Breakfast Served Anytime (10 page)

The bearded guy was out of breath. “Sorry I’m late,” he wheezed — I detected asthma and vague cluelessness, a recipe for dorkdom — “but I’m not as late as you are, right? Holyfield, get down.” He adjusted his glasses and stuck out his hand to Calvin, who, of the four of us, must have appeared the friendliest. “Wesley Xavier,” he grinned. “And this” — he indicated the vapid passenger on his chest — “is Juliet. You’ve already met Holyfield.”

At the sound of his name, Holyfield — who had revealed himself to be a boxer puppy, and irresistibly cute — perked up his ears. They were floppy ears, not the pointy kind I’d seen on boxers before. One of them, the right, looked a little mangled, a flaw that only added to his appeal.

“Runt of the litter,” Wesley Xavier said. “One of his brothers got his ear there, poor guy. My wife’s the one who came up with Holyfield.”

Weston A. Xavier. Wesley Xavier. Just a simple little switch and suddenly you’re a fascinating enigma. Why hadn’t I thought of that myself?

“So here we are,” X said. “I hope I’ve given yall ample time to get to know each other on your own terms.” He looked around the tomb and beamed. Maybe it was just me, or maybe it was Chloe’s recently extinguished cigarette, but as X raised both his arms in a goofy gesture of triumph, I swear I thought I caught a whiff of pot. “Welcome to Secrets of the Written Word.”

So the laundry room in the basement of Reynolds Hall quickly became my Thinking and Letter-Writing Place. I liked it down there — most of the time it was hot as hell, but aside from the excellent white noise of the HVAC unit and the washers and dryers, it was quiet and cavernous and largely unoccupied. In addition to an ancient TV with actual bunny ears that tuned to exactly one channel (sort of), it also featured a purple plastic CD player with a cracked but functional lid. My first pang of missing my laptop came with the realization that I wouldn’t be able to immediately transfer the songs from Alex’s CD onto Indigo, so discovering the CD player was an excellent lark. Alex’s CD? Be still, my beating heart. I tried to see how long I could make myself wait to open the package and I held out for roughly twelve hours, which is not bad if you’re me. Totally worth the wait: a collection of sixteen songs, eight with my name in the title (in chronological order and spanning four decades!) and eight by some band I’d never heard of and quickly fell in love with called the Gloria Record. Inside, a note:

If I loved Alex before, I loved him ten times more now that he was no longer in the Lower Forty-Eight. Completely backasswards, but also completely true. His absence, the distance, the mysterious business of a
roadhouse
(I imagined a log cabin, taxidermy, bizarre people drinking absinthe in some seedy saloon) in a town whose name I couldn’t pronounce — it was thoroughly enchanting, every bit of it. He wouldn’t be back until Thanksgiving — ah, the beautiful, aching
agony
of it! My life was taking on the soft glow of a movie; now this was the kind of romance I was destined for: the kind where you don’t have to actually show up with frizzy hair. After all, my handwriting is so much more appealing than my face. If you could have looked inside my head, here’s what you would have seen:
Love Alex Love Alex Love Alex Love Alex Love Alex
. What a lovely refrain. I listened to the songs over and over, mining them for hidden meaning.

The lyrics paraded around in my head all night and into Wednesday, which turned out to be Community Service Day. Assignments were distributed by dorm floor, and Reynolds 3 was handed the unfortunate task of entertaining a bunch of three-year-olds at a local day-care center. Suck! Chloe and the rest of Reynolds 2 got to clean up a highway, which sounded marvelous in comparison. Calvin and Mason were in charge of helping local farmers get their stuff ready for market — thrilling! I would have eagerly volunteered to clean bus station toilets if it meant I could escape the torturous sentence that was Dealing with Kids.

Anyway. That’s how I came to be standing in front of a little girl named Brayden, whose mouth was still ringed with a violent shade of green from the Popsicle she’d had for a snack. We were on this playground behind the preschool. Brayden was on a swing, and I was standing behind her, contemplating the best way to give her an effective push. I reached out and put my hands on her back, which seemed impossibly tiny — a delicate architecture of bird bones fluttering beneath my fingers. I was scared to death.

“No, yank back real hard on the chains, up here,” Brayden ordered, slapping the metal links with gusto. Nothing delicate about her. “Give a big push, like Daddy!”

Like any good lemming, I followed orders. I yanked the chains back as far as they would go and released Brayden, who sailed forward with a gleeful shriek and then — “Watch this, Miss Gloria!” — leaped from the swing and landed hard on the ground. My mind went straight to the dangerous territory of blood and broken bones, but Brayden rose from the mulch unscathed. She dusted herself off, squinted at me, and, apropos of nothing, asked, “Hey Miss Gloria, do you like pineapple?”

“I do,” I answered, and the questions continued, rapid-fire non sequiturs that ranged from tornadoes to velociraptors to the very hot topic of Disney princesses.

“Which one’s your favorite?” Brayden wanted to know.

“Ariel?” I guessed.

Brayden frowned. Wrong answer. “Why Ariel?”

God, this was tedious. “Well,” I said, “first of all, I can appreciate that Ariel is a rebellious soul.”

Brayden squinted.

“She doesn’t let anyone tell her what to do, you know? Also, it’s cool that she shares a name with a character in a play written by this very famous guy named William Shakespeare. The play’s called
The Tempest
. You’d like it.”

“The Tempest,”
Brayden repeated. She was the kind of kid whose brain locked on to things, I could tell.

“Yeah. Tempest means storm.”

Brayden’s eyes got huge. “You mean like a tornado?”

“More like a hurricane,” I said.

“Do you know what?” Brayden asked. Too excited to wait for my reply, she answered herself, giggling and spinning in circles: “They don’t have tornadoes
in heaven
!”

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I followed Brayden’s lead and, arms flung out to my sides, started spinning as fast as I could. The world tipped sideways, trees spilling into the sky. Everything was hilarious. Everything was hilarious and sad. I waved across the playground to Sonya, beckoning her to save me from all that dizzy hilariousness. She jogged over and crouched down in front of Brayden, hands on knees.

“Hey there,” she said in her normal Sonya voice. Sonya didn’t change her voice — or anything else about herself — for anybody. “We’re going to play some basketball. Do you want to play or what?”

“I want to play!” Brayden screamed, and she took off running in the direction of a noisy circle of toddlers and a hoop that was about four times too high for them. Jessica was over there sinking one neat basket after the other, and the kids were clapping wildly.

“How are they going to reach?” I asked.

“They don’t care if they can reach or not,” Sonya said. “Trust me.”

“But what about teams? How are we going to do this?”

Sonya planted her hands on her hips. “Girl, weren’t you ever three years old?”

I stared at her and blinked. I tried hard to remember being three. The best I could do was four, this time when my mother took me to a baseball game, just the two of us. It was a summer day, like this one. Dusk. My mother is always in a hurry, always in a rush. That night, though, she was still. Peaceful. Absentminded, maybe, because as we sat there, ears tuned to the satisfying crack of ball against bat, my mother gently scratched my arm — just kind of absentmindedly stroked my arm and hummed as she watched the game. Who knows where her mind was drifting. What matters is that she was there, and she was happy, and that baseball will forever be this for me: my mother’s touch on my arm.

“Tell you what,” Sonya said, grabbing my hand, yanking me back to myself. “How about a do over? For the next twenty minutes, you get to be three again. Watch and learn.”

So for the next twenty minutes, I watched Sonya and Jessica as they dazzled the kids with their basketball moves and talked to them in easy, friendly chatter about the star players on the UK basketball team. These kids were
informed.
They knew exactly what was going on. By the time we moved back inside for circle time and a story, my friends had acquired fifteen pint-size devotees. I, who had never babysat a single day or minute in my life, sat back in Deer-in-Headlights mode and watched, awestruck.

Sonya sat cross-legged on the floor, and all the kids made beelines for her lap. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” she said. “I’ve only got one lap. Miss Jessica has a lap and Miss Gloria has a lap, and the rest of all yall’re gonna have to sit down on your bottoms — right now — or I’m not going to read this story. Are we clear?”

It was like musical chairs, only musical laps: Jessica got swarmed. Nobody wanted my lap except for Brayden, who approached me shyly and grinned. “Can I sit with you?”

I patted my crossed shins. “Have a seat.”

Brayden lowered herself onto my lap, and Sonya, having successfully quieted her young charges, started reading a book she had chosen for do-over three-year-old me. It was called
Officer Buckle and Gloria,
about a cop and a dog. Gloria was the dog, of course. Brayden and her friends hung on every word. Sonya was the best: theatrical and funny in all the right places, hushed and serious when the story called for it. Brayden’s fingernails were lined with dirt, and she wore two ladybug barrettes in her hair, which was a tangled mess but also smelled of sunshine and playground mulch and some other unnameable kid fragrance, and the solid warmth of her little bird body brought me, at one point, dangerously close to tears. I chalked it up to sleep deprivation, but when it was time for us to go and Brayden threw her bird arms around my neck in a mighty strangle-hug, I felt the pinpricks behind my eyes again and knew it was something else.

“See?” Sonya said on the bus home. “You just gotta talk to them like they’re people. That’s all anybody wants, I don’t care how old or young they are.”