Addie and the King of Hearts (4 page)

“If you think he's vain now,” I said, “just wait!”

“Well, he is cute,” said Carla Mae. “And you know it.”

“He knows it, too,” I said. “He'll probably wear his crown to class for the rest of the year.”

We all giggled.

“Speak of the devil,” said Carla Mae.

We looked over and saw Billy coming in the door with Tanya. He joined the other boys at the pinball machine and made a big show of pounding on the sides until it tilted and shut off.

“Oh, look at him!” I said, disgusted. “He is so obnoxious!”

“Yeah?” said one of the other girls. “Then how come you're always talking about him?”

“That's just to cover up for her real love,” laughed Carla Mae. “Mr. Davenport!”

“Oh shut up, Carter!” I said, embarrassed.

Carla Mae suddenly grabbed my notebook and whipped open the cover where Mr. Davenport's first name was written in several different styles.

“See!” Carla Mae said triumphantly. “She just keeps writing his name over and over.” They all laughed.

“I wasn't writing his name!” I said. “I was just practicing different kinds of handwriting. I was just using the name Douglas …”

I knew they wouldn't let me get away with that. They kept laughing, and I tried to grab the notebook back from them. As we were tussling and squirming around in the booth, Billy threw a piece of ice at us.

“Disgusting!” shouted Carla Mae.

“Oh, yuck!” I said. “He is so immature! And I suppose I have to go to the dance with that!”

“Oh, I can tell it's just killing you,” said Carla Mae, sarcastically. “Has he asked you yet?”

“No, I'm not speaking to him at the moment,” I said. “He'll just have to wait.”

Tanya came over, and as she squeezed into the booth with us Billy gave a loud wolf whistle.

“Creep!” I said.

“Oh, she hates him so much!” said Carla Mae, mocking me.

“Well,” said Tanya, “I'm glad you can't stand him any more and don't want to go to the dance with him.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because he just asked me to go, and I said yes,” she answered.

Everybody else was very quiet. I froze. I couldn't think of a thing to say.

I felt humiliated, but I didn't know why. I didn't even
like
Billy. Dam him anyway. I would look ridiculous going to the dance alone. He had really thrown a kink in my plans. And asking Tanya instead of me was the final insult. He didn't even like her! At least he had never shown any interest in her before. I figured he must be trying to get even with me for giving him the brush-off after school the day before. But this was going too far. He couldn't really like Tanya more than me. I wondered. But why did I care what Billy thought?

I walked home from Cole's feeling dumb and angry. That stupid Billy had let me sit around all that time thinking he was going to invite me and then had invited Tanya instead. I couldn't believe it.

I wandered into the kitchen where Grandma was ironing and sat down glumly at the table. She looked over at me.

“Not even a hello for your own grandmother?” she asked, smiling.

“Hello,” I said, grim.

“Glory!” she said. “Could mop the floor with your chin all the way down there.”

I just sighed.

“You'd better get the table set. Your dad will be home for supper soon.”

“What's going on with him, anyway?” I asked, not wanting to reveal my eavesdropping about Irene.

Grandma looked as though she were going to say something and then thought better of it.

“Well, you'll find out in good time,” she said.

“Nobody ever tells me anything around here!” I said angrily. I would find out for myself if they were going to be that way about it.

I got up and got plates and silverware and listlessly dumped them around at our three places on the table.

Grandma was watching me. She could always tell when something was wrong. She seemed to know me much better than Dad did. Grandma had come to live with us when my mother had died more than twelve years ago, and the three of us had been a family ever since. Some people thought it was an unusual situation—my being raised by my grandmother—but I was so young when my mother died that I didn't remember her at all, and having Grandma there seemed quite natural and ordinary to me.

Yet Grandma herself was anything but ordinary. She was, in fact, a bit of a character. She always worked around the house in an old faded cotton housedress, Indian moccasins and an apron made from an even older, cut-down cotton dress. When she was doing heavy cleaning she would put a “dust-cap,” a little ruffled cotton cap, over her hair, and she looked as I imagined David Copper-field's Aunt Betsy had.

Grandma was short and shapeless with age, but she had fantastic energy and whizzed around the house with a terrific clatter, which sometimes annoyed my dad. It wasn't easy for a grown man to be living with his own mother—especially Grandma, who was not intimidated by anyone—but they managed to get along pretty well.

One reason for the relatively peaceful existence at our house was that Grandma was as sensitive as she was strong-willed. She could always tell when my dad and I were about to annoy each other to the point of an explosion, and by now she was an expert at defusing us.

She was also an expert at finding out what was on my mind when I had no intention of talking about it. I finished setting the table and slumped down in my chair.

“Bad day at school today?” she asked.

“No.”

She kept prodding around till we got on the subject of Billy, and then the whole story came out about his asking Tanya.

“Well, I'm not too surprised,” said Grandma. “The way you treat Billy. You're not very nice to him sometimes, and he acts like he's real sweet on you …”

“Oh, what does he know? He's so immature!” I said. “I wouldn't have gone with him if he had asked me, that creep!”

“He's not as grown-up as your Mr. Davenport, is that it?” she asked.

“Who said anything about Mr. Davenport?”

“I don't know … I hear his name an awful lot around here.”

“Well, I just wish I was older, that's all,” I said angrily. “If I was just four years older … I'd be seventeen … I could do what I want and date grown-up people and … I could even get married if I was seventeen.”

“Married!” said Grandma. “First time I ever heard talk of that. Thought you was goin' to Paris and study art and never get married.”

“Oh, you know what I mean!” I said, exasperated. “I just want to be old enough to do what I want.”

“Well, just be sure you
know
what you want,” said Grandma.

“I do!”

“I don't know …” she said. “Sounds like you wanted Billy to ask you to the dance, and then sounds like you didn't care one way or the other.”

“Well, I don't want to be the only one there without a date!”

“Now, Addie, that's not a good reason for going out with somebody, just so you'll have a date. That's using somebody. It ain't right. You shouldn't go unless you like the fella.”

“Oh, well, I like him well enough to go to a dance with him, I guess,” I said. I didn't want to think about Billy. I was worried about my own problems, but I couldn't help thinking about what Grandma had said. I had been so busy thinking about going to the dance and making an impression on Mr. Davenport that I hadn't considered Billy's feelings. If he really did like me he must have been hurt by my refusal to take him seriously.

I put that thought aside. It seemed like a whole new complicated set of ideas that I didn't want to bother with at the moment;, but I was left with the nagging feeling that I had not been very nice to Billy, and that it was all my fault that he was going with Tanya.

“I don't even think I'll go to the dumb dance,” I said.

“Your dad already paid for your ticket, didn't he?” Grandma asked.

“Yeah. I think I'll just throw it away.”

“He'll have a fit if you waste a fifty-cent ticket,” she said.

“I'm not going by myself!” I said angrily.

“Well, ask someone then,” she said.

“Oh, Grandma, I can't do that!” I said. “Girls don't do the asking. I'd be a laughing stock. It's so unfair! Girls just have to sit and wait.”

“Well, sometimes it's hard for boys, too,” Grandma said. “Always havin' to be the first one to show how they feel—always havin' to do the asking, wondering if the girl's going to turn them down. Sometimes a girl needs to show she likes a boy, too—to help him out a little. And there's nothing wrong in that, so long as she really means it.”

I knew Grandma was talking about Billy, but I wasn't thinking about him at all. I was thinking about Mr. Davenport and what I could do to show him how much I cared about him. Maybe if I made the first move in some way, he would think of me as more than just a student. I would have to impress him at the dance. I would have to look older and more sophisticated—a serious person with whom he could share his life.

“Well, what if you show you like someone,” I asked, “and he doesn't like you back?”

“That's a chance everyone has to take,” she said. “You'll find the right person one of these days; you'll see.”

“How do you know?” I asked. “How do you know when it's the right person? And how do you know where he is? What if he's in Paris or Rome or somewhere, not here in Clear River? How are you supposed to find somebody?”

“Things have a way of working themselves out.”

“Oh, you always say stuff like that!” I said, exasperated. “It just doesn't make any sense. When you find somebody, then he doesn't even like you back, so what's the use?”

“You'll find somebody to like you back sooner or later.”

“That's easy for you to say. You fell in love with Grandpa, and he fell in love with you, and there it was—all settled.”

“It wasn't quite that easy,” she said. “I had my share of disappointments, too, before I settled down.”

I had never heard Grandma say anything like that before, and I looked up at her, curious.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, Grandpa wasn't quite what I would have planned for myself if I coulda had everything just my way,” she said.

“Why not?”

“There was somebody else I liked a lot, too.”

That amazed me. I had never thought of Grandma as having cared about any man but Grandpa.

“You mean you didn't just meet him and say, ‘That's Mr. Right'?”

“Well, not quite.”

“What happened?”

“Well, when I was about sixteen my folks sent me to Des Moines to help out our Aunt Lizzie. She was ill and needed someone to help nurse her. I stayed there almost eighteen months, and while I was there I met Grandpa. We both sang in the church choir, and he was a real nice young man. We began to see each other, and after a while we got engaged.

“When Aunt Lizzie passed on, I had to come back to my folks here, and Grandpa promised to sell his land in Des Moines and come out here and find a farm, and we'd be married. I had to wait for him for several months until he could arrange everything, and I started seeing an old school chum of mine named Tom Childers. Before I knew what happened, I was head over heels in love with Tom.”

I was amazed. “Really?” I asked.

“I guess I never knew what it felt like before,” said Grandma. “I thought the affection I felt for your grandpa was the best thing one could hope for. When I met Tom, I knew different.

“But your grandpa was selling his land and was on his way to Nebraska to marry me, and in those days—you know it was the 1890s—well, you just didn't back down on an engagement after a man made that kind of promise to you. So I stopped seeing Tom, and when your grandpa arrived here, I never let on a thing, and I went ahead and married him.”

“You mean you married somebody you didn't love and gave up the right person?” I asked, incredulous.

“Well,” Grandma said thoughtfully, “I don't know as there's any one ‘right person' for anybody. After Grandpa and I were married, I grew to love him. He was a fine man and a good husband, and I don't think I coulda loved Tom any more than I did your grandpa after forty years of marriage. Who's to say?”

“But whatever happened to Tom?” I asked.

“Oh, he moved away, and years later I heard he was married and had a family. I'm sure he was happy, too. I think there's more than one person you could be happy with. You just have to choose the best you can and try and make it work. You'll see; you'll find somebody one of these days.”

I thought about that for a moment and tried to imagine if Mr. Davenport might be the right person.

“Dad was ten years older than my mother, wasn't he?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Grandma.

“Did he think she was just a kid at first?”

“Well, she was eighteen when they met, and out of high school,” Grandma answered.

I wondered if Mr. Davenport would wait five years for me until I was older and out of high school. It all seemed hopeless.

“I'm not going to the dance alone!” I said again.

“Now, Addie,” said Grandma. “Some of the other boys are bound to ask you.”

“What if they don't?”

“Of course they will,” she said. “And you'll have your new dress and new shoes, and you'll get your permanent. Why you'll look fine.”

Chapter Five

I dragged myself out of the house the afternoon before the dance to go over to Irene Davis's Beauty Salon. Grandma nearly had to push me out the door, because getting myself all fixed up was the last thing I wanted to do. As far as I could tell, there wasn't anybody left in the class who didn't have a date, and I would feel like a creep going to the dance alone. I didn't know why I was bothering with a permanent. At the same time, I was terribly curious about Irene, and I finally agreed to go because I wanted to get a closer look at her.