Still Life in Shadows (10 page)

Angie looked at Kiki, still holding the bike by the handlebars. “I guess I have to go,” she said. “He’s such a moron sometimes.”

“What about the bike?” Kiki asked.

“Just leave it.” Angie walked toward the truck.

Gruffly Reginald said, “Go on home, China Girl.” Kiki wanted to say that her relatives were from Japan, not China, but she only kept her eyes on Angie’s bike, right at where the name brand had been scratched off. Kiki could only make out an R and a T. She kept her eyes on those letters as Reginald continued harpooning slurs at her.
Ignore him,
her inner voice told her, the one Dr. Conner advised her to listen to.
Ignore him.

She knew what she was going to do as soon as Reginald left. If only
he would go.
Leave,
she repeated in her mind, until at last, his truck was out of sight. Then Kiki lowered Angie’s bike onto the grass. She rushed into her house, tossed her book bag on her bed and then raced out. Slowly, avoiding the potholes, she guided Angie’s bike to the shop. Not only was the tire flat, but the brakes made a clicking noise. She would show them all. She’d fix the flat tire and the brakes. It would be good as new, good as new. Kiki, the bike repair hero!

Twenty minutes after sitting by the storage room with an assortment of tools, Kiki had Angie’s bicycle sounding and looking in good condition. She figured a sliver of glass had punctured the tire, and she doubted the shop had a new one. But after she removed the tire and the tubing, she saw that the tubing just needed a patch. Luckily, Gideon had a can of glue and a patch he let her use.

“You do good work,” Gideon said as he watched her. “Whose bike?”

“Some tattletale girl named Angie Smithfield.”

“The funeral home family?”

“That’s it.” With a sour expression, she muttered, “She also told on me.”

“Told on you?”

Kiki didn’t meet his questioning look. “About the parking lot.”

“Oh, I see. That’s how she got the tattletale name.”

Kiki let out an exasperated huff. “She’s too nosy. Nosy Angie Smithfield. Just because her family owns this town doesn’t mean she has to act like she’s the boss over me.”

Ormond sipped from a cup of iced tea. “I always say that those Smithfields wear their money like a nicely pressed suit.”

“Well, none of them will press me like a suit! Angie’s not the boss over Kiki Yanagi.” Kiki stood erect like a statute and saluted.

Gideon stifled a laugh and then suggested that they steer the bike into the empty bay so that he could fill the tire with air from his compressor.

Kiki had never seen a compressor in action before. Ricky always added air with a bike pump he had to maneuver with his own strength.
She recalled how his powerful muscles flexed whenever he lifted a bike to the work area inside the gym at the after-school center. Then he’d pump air into each tire, his ability to swiftly fill them leaving Kiki in awe.

Kiki noted the tools scattered at her feet. “Mr. Miller?”

“Gideon,” he corrected.

“Okay. Gideon, then. I need something to put my tools in. Do you have anything?”

Gideon said he’d look around and minutes later handed her a wooden box about the size of a shoebox.

“This is a nice box,” she said, her attention suddenly far from Angie’s bike. Running her fingers over the wood, she felt the grooves where the nails were. She opened and closed the lid, opened it, and placed the three tools inside.

“Gideon made that box,” Ormond said with a look of nostalgia. His eyes met Gideon’s, then he smiled and turned to Kiki. “He used a piece of cedar. When he first came here, making things from wood was about all he knew how to do.”

Kiki rubbed the brass latch. “Really? He made this?” She couldn’t help but think of how beautiful it was, a real work of art. She looked up at Gideon. “You are talented!”

“Thank you.”

“In Amish-land, that was what he was good at,” explained Ormond. “Apparently, he made these and sold them at a local craft store, didn’t you, Gideon? He made a few here and gave them out as Christmas gifts his first Christmas here.”

Gideon reminded Kiki of a little boy who was too shy to admit that he had a skill. She wanted to hear him talk about the box so she said, “What’s it called?”

“It’s called a keepsake box.”

“Keepsake.” Kiki let the unfamiliar word fill her mouth and slip off her tongue. “Keepsake. A keepsake box.” She looked at Ormond and Gideon and suddenly let out a snicker. “For Pete’s sake, give me the keepsake.”

When Ormond laughed, she was encouraged to repeat her ditty. “For Pete’s sake, give me the keepsake.”

Now that she had repaired bicycles and had been given a keepsake box for tool storage, she’d better show others that she had a business. As she pedaled home, she saw a gray piece of paper on a telephone pole, asking about a missing dog. A flier! That’s what she needed to spread the word about her bicycle repair business.

As Mari made dinner, Kiki set out to design a flier on their computer. She wrote
Bikes Fixed for You
at the top of the page and then remembered that bikes could also mean motorcycles and she didn’t know how to fix them. She changed the words, typing in,
Get Your Bisycle Repaired!
But when she asked Mari to take a look, her sister told her she’d misspelled bicycle.
How embarrassing is that!

As the aroma of fried potatoes, onions, and green peppers saturated the house, Kiki rubbed her temple and wondered what else she could say about her business. “Ahh,” she cried out in frustration. “This isn’t working!”

Mari told her to calm down. Then she soothed Kiki’s brow with a cool hand.

“Let’s eat dinner, Kiki.”

“Then I can finish it after that?”

“Don’t you have homework?”

She had loads of homework, way too much, as usual. When she was the queen of the world, she would never let homework be allowed.
Seven hours doing work at school was enough, why did teachers expect more from you at home?

“Kiki, do you have any?”

“Some.”

“You better do it then. You can work on the flier this weekend.”

“Will you help me?” Kiki knew she needed help, and Mari was good at English with all its crazy nouns and verbs.

“Yes.” Mari turned off the stove and said dinner was ready.

After dinner, Kiki went to her room, tried to concentrate on her
math homework, and then put it aside to put on her pirate hat. Observing herself in the full-length mirror on her closet door, she shook her head in different directions because she liked to watch the two feathers on the top of the hat bounce with her movements. Pretending she had a sword, she flicked her wrist and called, “Aye, you can’t win over me. I’m the best there is. Aye, aye.”

Ricky had helped her perfect her pirate talk. One day they’d watched the first
Pirates of the Caribbean
movie in the rec room. Although a few of the other kids joined them, none were as taken with the pirate’s life as Kiki had been. After seeing that movie, she’d asked for a poster from it, and Ricky bought her one for her birthday. She’d found a space big enough on her bedroom wall to hang it. She knew the actor Johnny Depp was Jack Sparrow in the movie, and she found him extremely handsome.

With the hat fitted snugly on her head, Kiki quietly tiptoed down the hallway, entered the kitchen, and picked up the cordless phone that sat on the counter by the refrigerator.

Mari was in the living room; the sound of
Frasier
reruns softly came from the TV. From memory, Kiki punched in the familiar numbers, numbers she had often dialed when she lived with Mama in Asheville.

With sweaty palms, she waited as the phone rang.

A woman answered.

Using her most grown-up voice, Kiki said, “May I speak to Ricky, please?”

“Ricky?”

“Yes.”

“Ricky no longer works here.”

Kiki thought she hadn’t heard correctly. “Ricky,” she repeated. “Ricky Lopez?” For the sake of Pete, how could the woman not know who he was?

“I’m sorry. He no longer works here.”

“Why not?” She squeezed the phone closer to her ear.

“I don’t know.”

Like a flash across her mind, Kiki saw the gym where Ricky had taught her to shoot hoops, coaching her with patience, although she was not any good. Then there was that afternoon she found him tinkering with a bicycle on the outdoor court and when she asked him how he repaired a flat tire, he showed her. She’d observed with interest.

Now this person on the phone said she had no idea where Ricky was. “Well, when will he be back?” Kiki asked.

“I said he doesn’t work here anymore.”

“But, but why not?” Suddenly, her adult voice caved into that of a desperate child’s.

“I have no clue, honey. I just know he isn’t here.”

Kiki clung to the receiver, even after there was a beeping noise and she knew the woman she’d been talking to had hung up.

B
y Wednesday of the next week, Gideon wondered if he had imagined the phone conversation with Moriah. He played parts of it over in his head, but even so, today he was beginning to think he’d dreamed the whole thing. What if he was so homesick to hear another immediate family member’s voice that his mind was playing tricks on him? His brother had said he was on his way here from Florida. Gideon hadn’t even asked what kind of car Moriah drove.

On the same Wednesday, Gideon decided that perhaps it was time to end a habit. Before Mari had become the new manager at Another Cup, he’d eaten a lot of takeout for lunch. Maybe it was time to go back to doing that. Luke had made a comment that he was spending
hours
over at the tearoom, and if Luke noticed then that meant that either Ormond already did, too, or he would. Ormond was a big teaser.

Each afternoon Ormond picked up food from Ole Loner’s Barbeque, and although the pulled pork looked too greasy for Gideon’s taste, it would have to do today because that’s what he’d ordered.

Spreading a napkin across his desk, Gideon arranged his glass of
sweet tea and Dixie plate of pork, coleslaw, and baked beans on top of it. As he sipped his tea, he tried not to ponder on a cute manager with thick black hair and eyes that lit his heart.

The next day he asked Ormond to get him a half-rack of ribs instead of the pulled pork. When he asked if there were other sides, Ormond handed him a coffee-stained menu he kept inside his desk. Gideon requested corn on the cob and green beans. He figured something a little less caloric might be what he needed. He wasn’t getting any thinner.
Of course
, a voice inside his head whispered,
you could give up all that blackberry pie.
But why would he want to do that? As far as vices went, blackberry pie was a harmless one.

That afternoon, he stood by his open bay looking out at the parking lot. A cloud of despondency loomed over him, like something was brewing in the air. Even the ribs from lunch seemed sour in his stomach.

The lone morning glory over by the fence behind the metal Dumpster had not bloomed in weeks. He’d have to wait until next summer to feel connected to its faint purple petals again. They were the same color as the teacups his mother had on a shelf in the living room back on the farm. His father had scolded that they were too fancy for a proper Amish wife to own, much less display. His mother merely said that purple was mentioned in the Bible as a color of royalty and displayed them anyway.

Still heavy in thought, Gideon did not recognize the man who walked briskly his way then stopped a few feet in front of him. Gideon noted the man’s long, sandy-colored hair, pulled back in a ponytail. He was dressed in a pair of jeans worn out at the knees and a gray T-shirt. A charcoal leather jacket swung over his shoulder.

The minute he pulled his sunglasses off his eyes, Gideon knew. Frozen, unable to move or find his voice, Gideon stood with his mouth open. This must be what it felt like to be paralyzed. The man laughed and threw his arms around Gideon’s shoulders, knocking Gideon’s cap off his head.

As Gideon welcomed his embrace, he felt all the years he’d missed
of this kid’s youth. He smelled Irish Spring soap, cigarettes, and nostalgia—all gripping his heart in every tender crevice. When he found his voice, he said, “Moriah! It is you. You look good.”

His brother laughed again, stepped back, and smiled into Gideon’s face. “You haven’t changed a bit.”

Gideon teased, “Still wearing suspenders and a straw hat, right?”

Moriah retrieved his older brother’s cap from the floor of the bay and placed it on his own head. Draping his jacket on a plastic chair by the tool chest, he said, “I’m glad I made it. This is a tiny town. The man I got a ride from said that if you sneeze, you’ll miss it.”

Gideon laughed and playfully snatched his John Deere cap from Moriah’s head and fitted it on his own. He watched Moriah take a pack of Marlboros from his T-shirt pocket. He offered his brother one, but Gideon declined. He wondered when Moriah had picked up the habit. Or maybe it wasn’t a habit yet—maybe it was just another way to denounce all that their father believed was right.