In Broken Places

19




THE FADED COLORS of Lewis’s living room and the austere grandeur of the professors’ dining hall had replaced the blank, bare stage. We’d even constructed a backstage area and wings by hanging temporary curtains from the beams high above and propping up makeshift walls with two-by-fours and bricks. The transformation had sublimated the performances of the students as they were carried by the sets and props to a time and context none of them had known. The only unfinished item was the wardrobe, the centerpiece of the set, critical to the story, which Scott was in the process of assembling onstage. He’d recruited the help of some of his basketball players for the job, but it still was proving to be a frustrating, unwieldy task. The pieces weren’t coming together as planned, and after two hours of effort that should have taken only minutes, with ten cast members waiting to take possession of the stage for a critical rehearsal, things didn’t seem anywhere near a resolution. I approached him to ask when he thought he might be finished, but his only answer was a scowl followed by “I’ll be finished when I’m finished.”

So I retreated to my front-row seat and tried not to let his shortness get the best of me. Meagan and I spent the wait going over a laundry list of small details needing attention, while the cast occupied their time in various forms of stress release and Shayla wandered around the stage in tight circles engrossed in a loud and seemingly endless version of “London Bridge Is Falling Down.” Seth paced back and forth across the back of the room, practicing his final monologue at breakneck speed. Two other guys made ape sounds and flounced around in the balcony in a semblance of jungle warfare. And several others were involved in an animated discussion about the social and cultural importance of Paris Hilton. Jessica thought it was commendable that she’d made such a name for herself when all she’d been before was a pretty girl with a pedigree, while two of my more outspoken male actors compared the hotel heiress to a hollow-headed manipulator masquerading as a trashy debutante. It was an entertaining conversation, to say the least. As their voices blended with the ape noises coming down from above, the murmured lines at the back of the auditorium, Shayla’s singing, and Meagan’s incessant commentary on the goings-on around us, I wondered if I might have somehow gotten trapped inside the psychedelic chaos of Ozzy Osbourne’s mind.

“Hold that side higher, Kenny,” Scott instructed in a tight voice, lightly hammering his side of the structure so it would line up with the set wall next to it. Kenny strained to lift the bulky frame a little higher off the ground, and in doing so, raised it so high that he pushed Scott’s side off-kilter.

“No, Kenny!” he said in exasperation, wiping sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. I heard him mutter something under his breath as he slammed down the hammer and used brute strength to force the heavy wood back into place.

Thomas and Kate chose that moment to step onstage and begin a sort of demented parody of the play, their voices raised in a comical British cacophony of ridiculous dialogue. On the other side of the stage, a Korean stagehand named Simon nearly stepped off the edge as he tried to maneuver a large, framed painting around the professors’ grand table. Meagan jumped into action, screaming his name as she rushed over to catch him if he were to fall.

The noise and confusion were increasing exponentially, and as I found out too late, so was the frustration of the amateur carpenter onstage. He managed to control himself right up until the moment when Simon, who was still trying to position the frame, rammed the end of it into the wardrobe door. Kate screamed in mock horror at the gouge in the wood, which attracted the attention of the rest of the students in the room. The apes in the balcony started yelling down at Simon, giving him a hard time, and Simon started yelling back that actors were an ungrateful bunch of egotists. It was all in good fun, of course, and I was chuckling in the front row when Scott stopped what he was doing and rounded on the students with so much impatience that it scared me.

“Hey! Would you all mind keeping it down?” he yelled, hands on hips and anger like shrapnel in his voice. “Kenny can’t hear a word I’m saying and he’s only two feet away! Just . . . chill out!”

And he turned back to work with a stiffness I’d never seen in him before, ordering Kenny to put more pressure on the base of the wardrobe structure.

Standing in the middle of the stage in her favorite purple corduroys and matching flowered shirt, Shayla was dumbstruck. Her bottom lip came out, her chin started to tremble, and she looked at me as if willing me to leap onto the stage and whisk her away from the man she’d never heard yell before. I felt the same way she did.

Behind her, Scott had stopped working and was kneeling there, hammer in hand, doing nothing. Kenny still held his half of the wardrobe and seemed rather unfazed by what had just happened. Then again, he’d probably witnessed similar displays on the basketball court. So when he saw Shayla’s face, he let go of the wardrobe without hesitation and went to her before I’d had time to rise from my chair.

“Hey, Lady Shay,” he said, crouching down beside her, “whatsa matter?”

She didn’t say anything. She just turned her head toward Scott as her chin started to quiver in earnest.

“What—him?” Kenny said in a nonchalant voice, pointing over his shoulder. “He’s just ticked off ’cause he can’t get his wardrobe to work.”

“He yelled at me,” Shayla said in such an unsteady voice that someone at the back of the room giggled. That seemed to release the tension enough that others started to talk. The crisis had passed. But not onstage. Scott straightened and walked over to where Shayla stood. She watched him come with a frown so thunderous that it would have been comical under different circumstances. Kenny squeezed her arm and moved aside.

Scott took a moment to look down at her, considering the expression on her face and probably assessing the risk. Then he sat down cross-legged in front of her, looked directly and sincerely into her eyes, and said, “I messed up, didn’t I?”

She took a shaky breath and said, “You yelled at me.”

“You’re right, Lady Shay. I shouldn’t have.”

“You sca-yod me.” She gave a little hiccup and swallowed hard.

“I didn’t mean to scare you—”

“You should say sowwy.”

Scott raked his fingers through his hair. “I am sorry, Shay. I wasn’t mad at you. I promise I wasn’t. But I was mad at that wardrobe because I can’t get it to work right.” He took her hand and kissed her fingers. “I’m sorry I scared you.”

She seemed to consider that for a moment, then propped her fists on her little hips and said, “Don’t do it again.”

Scott smiled, though I could still see tension in the lines of his face. “I’ll try not to.” He tweaked her nose. “Forgive me?”

She hesitated, playing a little hard to get as all good girls do, but then she nodded and Scott scooped her up and sat her down in the crook of his crossed legs. She leaned back against him while he whispered something in her ear that made her giggle. They sat like that for a while, and I looked on from the first row of the audience, blinking hard.

I’d learned three things in the simplicity and spontaneity of an impatient moment. One, Scott was human—which was a great relief to me, because I’d started to think I was the only one with monumental flaws like bouts of verbal diarrhea, a tendency to cry at Hallmark commercials, and an occasionally runny nose. Two, anger didn’t always harm, at least not long-term. He’d lost it, he’d realized it, he’d fixed it. Period—pass the donuts. And three, I could think of no more beautiful, heart-stirring sight than my daughter wrapped in the arms of a man who loved her and whose tenderness toward her was stronger than his anger.



As opening night drew closer, the days grew longer. I woke up with a to-do list screaming in my brain, and I went to bed dejected at how little I’d actually accomplished. And in between? In between, I tried to wrangle ten actors hyped up on adrenaline into some semblance of performance, I taught English classes that were sadly ill-prepared, I spent hours with Shayla learning the German words for shapes, colors, and animals, as her teacher had encouraged me to do, and I reveled in the luxury and mystery of being pursued.

My educated and researched view on being pursued was this: good stuff—even though my brain still told me to be careful, to expect disappointment, and to enjoy Scott while I could, because all good things invariably came to a bitter, painful end. So each moment with Scott hummed with the delicate tension of absorbing the wonderfulness and bracing for the horribleness. I found that our times together galvanized me and elevated my emotions to a level of optimism they’d seldom reached before. But I knew that the second I was alone at home again, I’d relentlessly relive the moments in my mind and sift through the happiness in search of something wrong. He hadn’t decided to dislike me yet. But a ghostly voice told me that if I gave him more time, he eventually would.

To be honest, my expectations for being pursued were slightly skewed, for which I blamed Keith Jacobs, my almost-date to my college formal. He’d made pursuit into a competition sport in which I’d said no in every way I could and he’d ignored me. I’d rather have played croquet. Keith had been the Arnold Schwarzenegger of pursuit, blending the subtlety of Conan the Barbarian with the romance of the Terminator. He’d attempted to woo me with a kind of rabid sense of purpose that had bordered on maniacal, and I’d spent my last semester of college developing running skills I neither wanted nor enjoyed.

But Scott was different—in every important way. He wasn’t out to convince me of anything. Nor was he attempting to seduce my hormones into overtaking my brain. He was simply there, coming in and out of my life during the day with casual touches and healing smiles, helping when he could, and always willing. We laughed together, we took walks together, and we even prayed together, which was teaching me more about his nature and about my own faith than any amount of conversation might have done.

On Monday nights Shayla and I headed to the gym, where I watched BFA’s male staff members trying to prove they were still fit by engaging in merciless games of geezer-ball. It had all the trappings of basketball, but apparently none of the rules. We usually played in the bleachers until an injury on the court forced me into my unofficial paramedic role. I found the geezer-ball tradition dangerous and pointless, but who was I to interfere with Scott’s need to be macho once a week?

Shayla had caught some of his excitement for the sport. He had taught her how to dribble a basketball, and she now walked around the apartment yelling “swoosh” at random moments, which, I decided, was one of the greater downsides of being pursued by a sports enthusiast. The other was that he was determined to coax me toward at least an appreciation of football, which meant spending hours on his couch with his laptop on a tray table in front of us, watching the Chicago Bears getting beaten by other teams.

It would have been excruciating except for the sitting-on-the-couch part. That much I liked. So I pretended to be horrified when the quarterback dropped the ball and used my horrification to snuggle a little closer to the man whose strength and character made me proud and who seemed adept at only this one form of multitasking. He could watch a game and hold me, which was a pretty cool trick indeed.

“I’m getting shoulder pads,” I said on one occasion, when Shayla was sleeping in the armchair next to the window and Scott and I were in our usual places on the couch watching the Bears getting trounced again.

“Yeah?” He was only half with me. I’d discovered that the rise in testosterone caused by football had a direct relation to hearing loss. Go figure.

So I tried it again. I nuzzled his neck a little—because I was allowed to do that now that we were pursuing and all—and said in as husky a voice as I could muster, “Scott? I’m getting shoulder pads.”

I had his attention. And his confusion. “Planning on taking up football?”

“No, but look at those guys!” I was back to my own voice as I motioned toward the TV. “Their shoulder pads make their butts look tiny.”

“My girlfriend the athlete.”

“Your girlfriend the bored nonathlete who sits on the couch and watches games with you because she knows it makes you happy. Your girlfriend who has, however, been sitting on this couch too long tonight because her daughter is asleep in your armchair and should really be home in bed. Your girlfriend who still thinks it’s a little bit weird for adults in their midthirties to be using the term girlfriend when really this is just a game of if-you-pursue-me-I’ll-put-up-with-your-blasted-football-game.”

“You through?”

I thought about it. “Yup.”

“Good. For an English teacher, you sure use a lot of run-on sentences.”

“For a phys ed teacher, you sure do a lot of sitting on the couch.”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Should we break up?”

“Sure—I have to go home anyway. Can we make up in the morning?”

“Sounds like a plan.” He got up and slipped into his coat. “I’ll carry Shay out to the car.”

“Thanks—I’ll wait here for your second run.”

“I’m not carrying you.”

“You couldn’t lift me anyway. I’ve got my first-performance bulge going on.”

“You’re not fat, Shelby.”

“My love handles have grown into a love steering wheel.”

“You’re not fat,” he said again, lifting a limp Shayla into his arms and arranging her against his shoulder. “But your lips should be a lot skinnier for all the flapping they do.”

Any talk about mouths or lips always got my brain thinking about kissing, and thinking about kissing always made my toes curl, so I put the thought out of my mind, what with having to walk out to the car and all. Curled toes made it ungainly.

I followed Scott outside and waited while he installed Shayla in her car seat. It was a lesson I’d learned only recently. It went something like this: wait for the cute guy to open your car door or he’ll get all huffy and make you get back out of the car so he can be a gentleman. Scott was trying to break me of my single-girl habits. When he got around to my door, he reached for the handle but didn’t open it right away.

“So are we going to talk about the kissing thing or just have a moment of panic every time it crosses our minds at the same time?”

I put on my Scarlett accent. “Why, Scott, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Flapping lips.”

My toes did the sighing thing. “Fine. Go ahead and talk about it, then.” I hated that I still went a little junior-high when I was out of my comfort zone.

“You want subtle or nonsubtle?”

“I want quick. Shayla’s freezing in the backseat.”

He glanced into the car where Shayla slept peacefully and warmly under the blanket Scott had wrapped around her. “She’s not complaining.”

“Okay, let’s go for subtle.”

He cleared his throat, and I thought I saw a bit of a blush working its way up his neck. “All right,” he said, “here’s the deal. I’ve known you for, what, six months now, and we’ve spent a lot of them being just-friends—which, by the way, was your idea.”

“Are you blushing?”

“Hush. I’m trying to be subtle.”

“Whatever.”

“But we’re not just just-friends anymore and . . .”

“All right, enough of subtle. I don’t have time for this. How ’bout you go for nonsubtle and get whatever this is over with?” There was an elf tap-dancing on my stomach and he was driving me nuts.

“Nonsubtle?”

“Please.”

“All right, here it is. I really, really want to kiss you, and if you don’t say no in the next three seconds, I’m going to do it.”

One. No, no, no, no, no . . .

Two. Okay, well, if you have to, let’s get it over with.

Three. What are you waiting for?

One minute I was standing there feeling three seconds tick by, and the next . . . and the next, a warm hand was snaking through my hair to the back of my head and drawing me in. I had a moment of panic right before his lips touched mine, because it felt so conclusive somehow—in a what-are-you-doing-for-the-rest-of-my-life? kind of way. But then his lips were on mine and his breath was on my face and my hands were clinging to the front of his jacket because my legs were doing a limp-noodle imitation.

Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, quadruple axel, knotted-up toes, tap-a-tap-tap, and all that stuff.

It was nice, in other words.

He pulled away just enough to take a look at my eyes—like he expected me to have fallen asleep or something.

“Still here,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“For the record?”

“Uh-huh?”

“I haven’t stopped liking you yet . . . or wanting to pursue you.”

“Oh.” My turn to blush. “Well . . . give yourself some time. It might still happen.”

“See you tomorrow, Shelby.” He said it against my lips, and my innards did a twist.



“Shut—your—mouth,” Trey said with so much pent-up impatience that I clamped my jaw shut and ordered myself to be quiet. Apparently he wanted his surprise to be a silent one.

I’d never been into surprises. Maybe because they were by definition something I couldn’t prepare for, and preparing was a critical issue for me. I blamed it on the drama of my seventh birthday, when Mom had asked a few girls from my class to my house for a party. I hadn’t expected it. Trey and I had gone to the library to return some books and pick new ones for the weekend, and the house had seemed really quiet when we’d returned. Right up until we’d walked into the living room and Vira Snurdly had popped up from behind the couch yelling, “Happy birthday!” loudly enough to scare the crows out of the tree in the yard. I was so surprised that I fell backward over the La-Z-Boy’s footrest, legs in the air, and exposed my Tuesday undies to the assembled guests. It wasn’t showing my Tuesday undies that had humiliated me so much as the fact that it was Saturday. My day-of-the-week panties were a big deal at the time.

So when Trey had insisted on covering my eyes with a scarf several minutes ago, then shoved me into the passenger seat of his car and driven around town for a while, I’d had flashbacks to that fateful birthday party.

“I don’t like surprises.”

“You’ll like this one.” He sounded sure of himself, and that scared me even more.

“Just give me a hint.”

“Nope.”

“Is Vira Snurdly involved?”

“Be quiet, Shell.”

“Well, at least I’m not wearing day-of-the-week panties.”

“Huh?”

“Remember the day we got books at the library and then went home and Vira Snurdly was hiding behind the couch with Jocelyn Hicks and Carrie Smith and they jumped out at me and yelled, ‘Happy birthday!’ and I fell over the footrest and they saw my panties and—”

“Shell.” There was a warning in his tone. A kindhearted warning, but a warning nonetheless.

“Wait, you don’t understand—they were my Tuesday panties!”

There was a pause before a reluctant “And?”

“And it was Saturday! Saturday, Trey! They saw my Tuesday panties and it was Saturday, and I’m telling you, I just knew that Vira would never let it drop because she never let anything drop, like the time Corrie split her pants and—”

That was when Trey told me to shut my mouth. Which I did. But I opened it again to explain to him that surprises scared me and that blabbing soothed me, at which point he said a “Shell!” that crackled a little too much for my own good. So I shut my mouth and sat there in silence while we drove around long enough to make me sick to my stomach. He eventually parked, turned off the engine, helped me out of the car, and ushered me through a door into some sort of resonant room.

“You ready?”

I was standing there blindfolded, trying not to throw up, but yes, I was ready.

“Keep your eyes closed until I tell you to open them,” he said, his fingers fiddling with the scarf’s knot. “Okay—open.”

I opened my eyes and found myself standing in an empty room with unpainted walls, a semifinished tile floor, plastic-covered windows, and dangling wires where light fixtures should have been. Trey was looking at me with so much expectation that I didn’t dare react.

“Where am I?”

He looked around the room with a deep smile spreading across his face. “Picture it,” he said. And he proceeded to describe in minute detail every invisible item he could see in the space, from the wall decorations to the window treatments, from the espresso machine to the whipped cream dispenser. He was still talking exultantly about the bakery of his dreams when I interrupted.

“You bought your bakery?”

He nodded and smiled like he’d swallowed the sun. “Signed the papers this morning,” he said with so much excitement that his voice and eyes danced. “I start renovations next week.”

“You bought your bakery!” I threw myself at his neck with so much force that he teetered, and then we both did a ridiculous hopping routine that had us turning in circles in the middle of the echo-chamber room, waving our arms above our heads, and whooping like drunk cheerleaders.

When I’d whooped myself hoarse and hopped myself breathless, I plopped down in the middle of the floor, mindless of the dust and dirt, and looked around at the vision Trey had described. I could see it all, every hue and nuance of the dream he had bought with dogged pursuit and relentless dedication. He sat down next to me and leaned back on his hands, taking in the half-finished space with the eye of an artist.

“You think it’ll fly?” he asked.

“With you as the chef? You bet your booty.”

He exhaled loudly. “Tell me I’m not an idiot.”

“You’re not an idiot.”

“It’s financial suicide opening this kind of thing, Shell. Even with Mom’s money. I mean, the guy who had it before me only got halfway through the renovations before he threw in the towel.”

“But you’ve worked it all out, right?”

“Down to the last penny. With a bit of a cushion in case of emergency.”

“Then you’re not an idiot.”

“I’m calling it L’Envie.”

“So it’s a Chinese bakery?”

His head dropped back and he stared at the ceiling with his usual my-sister-the-moron expression. “That’s French, Shelby.”

I smirked. “I know.” I looked out the plastic-covered front window at the cars going by and savored the moment. “So what now?”

“We paint the walls, and the tile guys come next week to finish this up.” He motioned at the front part of the room, where the beige tile ended and rough cement extended to the door. “Kitchen gets installed after that. Then I have the inspectors come in to make sure it’s up to snuff, design flyers, put ads in the paper, maybe hire some help, organize a grand opening . . .”

“So you’re going to be busy, in other words.”

“For the foreseeable future.”

I nodded and inhaled the brightness of his dream. “It’s going to be fabulous, Trey.”

“I’m thinking of maybe serving meals, too. Maybe one meal a day—single-item menu.”

“As long as the single item is calorie-loaded and mushroom-free, I’ll be your designated taster.”

I giggled at his goofy, happy grin and lay back on the dusty floor, bending my knees and getting comfy while the grime of construction got into my hair. There wasn’t much to look at from that position. Then again, there wasn’t much to look at from any position yet. He joined me in the dust and let out a happy sigh.

“I like the postmodern light fixtures,” I said.

“Yeah? The French are big into the tangled-wire look.”

“And the ripped plastic on the windows is a really fancy touch.”

“Thanks. I ripped it myself.”

“This is your dream, Trey.”

“Yup.”

“You made it happen.”

“I did.”

“God’s not spitting anymore.”

“He never did.”

I turned my head to look at him. “You used to think he did.”

“We were only kidding.”

“Yeah, but remember after you killed the bird? When you went downstairs and started throwing things around in your room? You kept yelling at the ceiling, ‘Stop spitting on me, you . . .’ And then you used a word I won’t repeat because I don’t want to damage your fancy new bakery with a lightning bolt from heaven.”

Trey chuckled and breathed deeply. “I remember,” he said. “But I think I knew even then—way down—that God hadn’t spit on us. Dad had.”

“Literally and figuratively.”

“But not God. God does things like this instead,” he said, basking in the accomplishment and miracle of L’Envie.

“Took a while.”

“Well, he kinda wanted me to be part of the process, and I spent a few years getting over the Dad factor, so . . .”

Something bittersweet breathed across my mind, but since I didn’t recognize it, I let it glide on by. Trey must have sensed it too. He captured it before it passed.

“You’ll get your dream someday, Shell.”

“Yeah?”

An ambulance went braying by, its siren jarring the hope-laden air. Our celebration settled, mellowed, dimmed.

“How did you figure it out?” I asked, with inner eyes exploring the dull blankness of my hopes.

“My dream?”

I nodded.

“I don’t know. It just kind of came.”

A shadow crept across the weary gray of jadedness. “So what’s mine?” I asked. “What’s my dream?”

Trey grabbed my hand as we lay on the pale, hard tile—so plush, moments before, with the joy of dreams come true. “It’s out there, Shell. Just wait.” He squeezed my hand, exhaled. “Life isn’t finished with you yet.”