Split Just Right (13 page)

“Nope, never,” she says finally, and her words aren’t big and dramatic, but come out from right inside her thinking. “I never walked those blocks without you in my plan. Never, Danny. You’re my family.”

Her walking game sort of reminds me of
The Odyssey,
so I tell her about Penelope weaving and unraveling her tapestry, but Mom just gets that happy look on her face when she thinks of me getting my good Bradshaw education.

“That Dr. Sonenshine used to teach at Amherst,” she says. “Maybe you’ll go there, one day.”

“Maybe,” I say.

“Speaking of going.” Mom squints out to the driveway where Old Yeller is parked behind the Finzimer sedan. “You want to make a break for it?”

“Race you.” But she’s already jumped up so fast that I just barely save her rocker from tipping and crashing over.

Later, of course, we apologize.

“It was that horseradish on the roast beef,” Mom explains over the phone while I sit at the kitchen table, a hand clapped over my mouth. Mom’s lies flow so effortlessly, it’s actually pretty astounding. “She’s deathly allergic, and when she started going into fits on the porch … Yes, yes, I tried calling your mother, but she was back in the kitchen. … Of course I rushed her right to the hospital just in time … Now? Let me check.” Mom looks at me and points to the receiver but I slice my hands through the air and shake my head quickly If I talked now, I’d start laughing. “She’s still feeling a little too weak to talk … Yes, I’ll tell her to give you a ring before you leave.”

I call later that night, before Rick Finzimer’s next morning flight home.

“If you need anything,” he says. “You have my work number.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“And take care. It was nice to meet you, Danny.”

“Yep. You, too.”

“Next time I’m in town, we could go have lunch or something.”

“I’d like that, I think.”

He says good-bye, and I hang up and breathe a long sigh. I’m relieved but also a little sad. When Rick Finzimer was just a smiling picture on the bookshelf, he seemed full of secrets and possibilities. Now that the mystery of Rick Finzimer has been solved, my imagination can’t control him anymore.

“I don’t even know why I care,” I explained to Gary “It’s hard to say if he’s even worth knowing.”

“But that’s what you miss—the person you’ll never know,” Gary said. Which is true. Whenever I miss Elliot, it comes down to specifics, like how he loved to listen to 98.5 Lite Hits, no matter how much Mom and I made fun of him. Or how calm he was when Portia stepped on a bee—Elliot just packed her foot with ice and baking soda and said, “Cry it all out, and the pain’ll go away quicker,” which is the exact right thing to say to someone who loves to cry as much as Portia.

But I don’t have any memories like that of Rick Finzimer. There’s an ache inside me where all those memories should be. It’s a different feeling from missing Elliot, but it’s painful all the same.

The following Sunday morning I slap my alarm off and jump out of bed, into the shower and then a pair of jeans, sneakers, and an old T-shirt. Mom’s already gone and I take the train with a fast-beating heart. I hope I know what I’m doing.

Esther is waiting for me in the kitchen.

“It’s real simple,” she says, tying a black apron around my waist. “Just clear the empty plates, dump ashtrays after two butts, restock the iced-tea stations, and you have to get lemons from the walk-in fridge. You know how to make coffee? Good. And do napkin rolls whenever you can grab a minute. You get ten percent of the wait staff’s tips; it’s all under the table.”

“Okay, got it.”

“Your mom’s really funny; she recruited me for the play, for
Tom!
—not that I’m any good, but she was always like, ‘Esther, you’re such a perfect mimic,’ so in the end I was like, ‘Okay I’ll give it a shot.’ It’s just a small part.” Esther squares her shoulders. “But I do kind of like to imitate other people’s voices just for fun. It was so weird how your mom just knew …” She smiles and picks up a box of Sweet’n Low packets. “Also, every table gets waters as soon as they’re seated. And babies get those special seats over by the bar. Good luck.”

I spy Mom before she sees me. She’s putting an order into the computer and frowning, and a couple of irritated waitresses wait behind her, all rolling eyes and tapping feet. I guess Mom’s waitressing skills haven’t improved much since Portia saw her in action a few weeks ago.

“Hey.” I wave when she looks up. “What a coincidence. This is my new part-time job, too.”

When I see the surprise in Mom’s face, I’m glad that I know how to make a few good decisions alongside the dumb ones.

T
HE TOM SAWYER MUSICAL
slowly begins taking hold of Mom’s life, especially after
As You Like It
wraps up. The play wasn’t a big success, and they ended up closing early. Shakespeare is always something of a hit or miss at Bellmont.

As the days count down to opening night, Mom’s at Bradshaw all the time, and even when she comes home, she’s still absentmindedly wearing parts of the school like a costume: a highlighter pen to hold her hair up in a bun, bracelets of paper clips or rubber bands, a few fingernails painted in with purple Magic Marker or Wite-Out. She seems completely obsessive and a little out of her mind, so I do my best to avoid her when we’re both at school.

“It’s got to work,” she’ll occasionally say out of the blue, clenching her fists and staring at me.

“Mom, of course it’ll work,” I always reply, but to me
Tom!
sounds like a play that’s bogged down with uncertainties.

For one thing, Claire Knoxworthy, the tenth-grader who’s playing Tom, is one of the saddest sacks ever to hit Bradshaw. She’s a nervous, scurrying, beetle-faced girl whom kids have called “The Pox” since lower school. The name fits her, since she has that sort of medieval plague-struck look to her. Definitely not Tom Sawyer cute, unless you’ve always pictured Tom with goose white skin and a crooked Dutch Boy haircut.

I don’t know too much about Claire except that she has a younger sister who takes the special ed. bus, and both Knoxworthy girls live with just their grandmother. Claire did distinguish herself last year when she tried to found the Young Astronomers club for Wednesday activities. People signed up with names like Ima Starr and Dija Moonme, but poor Claire didn’t get it and on Wednesday she even brought punch and vanilla wafers to school, because she thought she’d have such a big turnout. I heard the whole story when I was in the infirmary, faking a headache, and so the only way I can ever think about Claire is with RTs.

“She’ll be great,” Mom says. “She has pizzazz, and her voice is unbeatable.”

“Even if she is great,” I told Portia, “most people will have a hard time forgetting that it’s Claire. Claire’s just so … Claire.”

“We’ll just clap extra hard,” Portia said. “My parents’ll be there, and Mom’s a professional at getting a crowd going.”

Another problem is Ms. Kohlman, who plays the piano.

“We have issues,” Mom confesses. I got to see one of these issues unfold when I stood in on an early rehearsal. It was during the Huck and Becky duet.

“Huck and Becky!” Ms. Kohlman had suddenly shouted. “Move downstage now!” She’d stopped playing the piano, catching Huck and Becky midnote.

“Too awkward,” Mom said, fluttering her fingers dismissively.

“I’m not sure.” Ms. Kohlman stood, waddled on her stumpy walrus legs over to where Mom sat, and pointed up to the stage. “They’re losing the whole back of the house.”

“Not at all.” Mom stood up, too. “You’re a hundred percent wrong.”

“I think you’re being a little bit of a diva, Sue,” Ms. Kohlman shot back.

“Who’s the director here?” asked Mom.

“If you can’t appreciate other people’s creative input, maybe you need a new music director,” snipped Ms. Kohlman.

“Bea Kohlman better back off,” Mom fumed later. “Too many cooks, you know.”

After that episode, the rehearsals made me too nervous to watch. I heard that Ms. Kohlman and Mom’s regular sparring matches have been a source of endless delight for the whole cast, but I doubt the fighting has done much to help the play.

Meanwhile, after my trial day, I got a regular position at the Greenhouse, busing tables for Sunday brunch. The money helps buy my train pass, but Mom makes me keep the rest for an allowance. Being tall and strong is an asset, and it makes me feel good when I can do something Mom can’t, like carry a tray or reach some glasses for her.

One Sunday I lived out a pretty big nightmare when all the Finns came flouncing in for brunch. Of course, Lacy pretended like she had no idea Mom and I worked there.

“Oh wow, that’s so funny,” she said. “Both of you guys. Good mother-daughter bonding experience.”

“Better than mother-daughter liposuction,” I returned, but only in my head. Out loud I said, “It’s okay.”

And it is okay, sort of. Some days I do feel that life has not been overgenerous handing out breaks to Mom and me, and I wish I could benefit from some of the stuff Portia’s got, like a beautiful house and perfect hair and a cool dad. But other days I think that working for my own money at the Greenhouse is more mature than getting handouts. As Gary says, it’ll get me ready for the real world, which isn’t quite as kind or generous as most Saint Germaine parents.

When I’m feeling reasonable, I see it this way But there are plenty of days I’d trade being mature for great hair.

The afternoon following dress rehearsal, Mom comes home hissing mad.

“Dwight Lemmon is trying to get me fired!” she storms. “I knew it. Listen to this. He had the stage waxed. It’s got some kind of high-powered, high-resistance polish. You can see your own reflection in it. We should perform on ice skates. Lemmon says he’d scheduled to have it waxed months ago. I’m so angry. This could be it, Danny. Girls will be breaking their legs, literally. My bags might be packed.”

“But you know how to ice-skate, remember?”

“This is not funny, Danny.” Mom presses her fingers against her temples.

“What are you going to do?”

“Get down on my hands and knees tomorrow morning and scrub it off, if I have to.” Mom’s hands are in fists. “This is so typical.” She looks pale, and all week tired shadows have darkened the skin just beneath her eyes.

“Wax comes off,” I tell her. “And Portia and I’ll help scrub.” But Mom doesn’t hear me; her thoughts are leaping and twirling toward other potential disasters.

That night, I dream about the musical. In my dream, the whole cast of girls is running out of the wings, all these dancing bodies moving simultaneously, and they’re slipping and wobbling and starting to fall. I’m hunched in the audience, close to the burning footlights and holding a sack full of rock salt, which I’m throwing by handfuls onto the stage, so that it scatters over the waxed surface like diamonds. “It’s okay,” I’m mouthing to Mom, who stands in the wings. “It’s only rock salt, rock salt.” But she can’t hear me. Her face, half hidden by the long folds of the curtain, looks gray and frightened.

Right in that blip of time before I’m fully awake, I’m happily thinking how rock salt is a brilliant idea that will save the show. Then I wake all the way up and feel like an idiot.

I tell Mom my dream on the way to school the next morning.

“Dreams,” she sniffs. “They’re so useless in real life. Whenever they happen in a book or a movie and they ’re supposed to be all symbolic and problem solving, I always want to scream fake, fake, fake. If I ever was a movie director or something, dreams would be the first things I’d permanently veto.”

“The worst is how I thought I’d solved it,” I say, sipping carefully from my coffee. Ever since he came back from the shop, Old Yeller’s gear has been sticking when Mom shifts into third.

“Well, late last night I lay awake for hours and I think I did solve it,” she says. She pauses. “Sawdust,” she pronounces. “I’m going to put an inch of it down everywhere. It’ll be cute; it’ll look like the outdoors.”

Sawdust. I’m not sure. To me, this idea seems kind of messy.

Later that day Mom brushes past me on the stairs and she doesn’t even see me. Her gaze is fixed in the distance as if to anchor the thoughts racing inside her head and she’s carrying a stack of programs, too many for one person. A few flap out and drop like wounded birds on the stairs behind her.

After lunch, I catch sight of Mr. Lemmon in the faculty lounge, sipping his tea and reading a magazine. His legs are crossed at the ankle and his whole body seems content and well rested. When he sees me he prisses up his face in a smile.

He’s planning to fire her, I think. My mind is already jumping ahead to figure out if I could pick up alternate Thursday nights and Saturday lunches at the Greenhouse. Foxwood High isn’t so bad, I tell myself. It’s just a fear of the unknown, combined with a slight anxiety about the metal detectors outside the front doors that check students for firearms.

Ty Amblin is the first person I see when Gary and Portia and I walk into the front lobby on opening night. For once, Portia says and does every thing exactly right.

“I see him,” she whispers, not looking at him. “So just keep talking to me and we’ll go over to the refreshment table for food and then head through the farthest left-hand doors.”

“Don’t look at him,” I say.

“No way. Smile. You look insecure.”

Even as Portia and Gary and I file into our seats, my eyes are trained on Ty. He pretends not to notice me, either, but right until the moment the house lights fall, I observe the outline of his shiny yellow hair and wonder if I’ll ever get over all my weird like and hate feelings for him, and if I’ll ever really know why he ditched before the Fling. “Who cares?” I mumble to myself under my breath. “You do,” answers the mean little voice deep inside me who always likes to cut and scrape me with the truth.

When the act 1 curtain comes up and a single spotlight beams down on Claire Knoxworthy who’s wearing a straw hat and an extraspooked expression, a ripple of laughter washes the air. I scrunch down in my seat and Portia grips my knee.

“Clap no matter what,” I whisper. Portia nods.