How High the Moon (42 page)

Brenda groaned, then said, “I’ve let you both down. I’m so, so very sorry.”

Brenda had been leaning against one of the black poles that served as a railing for the catwalk. But after her last sorry, she stood up. Slowly. She turned around and grabbed the long pole that went from the railing up to the tent-like middle of the ceiling. Then she lifted her long blue skirt, pretty as the sky, and stepped up on the bottom rail, her bare foot curling around it, her arms locked around the pole.

“Brenda!” Mrs. Bloom snapped when she looked up and saw what Brenda was doing. Brenda pulled her other foot up on the railing. “What on earth are you doing?” I couldn’t move. My head couldn’t think.

Mrs. Bloom took a step, her gloved arms coming out. “Get down from there. Brenda, get down!”

And Brenda screamed, “Don’t come any closer. You hear me? Not one step closer. Either of you.” Mrs. Bloom’s arms were out now, her hands shaking.

I looked at the polka dots of light shining up through the thin as paper Starlight sky. “Brenda. You’re scaring me. Get down. You could fall. It’s a forty-five-foot drop.”

But of course Brenda knew that.

Mrs. Bloom was probably thinking the same thing, because every bit of mad she had in her turned to shock and scared. “Brenda, don’t be foolish. Get down. We’ll make up an excuse… offer to reimburse them… anything. It’ll be okay. Just get down. It’s just a program.”

“But it’s everything to you, Mother. And I’m sorry. Sorry I couldn’t be the perfect daughter you wanted me to be. And Teaspoon, I’m so sorry I couldn’t have been a better Big Sister to you.”

“My God,” Mrs. Bloom said, worry as big as the Starlight sky in her voice. “Brenda. Come on. Get down. This is crazy. You can’t do something like this over a
show
.”

Brenda’s golden waves swished against her back as she shook her head, then leaned it against the pole. She must have been shaking, too, because her skirt was fluttering even though she wasn’t moving. “No. It isn’t just about the show. And you can’t make
this one
right, Mother. Neither can I.”

“What do you mean? Brenda, what are you talking about? Just come—”

“I’m pregnant,” Brenda whispered.

Brenda had her back to us, so she couldn’t see her ma. But I could. I saw her hand come up to cover her mouth, then flutter back down, then go up again. She pulled her shoulders back up and said, “It’ll be okay. You aren’t the first engaged girl to find herself in this predicament. You and Leonard will marry immediately and we’ll say you eloped… we’ll pick a date the wedding supposedly happened… we’ll say we were keeping it hush-hush until after the gala. You can have the baby in Madison and we’ll not announce
it here for a couple of months. People do that when this happens. Some will suspect, but they’ll be too polite to say anything. It will all be okay.”

“No!” Brenda shouted. “No it
won’t
be okay. I’m not going to marry Leonard. I don’t love him. And he wouldn’t marry me anyway, because the baby isn’t his.”

Mrs. Bloom let out a gasp and cry and a yell all rolled into one. And when Brenda heard that, she lifted her foot again and stepped right up onto the top railing. Teetering, like a Charlie on ladder-steep steps.

I could feel pinch spots on the insides of my hands where my fingernails were digging in. I took a couple of steps forward and Mrs. Bloom snapped at me to stay back. But I couldn’t. Because Brenda had put her free arm out, and her feet were scooting her sideways, farther from the pole, while the Sunshine Sisters sang below.

“Brenda! Don’t jump. Please!” I screamed. “My ma left me today, Brenda. She’s gone. Don’t you leave me, too, Brenda. Please.
Please!
Don’t you leave me, too!”

And that’s when Brenda fell.

Not frontward, through the paper ceiling. But backward, onto the metal catwalk.

Mrs. Bloom rushed forward and fell right down to her knees next to Brenda, even if the metal diamond shapes hurt a person’s knees when you did that. She stared down at Brenda for a while, her whole body shaking, then she wrapped her arms around Brenda and started sobbing.

I don’t know how long Mr. Morgan was standing on the catwalk stairs before I felt someone there and turned around.

In his black tuxedo, he was invisible in the dim light, but for his white shirt that looked like a bib over his chest, and the white stage light box he was holding. He set the box down and walked to me
quiet as a whisper. The Blooms still had their arms wrapped around each other, crying and rocking, when Mr. Morgan picked me up to carry me down the stairs, whispering, “Shhhh, shhhhh,” into my curls.

He set me down in the projection room, and I went to the glassless windows like a sleepwalker. Just in time to see the Sunshine Sisters leaving the stage—Little Sisters to the right, Big Sisters to the left, exactly like they were supposed to.

I fell asleep
sitting on the couch next to Teddy that night. In the morning, I got out of bed and changed into play clothes, hanging my gala dress up to keep it pristine. I was just stepping out of my bedroom when Charlie came in, saying that Teddy was over at his house talking to Mrs. Fry and Miss Tuckle. They’d talked about the gala first, just like I guessed they did, then, Charlie said, Teddy gave Miss Tuckle a wad of money, saying it took a lot less than he thought it would.

It didn’t make any sense at first, because Teddy didn’t have money to give anybody. But after Charlie said a bit more, I figured it out. Teddy
had
taken that loan from Miss Tuckle to fix the roof and the lean. Teddy knew the price of boards, but he must have found somebody willing to do the work for less than he expected, so he gave her back what he didn’t need. Like I told Charlie, it was the only thing that made sense.

I guess after Teddy gave Miss Tuckle the leftover money—minus two hundred, that he said he’d explain later—Mrs. Fry said that it was a “sin” what some people were willing to do for money. What could I do but shake my head and tell Charlie that his great-grandma was losing it, because what sin could there be in being a carpenter? Jesus was one Himself.

When Teddy came home, he told Charlie that Mrs. Fry wanted him home to help her with some work. Then while he took out the bread and eggs for our breakfast, he told me again, just like he had after we got back from the gala, how sorry he was that Ma left without saying good-bye to me. This time, though, he asked me if I was hurt because she didn’t wait to hear if I wanted to go with her.

In the years I’d been with Teddy, he never once asked me not to cry. And he didn’t ask then. But still, something in his eyes told me he was hoping I wouldn’t. So I didn’t tell him that when I found out she was gone, it felt like I got hit by a truck, and my heart was still hurting like it was bruised. Instead, what I told him was that if Jolene was telling the truth—that she’d heard Ma tell Paul on the phone that she had to leave immediately because her agent got her an audition for a part in Rock Hudson’s new picture—then I couldn’t blame her at all for leaving when and how she did.

Even sitting there at the table, Ma gone twenty-four hours already, I could still smell her. Maybe some of her perfume was still in the air. Or maybe it was my nose holding on to her smell, just like I asked it to do. Whichever it was, knowing that I’d remember her smell and how she looked and how she sounded this time gave me some comfort because, no matter how long it took before Ma came through Mill Town again, I’d remember her just as she was.

While four yellow slices of French toast cooked on the griddle, Teddy went to the pantry to get the syrup. But he didn’t come right back. And when I looked, he was standing at the metal table, staring down at the words I’d spelled out on the Scrabble board. Teddy nodded and wiped his eye, still staring down at the tiles I’d put down where the word
gluck
(that wasn’t a word at all) used to sit:
im staying with you teddy
.

“I know that’s more than one word, Teddy, so it can’t count,” I said. “But how many points is that worth?”

And Teddy told me, “All of them.”

He was so choked up his words were zigzagging as he asked me to go sit on the Starlight seats because he wanted to show me something. He shut off the French toast and went to his room, then came back with stapled papers and handed them to me. I couldn’t make any sense out of what they said because those papers had more Bibley words in them than the Bible itself, so I asked Teddy to just explain them.

Teddy looked down at the floor and bit his lip. Then he told me how Ma wanted to make sure everything would be okay back here while she was in Hollywood, so she signed those papers, making Teddy my legal dad. He told me that the papers didn’t mean Ma wasn’t my parent anymore, because I’d always carry her in my heart, but that from then on, forever, he would be my dad.

Teddy asked me if I understood, and I said I did. It meant that I wouldn’t have to be a fibber-face and tell my new teacher he was my uncle, or make her twitchy by telling her that he was the boyfriend my ma left me with. It meant that if I ever got smacked by a truck, I’d know what to say when a nurse lady asked me my dad’s name. Past that, I told Teddy, I couldn’t see what difference it made, since he’d been my dad for the last five years anyway.

But it made a difference to Teddy.

You’d think that
after Teddy lost his girlfriend for the second time, he’d have had to force himself to perk up before leaving the house again. But he didn’t. His shoulders stayed back and his chin stayed up all on their own, whether he was inside or out. Charlie said Teddy even looked like he grew some. I didn’t know about that, but what I did know is that Teddy had lost his noodleyness. Three days after the gala, the Jackson boys attested to the fact that I was right.

I had scootered down the corner to see if the Taxi Stand Ladies were there
yet
, so I could thank them properly for being our makeup ladies, and tell them about my new teacher, who seemed real nice. But the corner was empty for the seventh day in a row. Charlie was busy helping Mrs. Fry pack away some old junk, so I went over to the Jacksons, even if I knew that Jolene and Jennifer had gone shopping with their ma. And then Jack and James told me what Teddy had done.

Turned out, the night of the gala, after Teddy poured me into bed, the Jackson boys were in their yard playing flashlight Hide-and-Scare when a big Lincoln pulled up to the corner where Walking Doll was standing, and Mr. Miller got out, shouting cusswords at
her. Joey was hiding in their neighbors’ yard, and he went back to get his brothers, telling them, “Fight! Fight!”

The Jackson boys crouched down alongside The Pop Shop to watch. “We went like soldiers on a maneuver, up against the backs of the houses, until we got to The Pop Shop to watch,” James told me, and Joey nodded.

“Boy, was Miller pissed,” Jack said. “He was shouting at her, saying, ‘What in the hell do you think you were trying to pull, you blackmailing little bitch? You got your car and that’s all you’re getting. You threaten me again, or you even think about opening your mouth, and the only thing you’ll be getting is a knife in your back.’”

“You’re making this up,” I told them, even if something inside me was saying they weren’t.

“Oh, yeah? Oh, yeah? Ask Teddy if you don’t believe us!” Jack said. “He must have heard that whore scream, because he shot out of your house like a bullet and raced down to the corner.”

“It’s true!” James roared. “We saw the whole thing!”

Jack pushed James out of the way. “Miller slugged her while Teddy was running, and when Teddy got to the corner, Miller said, ‘Stay out of this, Big Guy.’”

And then I knew they couldn’t be making it up, because they didn’t know what Mr. Miller called Teddy.

“…and then, Teddy, he grabbed Miller’s arm, and Miller shook him off like a flea. He tried to give Teddy a punch, but Teddy ducked.” Jack started laughing then, and so did his brothers. “Then Teddy… he… he… popped up and busted Miller’s nuts with his knee.” Jack doubled over laughing, so Joey continued.