness out of his belly and leaving only staticky tension in its place. Suddenly it felt as if nothing but staticky tension had ever lived in him. That voice seemed to completely erase any and all of the comfort of his past. Such as it was.
It’s official, he thought. We’re kidnappers.
He thought about wings. Wide, white-feathered, flapping wings. Anticipated them, really. Might as well get used to them, he thought to himself. Come nightfall they’ll be our only companions.
“So…what did you tell Rayleen?” Billy whispered, though Grace’s mom was ten times too far away to overhear.
“Just that my mom was…awake…very awake…and this might be a good time to have that talk with her.”
“Grace!”
This time her mom’s voice came through as even more shrill and shocking, though she was halfway down the block by then. It made them both jump.
“She’s getting scared now,” Billy said.
“It’s really weird to hear her and not answer. It feels weird. It feels…”
Billy waited, as patiently as it was in his nature to wait. Then he said, “Can’t find the word?”
“Wrong,” she said. “It feels wrong. But I didn’t want to say wrong, because we had a meeting and we decided this was right. But…are we sure this is right? I mean, what if we’re not doing the right thing?”
“Here’s all we really know for sure,” Billy said. “What we’ve been doing up until now is wrong. We pretty much all agree on that, even the late Mr. Lafferty, who didn’t agree with much of anybody on much of anything. So, if we make a change, at least we have a chance of getting to right. We’re just pretty sure we’re not going to get there without a big change.”
“Right,” Grace said. “Thanks for reminding me.”
But she still didn’t sound all that sure. And she was beginning to look genuinely stressed.
“You OK, baby girl?”
“It just feels different. You know. Now that we’re actually doing it.”
“Things always do,” Billy said.
? ? ?
Rayleen came striding down the sidewalk about twenty minutes later.
“Record time,” Billy said to Grace.
“Are you kidding? It’s been a century.”
They lay on their bellies on the living room rug, side by side, watching out the very bottom of the sliding-glass door.
“It’s like a fifteen-minute walk. You have no idea how fast she got here.”
“Felt like a year.”
“It was twenty minutes,” Billy said.
“Seriously? Twenty minutes? How do you know?”
“I can see the kitchen clock from here.”
“How come some twenty minutes are so much longer than others?”
“A question for the ages.”
“Does that mean you don’t know?”
“Pretty much.”
“Now I don’t even know where my mom went. Here Rayleen rushed all the way home to talk to her, and my mom’s off looking for me someplace around the corner or something, and who knows when she’ll be back.”
She said it as though she meant it to be a complaint, but a note of relief shone through in her voice.
Billy said, “Look again, baby girl.”
He hated to drop it on her like that, but it needed to be said. Besides, she’d see it for herself soon enough.
Grace’s mom was walking back down the sidewalk toward home, approaching from the opposite direction as Rayleen, and it looked as though they were destined to collide right about at the walkway to their building.
“Oh, shit,” Grace said, and then slapped a hand over her mouth.
“Special price today on swearing. It’s marked way down.”
“You’re so weird, Billy.”
Then they both fell silent and watched it happen.
On the outside of the situation, it didn’t look like much. Rayleen stood with her hands on her hips, looking relaxed, even though Billy knew she wasn’t. Grace’s mom was a good head shorter, and she puffed up her chest and did everything a person can do with body language to look big. She had long hair, Grace’s mom, and she brushed it back a lot as they talked. A nervous tic, maybe.
The two women stood just far enough away from Billy and Grace’s perch that it was impossible to see their facial expressions.
“She’s mad,” Grace whispered, reverently.
“Your mom?”
“Who else?”
“There are two people out there.”
“Right, but which one is being told something that’ll make her mad?”
“Can you really see that she’s mad? Or do you just figure she must be?”
“I can tell by the way she’s standing. She has a lot of different ways to stand, and I know them all by heart, and that one means she’s mad.”
Just at that moment, Grace’s mom split away from Rayleen and came stomping up the walkway to the front apartment house door.
“Oooh, you’re right,” Billy whispered. “Mad.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t do this.”
“I think the die is cast.”