Grace
“Someone is knocking on Rayleen’s door,” Grace said. “Billy, do you hear that?”
Grace paused her dance rehearsal to listen, standing balanced with one leg in the air. Her balance had gotten a lot better since she’d started with all the dancing. Still, she hoped she didn’t look too much like one of those bird dogs you see in the movies and on TV, helping hunt pheasants. Or…then, on the other hand, those were really pretty dogs.
“Maybe we should go see who it is, so we can tell them Rayleen won’t be home till five thirty.”
“I’ll go along,” Billy said, lifting the cat up off his lap.
“Why? I can open a door, you know.”
“But we don’t know who’s on the other side.”
“Some protection you’ll be,” she said as they approached the door nearly elbow to shoulder.
“Hey.”
He sounded hurt.
“Sorry.”
It was so natural to take those little shots at Billy, and he was around so much of the time, that Grace had to keep reminding herself that it was easy — too easy — to hurt his feelings.
Billy undid the locks and Grace opened the door, a team effort.
There was a lady at Rayleen’s door, and Grace remembered her, but just for a second she couldn’t remember from where. Then the lady turned around and smiled at her, and Grace’s tummy did a little flip-flop. It was that lady from the county. The one who’d come already, once before, to check on her.
“Oh, there you are, Grace,” the lady said. “Do you remember me?”
“Yeah.” Grace was surprised by how little her voice sounded. “Just not your name.”
“Ms. Katz.”
“Right. I wonder how I forgot that. Because I really like cats.”
“It’s not spelled the same,” the lady said, still smiling that smile that didn’t seem real. It looked more like something she might have put on earlier that morning with her make-up.
“Doesn’t matter how it’s spelled,” Grace said.
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Billy ripping at a thumbnail, but she wasn’t sure how it would look to slap his hand in front of Ms. Katz. She wasn’t sure about any of the things you were or weren’t supposed to do in front of a county lady, and that was just the problem. Somebody should have given her lessons, but they hadn’t, and now it was too late.
“I don’t think I’ve met you,” Ms. Katz said, looking up at Billy.
Grace thought how it was a good thing Billy was dressed right now, and not in his raggedy old pajamas. Then again, he was almost always dressed these days, unless he was trying to take a nap, and Grace felt bad that she had only just now thought to notice.
“Billy…Feldman,” he said, and held out his hand for her to shake.
Too bad it was his right thumb he’d been chewing on, and now it had a little blood on it. Grace hoped Ms. Katz wouldn’t notice.
He opened the door wide and motioned the county lady into the apartment. Grace wished he wouldn’t. But, then again, she sort of figured Billy wished he wouldn’t, too, but probably he just figured he didn’t have any other choice. Grace wondered if Billy knew what you did and didn’t do in front of the county, or if he was just making it up as he went along, too. He looked scared.
Ms. Katz sat down on Billy’s couch and Mr. Lafferty the Girl Cat jumped right into her lap.
“She likes you,” Grace said.
“That’s nice,” Ms. Katz said.
She ran one hand down Mr. Lafferty’s fur, and the cat did that little “elevator butt” move that some cats do, raising her back end just as the hand got there. It made Grace like the county lady a little better, how she petted the cat instead of just shooing her away or something.
“That’s my cat,” Grace said. “She used to belong to Mr. Lafferty upstairs, but then he shot himself, and now she’s my cat.”
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Billy start back in on the same poor thumbnail.
“So she comes with you when Mr. Feldman babysits?”
“Mr….who? Oh. Right. Billy. I always forget his name is Feldman. I just call him Billy. Or Billy Shine, if I need a last name. No. The cat doesn’t come anywhere with me. She lives here.”
“Your cat lives here?”
“Yeah. My mom doesn’t want me to even get one. Cat, I mean. But I already got her. But she lives here.”
Billy jumped to his feet.
“Coffee!” he shouted, and it came out way too loud, and then he looked embarrassed about it. “Shall I make us a pot of coffee? I have real cream.”
“No, thank you,” Ms. Katz said. “I won’t be here that long. So. Grace. Do you live here?”
Billy had started to sit again, but then when Ms. Katz asked that question he just froze in mid-air, not standing, not sitting, his knees bent.
“Um. No,” Grace said, and Billy’s spell broke, and he sat down. “No. I don’t live here. I just come here after school for two hours.” She watched Ms. Katz nod and write notes to herself in a folder. “Unless Rayleen has a date, which for the last week or two is almost every night. Then I’m here for a lot longer. But mostly I live at Rayleen’s.”
A long silence. Long and also…not good. Grace ran back over what she’d just said in her mind, all fast and panicky, trying to figure out where she’d made a wrong turn. It had all seemed like reasonable stuff to say, but they were in a bad place now, and she could feel it. And somehow it was all her fault.
“You live with Ms. Johnson? You’re not living with your mother now at all?”
Grace’s throat closed up, making it hard to talk.
“It’s just for a little while,” she said. “Just till she feels better.”
The words squeaked a little on their way out, and it was very embarrassing.
“From her back injury,” Ms. Katz said. She didn’t make it sound like a question.
“Her what?”
“Ms. Johnson told me she’d had a back injury, and that’s why she has to be on so many medications.”
“Right! The back injury! Yeah!”
Ms. Katz sighed, and set down her folder, and looked right into Grace’s face. Grace felt all the blood, and probably the color, drain out of her own face, leaving it tingling and cold.
“Here’s where we run into problems, Grace,” Ms. Katz said. She was talking that way grown-ups do when they want kids to know they care. “I just had a talk with your mom. Well. I saw her. I asked about the injury. And she didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.”
Grace glanced over at Billy, whose face was so white it looked like he might’ve died since she last checked. Nobody said anything for a scary-long time.
“The other problem,” Ms. Katz said, being the only one who wanted to talk, “is that I was told this was a babysitting arrangement. But if you’re living here or at Ms. Johnson’s, that’s a very different situation, because neither of your neighbors are registered as foster families. When will Ms. Johnson be home?”
Grace opened her mouth to answer, but no sound came out.
“About five thirty,” Billy said. “Unless one of her clients ran a little late.”
He sounded normal, and Grace marveled at how hard it must have been for him to say a normal, reasonable thing to the county at a time like this.
“All right,” Ms. Katz said, gathering up her folders and swinging the strap of a briefcase over her shoulder. “All right, that’s fine. I have another visit to make, and I’ll come back. Just tell her I’ll come back.”
Billy rose to walk her to the door.
“Grace is thriving here,” he said.
He sounded desperate, and it reminded Grace that he was scared, and that they both were, and that they both had plenty of reasons to be.
Ms. Katz smiled as if smiling made her sad, and started to say something, but Grace never gave her a chance. It was begging time, and she knew it. She got that from what Billy said, and it came through loud and clear.
Grace jumped up and begged.
“Please, you can’t take me,” she said. “You can’t take me away from here. It’s good here. I get to be near my mom so that way I’ll know if she gets clean — I mean, better — and besides, I get to dance at my school, in, like, two months, and if you take me away now I won’t get to do my dance, and it’s the most important thing ever. And I’m a good dancer, too, and before I came over here to Billy’s every day I didn’t know how to dance at all, not even one little step, and I was all pudgy and everything was terrible. And now look at me. Here, I’ll show you.”
She shuffled fast over to her plywood dance floor.
“I’m afraid I have to—”
But Grace refused to let her finish. There was too much on the line here to give up now.
“No, you have to see this,” she said. “You have to see me dance, so you’ll know how important this is.”
She tapped her way into the center of the plywood.
“Now watch. You’ll be impressed. You will.”
She closed her eyes. Pictured the first few steps. The way Billy had taught her to do. Counted to three. Started with a time step.
It was perfect. Billy was right. You start with something simple and perfect and it calms you down for the rest of the dance. But the Buffalo turns were coming up, and they had to be perfect, too. The whole future of the world depended on those turns being perfect.
Then it hit her, what she was forgetting. She relaxed her upper parts and felt her shoulders drop. And she smiled.
And the turns were perfect. The best she’d ever done.
She looked up at the county lady, who really was watching, and really did seem impressed. Maybe it was working! How could Ms. Katz watch this, and then take her away from the very people who’d made it happen?
She ended her turns in the perfect place, right back in the center where she’d started them, and spun into her treble hops, counting them out in her head. And smiling!
One, two, three, four, five, six seven, hop…one, two, three, four, five, six seven, hop…one, two, three, four…one, two, three, four…one and a two, and a one and a two, and a one and a two, and a three and a stop!
She stood proudly, one leg still in the air, beaming. It was the best dancing she’d ever done. Ever. It needed to be, and so it was.
Ms. Katz wedged her folders under one arm and applauded.
“Very nice,” she said. “Excellent. You are a good dancer. You learned all that in just a couple of months?”
“Yeah,” Grace said, still puffing with exertion. “I practice a lot.”
“Well, I think it’s wonderful that Mr. Feldman and your other neighbors have been so helpful to you. And I really wish it changed the legal facts. But…Just tell Ms. Johnson I’ll come back after six.”
And with that she let herself out.
? ? ?
“You have to get up,” Billy said. “You have to dance.”
“I can’t dance at a time like this,” Grace said.
She was sitting slumped on the couch, holding her cat tightly. Maybe too tightly. But the nicest thing about Mr. Lafferty the Girl Cat was how she never complained. Grace figured it was because there were worse things in the world than being held too tightly. Mr. Lafferty the Girl Cat had a point about that.
“You have to dance especially at a time like this. That’s the whole point. The dancing will bring you back into the moment. It’s the dance that will save you.”
“What time is it?”
Billy leaned way back to look at his kitchen clock. “Ten after six.”
“Nothing will save me.”
“You don’t get to say that until you try.”
Grace sighed. She set the cat down on the couch and pulled to her feet, only to find that nothing but Mr. Lafferty the Girl Cat warm fur and comforting purring had been standing between her and the panic. She felt suddenly as if there were no air to breathe.
She looked up at Billy, who was lacing up his own tap shoes.
“I think I’m having a panic attack,” she said.
He leaped to his feet and ran to her, one of his tap shoes still untied.
“No!” he shouted. “Undo! No. You’re not. Don’t even give it a name. Don’t even give it so much power. Cancel,” he said, waving his hands around Grace’s head as if he could erase her thoughts. “Unthink that one, right now. Come on. I’m going to dance with you.”
He took her hand and pulled her into the middle of the kitchen, all four of their tap shoes echoing in rhythm. He bent down quickly to tie his other laces.
“Billy. You said we can’t dance in the kitchen.”
“I can only hope your mother will come up here to yell at us,” he said. “I could use a word with her.”
Grace smiled a little in spite of herself. She still wasn’t really used to hearing him say stuff like that.
“Now line up with me,” he said. “No, a little farther away. We have to make room for each other in the turns. Now I want you to see how all the anxiety flies away when you dance.”
So, having nothing to lose the way she figured it, Grace ran through the dance with him, half watching him from the corner of her eye. She wasn’t perfect this time, and she forgot to smile, but it was so interesting to see how their movements matched and timed, and then all of a sudden she was in the present, dancing, just like Billy said she would be, and feeling like things would work out somehow. Because…well, because they just would.
“You’re the best dancer,” she said, after the turns.
“I’m not ten per cent of what I used to be.”
“You must’ve been good.”
“Yeah. That’s me,” he said, apparently not even needing to count out his treble hops. “A ‘must’ve been.’ That’s like a has-been or an also-ran, only worse.”
“Didn’t understand a word of that.”
“Doesn’t matter,” he said, and then they did their grand finish.
And then they heard the knock on Rayleen’s door.