13 Gifts (19 page)

Chapter Twenty

 

“They were props? For a play?” Amanda and Rory
cry out, halting their forks in midair. Leo stops chomping on his chocolate-chip pancake, but only for a second. David said if you want something from someone, make sure they have a full belly. So I’m treating everyone to a post-final-exams pancake and telling them the news that I told David yesterday. I haven’t told anyone about using the wrong list, though. I plan to take that info to the grave.

I nod. “
Fiddler on the Roof,
to be exact.”

Amanda and Rory stare at me like I’ve just announced that aliens have landed at the diner. “You gonna eat that?” Leo asks, spearing my chocolate-chip pancake before waiting for a reply.

“So what does that mean?” Amanda asks. “Why would … the person who hired you make you find all the props to a play?”

“Maybe she really likes
Fiddler on the Roof
?”

“Oh, no!” Rory says, looking from me to David and back again. “You’re not going to say we’re putting on the play are you?”

“We’re putting on a play?” Leo asks, coming up for air. “Can I write it?”

“It’s
Fiddler on the Roof
,” David says. “Someone wrote it, like, fifty years ago.”

“Oh, right.”

I pull out the playbill and lay it on the table.

Rory gasps. “That’s Emily! How is that possible?”

“Actually, it’s our grandmother, Emilia. Emily was named after her.”

“I’ve seen people in town stop her and say how much she looks like her grandmother,” Rory says, peering closely at the photo. “Now I see why!”

“Might as well tell them the kicker,” David says.

I take a deep breath and say, “And we have to do it kind of fast.”

“How fast?” Amanda asks.

I point to the date on the front of the brochure.

“Of
this
year?”

I nod.

“But there’s no time,” Rory says. “That’s less than three weeks away. And it’s the day before David’s bar mitzvah.”

“It’s okay. I’ve been practicing long enough,” David says. “If I don’t have it by now, I’m never gonna get it.”

“What about the beach?” Rory asks. “You’re supposed to be going for ten of those days.”

“I know. I’m hoping if Emily agrees to star in the play, then Aunt Bethany will let us put off the trip.”

Rory shakes her head. “Emily would never agree to it. She’s never performed in public before, and I don’t think her mom wants her to.”

“I know. But look” — I slide the playbill across the table — “she was born to play this part.” I’m sort of surprised that Rory is the one throwing up roadblocks. She almost seems angry. Usually she’s so quick to want to help everyone.

Rory looks at the playbill and sighs. “Maybe you’re right. Can I talk to you alone for a second?”

“Um, okay.” I start sliding off the bench.

“Girl stuff,” Rory explains to David and Leo as she climbs out.

“Hey, I know all about girl stuff,” Leo says. “My best friend has been a girl for thirteen years. Well, twelve, if you count the year she hated me. Either way, I know more about girl stuff than I ever wanted to.”

Amanda elbows him in the ribs.

“Maybe you can teach me some,” David says.

This seems like a good place to exit the conversation. Rory leads me to the other side of the diner, next to the old jukebox. “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s not you I’m mad at, it’s Angelina. Did she tell you something would happen if you don’t put on the play? Or that something
will
happen if you do?”

“Something like that,” I admit, hoping she doesn’t ask for specifics.

“I don’t want to know what it is,” Rory says, to my relief. “It’s just that I thought you’d be done with all this once you finished with the list. I was hoping, for your sake, that it was over.”

“I know. I think it will be, after this.”

Rory sighs. “Well, then, I guess we have a play to put on.”

“Thank you,” I tell her, “for everything. For even caring in the first place.”

She grins. “That’s what friends are for.”

“I’m learning that,” I say, not really intending to say it out loud. Maybe she didn’t hear me over the clattering of dishes as a busboy clears a table nearby.

But she must have, because she says, “Before last year, I really only had two friends — Annabelle and Sari. Definitely not any friends who were boys. So I’m still learning, too.”

“Girl talk over?” Leo says when we return to the table.

“Just beginning,” Rory says, and we share a smile.

David says, “If we’re going to do this, we have to start right away. I think the first thing we need to do is get a script and find a crew. Costumes, sets, music, all that stuff. And actors, of course.”

“What happened to the playhouse anyway?” I ask. “I think this was the last play they tried to put on.”

“It was?” Amanda asks.

I tell them what Emily said about my grandmother and the Broadway producer and then I add how the play never went on, although I don’t tell them it was Angelina who told me that part.

“I bet I know who could tell us what really happened,” David says.

We all turn to him expectantly.

“Any of the people who had the props.”

“You’re right,” I say. “I hadn’t thought of that. They must have been involved in the play somehow. Where do we start?”

“How about the lady who did your makeup?” Rory suggests. “She lives right around the corner from here.”

We shovel in the last bits of pancake, and then I take the check up to the front counter to pay. “How’s that cane working out for you?” Mr. Milazo asks, taking the bill.

I reach down to my sock to get the money. “Haven’t used it yet,” I tell him. “Soon, though.”

“They have this newfangled device called a wallet,” he says as he hands me my change. “You should try one.”

When Bettie with an
i-e
sees that it’s us again, she opens the door wide. Rubbing her hands together excitedly, she says, “Oohh, you brought me two more models!”

Amanda and Rory look uneasy as they step inside.

“Sorry, Bettie,” I say. “We just wanted to ask you a question about that basket you gave me last time?”

“Oh, okay,” she says, obviously disappointed. “What about it?”

“Do you remember where you got it from?”

“It was my mother’s,” she says, glancing at a photograph on the wall of an elderly woman sitting on a lawn chair. “She had dozens of baskets. She used to carry her makeup in them when she did her rounds.”

I pull out the brochure and show her the picture of it in the play.

“That’s right,” she says. “She used to work at the playhouse, doing the actors’ makeup. She must have lent it to them for the play.”

“Do you remember this one?
Fiddler on the Roof
?”

“I was just a girl,” she says, “but Mom used to bring me to
all of them with her. That was the last one they did. Must be about thirty-five years ago. The playhouse closed down after that. Lost their funding or something.”

“Do you remember the woman who starred in it? Emilia Rose? She was my grandmother.”

“Of course I remember Miss Rose. She was famous in town. Headed for greatness, they said.” She glances down at the playbill and says, “That was going to be her big break, if I recall correctly.”

“But what happened?” I ask.

“I don’t really know,” she says. “She pulled out of the play a week before opening night, and it all fell apart after that. Oh, there were rumors. Some thought Miss Rose and the director fell in love and were going to get married, but then Miss Rose accepted another man’s proposal. I was too young at the time to be interested in that part. Sometimes people, when they’re on the brink of getting what they really want, they decide they don’t want it anymore.”

It’s a different version from what Emily told me. I wonder if we’ll ever know the real story.

“And no one wanted to start up the playhouse again in all these years?” Leo asks.

“The town bought the playhouse building and turned it into the library,” she explains. “Willow Falls used to have to share a library with River Bend, you know.”

“Why can’t there be both a library and a playhouse?” Leo asks.

Bettie shrugs. Then she says, “I just got some great eye shadows in the mail, you sure I can’t try ’em out on ya?”

Ten minutes later, we’ve secured a makeup artist for the play, and Amanda and I have purple, pink, and green striped eyelids. Rory claimed to be allergic to a lot of different kinds of makeup, which is an excuse I wish I’d thought of myself. The next stop is the library, to check if they have any of the theatre’s old stuff. Once we’re inside, it’s easy to see how it could have been a playhouse once. It’s strange to think of all the time my grandmother must have spent in this building so many years ago. When Rory tells the librarian what we’re looking for, she says, “We do have most of the plays, but not all. The Willow Falls Historical Society has a lot of them.”

“We’ll hope for the best,” Rory says firmly.

“Yeah,” says Amanda, “we wouldn’t want to bother the nice old lady that works at the historical society.”

The librarian shrugs and points to the shelves all the way in the back. “Good luck.”

The shelf is stuffed full of scripts and playbills and memorabilia from decades of plays. And my grandmother’s name is on the front of a lot of them, beginning when she was a kid.

“Here it is!” Leo says, pulling a copy of
Fiddler on the Roof
out of the middle of the pile. We crowd around as he flips through it. Every other page has a handwritten note in the margin. “This must have been the director’s copy,” he says.

“The play is really long,” I say, frowning. “How can people learn all this in such a short time?”

“What if we just do the songs?” David suggests. “Like, tell the play through the music?”

“Do you think that would be okay, Tara?” Rory asks.

“I don’t see why not. That’s the best part anyway.”

“Hey, look!” Leo holds up the script. Handwritten on the back cover is a list of the crew. “Recognize some of these names?” he asks.

Most of the names don’t mean anything to me. Then I get down to props. “Look! It’s Big Joe!”

“Can’t be,” Amanda says. “He’s way too young.”

“Didn’t Mrs. Grayson say the knife was his father’s?” David asks. “It must be Big Joe Senior!”

“Speaking of Mrs. Grayson,” David says, pointing to the script. “It says here she and her sister were the choreographers.”

“And look at the next one,” Leo says. “ ‘Fiddler … Bucky Whitehead’!”

“Bucky!” we all exclaim.

“When he gave me the violin he said he hadn’t played it in thirty-five years!”

“Did he say why?”

I shake my head. I don’t want them to know that I didn’t even think to ask. I’m sure any of them would have. “Do you think he’d be willing to do it again?”

“I guess it depends on why he stopped,” Leo says.

We take the script up to the librarian and ask her if we can make a copy of it. “It would probably be easier to download it from the Internet,” she says. “It wouldn’t cost too much.”

“We’d really like this copy,” I say.

She suggests we take it down to the copy shop since it’s so long and have them do it. We get outside and decide to split up. David’s going to get the play copied and then see the best way to fit the songs together. Leo is going to talk to Bucky, and Amanda to Mrs. Grayson. Rory’s going to ask her friend Annabelle to do
costumes, and her friend Sari apparently loves nothing more than doing people’s hair. And I get the fun job of convincing Emily to perform in front of the whole town. Or the five people who’ll probably show up. Either way, it won’t be easy.

“Not a chance,” she says, not even lifting her eyes from her math notebook.

“But look, it’s you, you’re the star.” I place the playbill on the notebook so she has no choice but to look at it.

“It’s not me,” she says, pushing it aside. It falls off the desk.

I pick it up and pace back and forth with it. “But it could be. This could be your big chance. You’d get to show everyone how good you are.”

“Isn’t the Fiddler the star of the play anyway? You know, since it’s named after him?”

I shake my head. “Nope. He’s just some guy who plays the violin on a roof. Technically, I guess the guy who plays the father, Tevye, is the star, but this is the biggest female part.”

She scribbles a few more numbers. “Mom would never let me do it. You know how she feels about all this stuff.”

“I don’t think we’ll ever really know what happened with Grandma and the play. But that was her journey, this one’s yours.”

That gets her to at least put down her pencil. “Why does it matter if it’s me? Why can’t someone else do it? I’m sure a lot of girls in town would want to.”

“I don’t know,” I reply honestly, looking down at the playbill. “There must be some reason you can do the same things
Grandma could. And you look so much alike. It would be like finishing something she started.”

She nibbles on the end of her pencil for a minute, then says, “I just don’t think I can.”

“Will you think about it?”

“Okay, but don’t hold your breath.”

I lie down on the bed wondering if there’s anything else I can do to convince her. My phone rings, making both of us jump. It’s Rory.

“Did you talk to Emily yet?” she asks.

“Yup. She said she’d think about it.” Then in a loud voice I say, “I know, she’d be perfect!”

“Not gonna work,” Emily calls out from her desk.

Rory laughs. “I heard that. Okay, I have a plan. Have Emily open her laptop. I’m going to send her an e-mail in ten minutes.”

“And you think it’ll work?”

“If this doesn’t, nothing will.”

Ten minutes later her computer dings.

“I really have to work,” Emily says. “Is this gonna take long?”

I don’t answer since I have no idea what Rory’s e-mail says. We open it up to find a link with the words
Click Me.

We click. A small video box opens, then gets larger. The video starts up and first thing we see is waves crashing on a beach. It’s a little shaky and grainy, like someone filmed it with their cell phone.