How High the Moon (17 page)

I started down the porch steps and turned when I felt Charlie practically breathing down my neck. “Geez, Charlie. I didn’t mean
right now. It’s late and Teddy’s gotta get to work early. I got my Sunshine meeting with Brenda in the morning, too.”

When I got home, Teddy was still in the bathroom wringing out clothes. “There’s some of Mrs. Fry’s homemade bread on the table if you’re hungry,” he called. “There’s some slices cut, and strawberry jelly in the refrigerator.” I unwrapped the bread, which still smelled like new and was glossy from butter that had melted into the crust while it was still hot.

The next morning, I got up and scrubbed myself squeaky clean like Brenda. I put barrettes in my still-damp hair and buttoned a sweater over my dress to cover my elbows and stepped outside. And there he was. Charlie Fry. Waiting for me at the bottom of the steps so he could follow me to the Starlight like a duck who didn’t know who his mama was.

Maybe, when you
do good after doing bad, Jesus gives you a reward since you were sorry. That’s what I thought, anyway, after I made my apologies to Teddy and Charlie and Mrs. Fry, and then showed up for my Sunshine Sisters meeting to find Johnny Jackson in the parking lot, leaning up against a dinged-up Perkins Construction truck wearing an employee shirt, smoking a cigarette and tapping the toe of his engineer boot with the heel of the other.

“Johnny!” I shouted as I jumped off my scooter and turned it over to Charlie. “What are you doing here? You working for Mr. Perkins now?”

Mr. Perkins was up on the back of the truck, which was long and flat like a stage, unhooking the belts that held stacks of wood the color of honey. Another guy, small as Teddy and with a beard that looked like it had dandruff, was helping. The little guy looked over at Mr. Perkins when I said that. And even though he had a cigarette stuck in his mouth, he said, “We’ll see how much work we get out of that hood, huh, Glen?”

Mr. Perkins didn’t grin. Instead, he nodded over toward a white pickup, where Johnny’s friend Doug—the dopey-looking one I called Dumbo Doug (but not to his face) because he had ears big as Dumbo’s—was rooting around in the back. “Probably more
work than we’ll get out of that moron. He can’t even find his tool belt and he had it strapped on him two minutes ago.”

Mr. Perkins jumped down when the wood was unhooked. “Crissakes,” he said, glancing at his watch. “If she was in such a goddamn hurry to get this work done, then you’d think she’d be here on time to let us in.” He spit on the cement, then added, “That’s rich folk for you. Their time is always more important than yours. Someone gets here in ten minutes to open these doors, or we’re pulling out.”

“Oh,” I said. “Brenda’s probably letting you in because her and I got a Sunshine Sisters meeting this morning. But you don’t have to worry about her not showing. She’s very responsible.” Dumbo Doug said something under his breath that only the little guy heard, and I could tell by the way the guy snickered that it wasn’t something nice, either.

Figured. Dumbo Doug was a part of that little group of people who didn’t like the Sweetheart of Mill Town, along with—sad to say—Johnny Jackson, and most of his friends. I knew this for a fact, because the day after Brenda got crowned, Johnny and his friends were working on Johnny’s hot rod while I sat on the steps with Jennifer and Jolene looking at clothes in the Montgomery Ward catalog, and I heard Johnny say that Brenda Bloom was a stuck-up bitch, just like her ma. And Dumbo Doug said that a one-legged cat had more talent in its missing leg than Brenda Bloom had in her whole body.

When Brenda pulled into the Starlight parking lot ten more minutes later, she looked rattled. And as she hurried to the door, fumbling in her purse for the keys, she gave the Perkins crew the same look folks gave Poochie when they passed the Frys’ yard. The bearded guy named Mel looked back at Brenda like he was Mr. Miller and she was a Taxi Stand Lady. Dumbo Doug didn’t look at Brenda, though. He was too busy looking at the new car Mrs. Bloom had given Brenda for a graduation present. He whistled like that car was a lady, and said, “Holy shit. A brand-new Thunderbird.
Rag roof. Thunderbird blue. Holy shit.” Johnny didn’t look at the car. Or at Brenda, for that matter.

Brenda was apologizing all over the place as she unlocked the door with a newly engaged hand—the ring not pretty and dainty like her, but big and clunky and old-lady-gaudy like Mrs. Gaylor—and Mr. Perkins said it was okay, even though a few seconds earlier it wasn’t, and inside we went. Me and Brenda went back to the concession stand, even though we weren’t going to make boxes or stock the candy, and the guys went to stand in front of the screen and listen to Mr. Perkins, who I think was delegating to them.

Brenda looked at Johnny plenty that morning. Not with her head turned to the front of the theater to stare, like I think I did, but glancing with short little looks from the corner of her eye. I was looking at him so I could figure out if the fluttering in my belly was love. And Brenda? I think she was just trying to figure out if he was going to hurt her.

Long as I could remember
, Teddy never missed a day of work. But two weeks after Johnny started working at the Starlight, I came home to find Teddy wearing a bandage wrapped around part of his hand and running up half of his arm. His fingers were poking out, and they looked puffy and sore. “What happened to you, Teddy?” I asked.

“Oh, I just took a little spill at work and sprained my wrist,” he said, wincing. “A couple of days off, and I’ll be good as new.” Teddy had his newspaper spread flat on the table and was holding it down with one elbow as he turned the page.

“Well, look here. An engagement picture of your Brenda and Leonard Gaylor,” Teddy said, flattening the pages with his good hand. I hurried over to stand behind him, and sure enough, there they were. Leonard sitting and Brenda standing half behind him, her hand on his shoulder, that aggie-sized ring on her finger.

I never saw Leonard before, I’d just heard of him—I didn’t go to his games, and he didn’t come into my neighborhood—and he wasn’t handsome at all like I’d imagined. He had one of those faces that looked like somebody pinched their fingers over his nose when he was a baby—while it was still squishy and soft like clay—and gave it a tug so hard that his upper lip got pulled forward right along with it, and neither boinged back into place after they let go. “He’s ugly,” I said.

“Teaspoon, you need to learn not to comment on people’s looks,” Teddy said.

“Why?” I said. “People comment on my looks all the time.” Soon as I said it, though, I got it. “Oh, you mean if they’re ugly.”

Teddy cleared his throat. “Well, a man doesn’t have to be handsome to be a good person.”

If anybody should have been an expert on that, it was Teddy, so I listened up as he read the article out loud. It didn’t say anything about Brenda I didn’t know, but there was lots about Leonard. Mostly about how he won lots of awards.

“He’s obviously a very accomplished, respectable young man,” Teddy said when he finished reading. “He’ll probably make a good husband for Brenda.”

I was happy at the thought of having Teddy around for a couple of days, but Teddy sure wasn’t happy about not being able to work.

That night, just to cheer Teddy up and help him forget about his throbbing wrist, me and Charlie put on a show for him and Mrs. Fry. Okay, maybe it wasn’t perfect—it was what you’d call an
impromptoe
performance after all. And maybe that string of medleys wasn’t planned, but necessary because we didn’t know the rest of each song, but still we had a lot of fun. “When it rains it pours,” Mrs. Fry said when she saw Teddy’s wrist, and she gave his good arm a there-there pat.

Mrs. Fry was right on that count, too, because the next morning—Teddy’s first day being stuck home—we got our first good soaking rain since school got out, and I woke up to a grumbling sky and a grumbling Teddy.

I always liked the sounds of summer storms, that thunder in the distance rumbling like a drumroll, and lightning clanging like marching band cymbals. “Wow, it’s really coming down, huh, Teddy?” I called as I got out of bed and went to my window.

The sky was so dark it looked like night, even if it was seven o’clock in the morning. Charlie was standing at his bay window,
his head tipped back watching the sheet of rain that ran down from the eaves. He gave me a slow wave.

“Hey, Teddy, is it true what Mrs. Fry says about how if you go out in the rain and get wet, you’ll catch a cold?” I asked as I headed to the bathroom. “I don’t know if I believe that, or else we’d get sick every time we took a bath. I don’t care if it’s true, anyway. I got a Sunshine meeting this morning and I’m not going to miss it.”

Teddy didn’t answer, probably because he didn’t hear me over the storm, to say nothing of the racket he was making with pots and pans. “Mrs. Fry knows a lot of things, but she doesn’t know everything, I don’t think,” I shouted, my voice echoing in the empty bathroom like I was singing. “She sure doesn’t know how to cut hair, anyway. You see Charlie’s head yesterday, Teddy? She’s got it all gouged up again.”

There was a crack of lightning so close that I swear, the hair on my arms stood up. I jumped off the toilet quick because Mrs. Fry said you weren’t supposed to be around water when it was lightning. Even if she didn’t know everything, I wasn’t taking any chances.

When I got to the kitchen, water stretched clear from the doorway to the table, puddling on the floor. I looked up and sure enough, water was coming down from that brown, bulged stain on the ceiling that gave us grief last summer. “Whoa, Teddy. The roof’s leaking again,” I said, but he was already squatted down in front of a cupboard we hardly used, clanging around with his good hand. “Teaspoon, would you come here and get that big soup kettle way in the back?”

While I moved pans to tug it out, Teddy grumbled at himself for not replacing those boards that got wrecked in last summer’s bad storm, and for slapping a tar patch over it instead, because now look at the mess he had on his hands after a winter of heavy snow.

“Well, Teddy, like Mrs. Fry says, a poor man has poor ways.” I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but I knew it was something she’d say at a time like this.

Teddy mopped up the mess, then propped the soup pot under
the leak, which was running like a faucet. I liked the sound of those water drops hitting the denty bottom of the pot,
plip, plop, plip, plop
, but Teddy sure didn’t.

“Hey, Teddy,” I said “You sure are cranky this morning. You worried about missing a couple days of work because you won’t make as much money on payday? Especially now that you have that bad bill?”

“Bad bill?” Teddy asked.

“Yeah. You know. The one you were looking at when I came back from my first Sunshine meeting. You haven’t been yourself since then, Teddy.”

Teddy didn’t say anything, so I just hummed a little.

“Hey, Teddy. Can you believe how good Charlie can play piano?” I said while Teddy rinsed off the mop in the sink. “He doesn’t even need a sheet of music to play. Brenda said that’s called playing by ear. Look at how good he could play ‘How High the Moon’ the first time he tried, and he’s never even heard that song on the radio, just me singing it. Lots of people tell me I sing with heart. I didn’t even know what that meant, until I heard Charlie play. Charlie plays with heart, doesn’t he, Teddy?”

“Yes he does,” Teddy said.

“Hey, did you like the little show we put on for you last night?” I asked, hoping to make Teddy smile, since I wasn’t having much luck making him talk.

Teddy got the eggs out of the refrigerator so we could have breakfast. “I sure did,” he said, answering in the same tone he used when he asked me if I brushed my teeth before bed.

“I think we sound like a real act, don’t you? Charlie can’t play fast songs as fast as they should be played, but he doesn’t miss a note.

“Hey, Teddy. Did you hear me? I said, ‘… he
doesn’t
miss a note,’ instead of
don’t
. Can you believe it? And I’ll bet I haven’t said
ain’t
or
gonna
even once today. Well, maybe once. I sure am learning how to talk good from listening to Brenda, though, aren’t I?

“Speaking of Brenda, she hasn’t been able to get a hold of Les
Paul and Mary Ford’s agent yet, but did I tell you who we did get booked?”

Teddy said I hadn’t, so while he cooked our eggs, my mouth started leaking like a roof fixed by a poor man. “Louis Prima and Keely Smith! They’re coming all the way from Las Vegas for a one-nighter. Can you believe it? Brenda said he’s funny as can be on stage, jumping all over the place like a wild man and making folks laugh. Brenda saw him in New York back when he had an orchestra twenty-seven people big. Course, he’s not bringing a band that size to the Starlight. But he’s bringing Keely, and everybody loves her.

“And Mimi Hines is coming with Phil Ford. I never heard of them before, but Mrs. Bloom said that Mimi Hines is one of the most underrated singers there is today. I guess she’s funny, too. Mrs. Bloom showed Miss Hines’s eight-by-ten glossy at the big meeting we had with all the Sisters so we could tell them about the gala. Boy, did those girls go nuts when they heard we were going to be in the show! Some of them happy-nuts, like I went when I heard, but others, like Mindy Brewer, went scared-nuts.”

Teddy set my plate on the table and told me to sit down, then he went to get the ketchup for his eggs.

“Mindy’s a Sunshine Sister who isn’t real pretty because her top teeth stick out like this,” I said as I pulled out my chair, and I showed Teddy by poking my top teeth out and hanging them over my bottom lip. “Her hair used to be all snarly, too, but it’s not like that anymore, now that she’s learning how to be respectable. Anyway, Mindy and her Big Sister were sitting at the same table as Brenda and me. And when Mrs. Bloom held up Mimi Hines’s eight-by-ten glossy, I leaned over and said in her ear, ‘Wow, Mindy. You’ve got the same teeth as a famous lady.’ Mimi’s aren’t as pokey-outie as Mindy’s, but she’s got some big choppers on her, for sure. Mindy put her hand over her mouth like she always does when she smiles, but when Mrs. Bloom set Mimi’s picture back on the table, Mindy was still staring at it.