In Broken Places (10 page)

Trey and I sat in the attic under a sheet draped across the backs of four rickety chairs and secured with clothespins. We called it our Huddle Hut, but for all intents and purposes, it was our bunker—a place where we could talk about the ickiness outside without fear of its nastiness actually bruising our souls.

It was a tradition we had started when we were much younger, on a day when my mom had screamed a bad word at my dad. We’d been so shocked to hear both the word and the volume coming out of her mouth that we’d scattered to our bedrooms. But that had left us all alone with our thoughts and our fear that Mom had lost it and joined the ranks of compulsively cursing grown-ups, so we’d catapulted back out into the hallway, where we’d very nearly smacked into each other.

We needed to debrief. Quickly. Before our minds came to any conclusions about Mom and lost the very last vestige of security we still had.

But going outside required passing through the kitchen, where Mom and Dad were still locked in combat, and talking in one of our
bedrooms carried the risk of being overheard, so we’d headed to the attic instead. Feeling too exposed under the dusty beams and a little grossed out by the moth-eaten piles of junk, we’d erected the first of our Huddle Huts and crawled into it, all conspiratorial and confused.

We concluded that day that our mother wasn’t really losing her mind. Nor was she ever going to be as mean as our dad. She’d just caught a bug, probably—the kind that gives you fevers and broadens your vocabulary. It would pass, we decided—like those migraines she got.

We were a little older now and well past the age for building forts and playing hide-and-seek, but still the Huddle Hut tradition endured. We didn’t wait for something terrible like cursing to send us to the attic anymore. We just decided, when things got too murky, to run away for a bit. Our tradition had gotten a little more elaborate with time, and we now sat on a rug rescued from a trash heap with an assortment of candies and soda cans in front of us. Trey never told me where he got the snacks, but I had the feeling he might have stolen them from Mr. Karzakian’s 7-Eleven on the corner of Elm and Main. That was just a guess, though.

Trey made a production of opening a Coke can and handing it to me. Then he got one for himself and clinked it with mine as if they were crystal goblets and we were at a cocktail party.

“To the brotherhood . . .”

“. . . of Davishood.”

“And to the muddlehood . . .”

“. . . of huddlehood,” I finished. It was pretty lame, as toasts went, but we’d invented it when we were little and it sorta had sentimental value.

Trey leaned back against a garbage bag full of old curtains, and I lay on my stomach with my face above the stack of candy. Again, it was traditional, and who was I to mess with history?

“Sylvia’s knocked up,” he said.

“But not by you, right?”

“Nope. Bobby Stevens.”

“To Bobby Stevens,” I said, raising a Rolo in salute.

“And to his kid. May he live long and forever be happy he doesn’t have Jim Davis for a father.” Trey smirked and slurped at his Coke can.

“He called Mom the
B
word again. Do you think he knows he’s repeating himself?”

“He’s going to have to make up new words. He’s overused all the old ones.”

“How ’bout . . .” I thought hard, the Rolo pinging at my brain. “How ’bout
kryphip
?” I suggested and spelled it for him because I thought the letters looked cool.

He pondered it for a moment, then gathered a big lungful of air and bellowed, “Get out of my face, you pathetic kryphip!” It was a dead-on impression of Dad. “Yeah, I think that’ll work,” he said. “You’ll have to suggest it to him.”

“I’d rather eat dirt.”

“I’d rather eat worms.”

“I’d rather eat monkey brains.”

“I’d rather eat rabbit turds.”

“Okay, you win,” I said. “I don’t want to get gross.”

“Too late.”

I knew he was trying to make me mad by implying I was gross, but I also knew he’d feel horrible if I did get mad, so I threw a marshmallow at him instead. If anyone had witnessed our exchange, they would have pegged us as being maybe seven or eight. We were nearly twice that, but it still didn’t bother us that our huddles were embarrassing. Nobody was there to see them but us, and it felt kind of freeing to talk about eating bugs and poop and stuff.

People like Bobby Stevens made it hard to stay on the funner topics, though. He was a couple of years ahead of us in school, but he still
reminded us of how old we really were and made us wonder when we’d be the ones God spit on.

The concept of God spitting on us was also one of our Huddle Hut inventions. But we didn’t mean any disrespect. We knew God was out there because Mom prayed to him a lot—and I did too, when I remembered. And we knew he was out there because when we said something like “God’s been spitting on us again,” we felt guilty, like we’d hurt his feelings. And you can’t hurt the feelings of someone who doesn’t exist.

“Is she going to keep the baby?” I asked.

“Sylvia?”

“No, Joan of Arc.”

“Yeah, I think so. Her parents don’t know yet, though.”

“Dad would kill me if I ever got pregnant.” The thought alone made us both shudder. “He’d probably send me away to one of those knocked-up farms where girls go to have their babies without anybody knowing.”

“Would you want to keep it?”

I pondered his question awhile and turned it over and over in my head. “No,” I finally said, and I was sure of my answer.

“Why not?”

“Because what if I end up like Dad? That wouldn’t be good. Even if I ended up with someone like Bobby who kinda deserves to have Dad for a wife.”

“You have a crush on Bobby?”

“No. Do you?”

“No.”

“Glad we got that straight.”

“So you’re not having kids,” Trey said, and I knew he was getting at something.

“Nope.”

“Are you ever getting married?”

“Nope.”

“Me neither.”

I wasn’t liking this huddle. It was more fun to talk about what other people would never be than about what we would never be. Big difference there.

“I think you should,” Trey said.

“Get married or have kids?”

“Both. I think you could do it and not turn into Dad.”

“I’d rather have another Rolo,” I said and popped one in my mouth.

“Seriously, Shell.”

I sighed. “Why should I if you don’t?”

“Because you’re a girl.”

“And . . . ?”

“And I think maybe the bad-parent gene is a male one.”

I pondered it for a moment. “Well, I’m not going to risk it. There are enough screwed-up Davises in this world without adding any more. Besides, I haven’t exactly seen any guys hovering around me.”

“That’s ’cause you’ve been scaring them away.”

“With my hair or my weight?”

“Are we going to discuss this at every single huddle?”

“Um . . . yeah.”

“You’re not fat and your hair is fine.”

“So what’s scaring them away?”

Trey looked at me as if he was trying to figure it out. “I don’t know,” he finally said, and I was pretty sure he really didn’t. “Maybe if you actually, you know, got girly around them.”

“What are you saying? That I’m not girly enough?”

“Not around guys. You get all competitive and stuff.”

“I do not. What do I have to compete about?”

“It’s not that kind of thing. It’s like they can’t get anywhere with you. You’re always shutting them down.”

I raised my eyebrows and assumed a Southern accent. “Who, me? Why, surely you jest.”

“I’m just saying,” he concluded.

I saw the serious look in his eyes and the way his mouth was pulled kinda tight and I knew he was worrying about me. I didn’t like it, so I tossed another marshmallow at him. He caught it in midair, quick as a rattlesnake, and launched it back at me with a bellowed “Get out of my face, you pathetic kryphip!”

ANOTHER REHEARSAL
, another stab at the chaos theory. I used the term like I knew what it meant, but it was way too mathematical for my brain. All I knew was that play rehearsals tended to feel like too many free radicals bouncing off too many parameters and never quite achieving homogeneity. That was a fairly random succession of science-type terms, all inaccurately used and with absolutely no scientific value, but it sure felt like a play practice to me.

Though Seth and Kate were doing a great job learning their lines, they were—much to my surprise—being a tad less successful at re-creating the kind of intimate moment that had earned them the roles in the first place. Seth seemed afflicted with compulsive awkwardness, and Kate, with her take-no-prisoners approach to everything, did nothing to put him at ease. In the scene where Joy, who had bone cancer, was supposed to be lying in a hospital bed in
unbearable pain and Lewis was supposed to be proposing to her, the best they could muster was a dynamic that made Seth look like a bumbling idiot and Kate come across as an ailing tyrant. And when I tried to add a tender gesture to the mix, merely asking Seth to run his fingers down Kate’s cheek, the lid came off the pressure cooker.

“He’s not going to touch me,” Kate said before I’d even finished my instructions. “He doesn’t even look me in the eye when he’s proposing to me, so how on earth is he supposed to touch me?”

Seth looked pleadingly my way. “I just . . . It’s hard to remember the lines and the motions at the same time. And the text is so . . .”

“Mushy! Go ahead. Say it. Can we change it, Miss Davis? It’s really kinda gross.”

I looked from one to the other and tried not to laugh out loud. You’d think a scripted romance would be easier to manage than a spontaneous one. All around us, the rest of the cast was trying to look absorbed in either homework or learning lines, but it was obvious that their ears were really trained on the quarreling not-quite-couple in front of me.

“Okay, you two,” I said. “We’re going out to the cafeteria to work on this. And the rest of you—” I paused to make sure I had their attention—“are going to run the opening scene with Meagan standing in for Seth.” There were grumbles—which I understood. Bubbly Meagan had ended up being my right-hand man, which meant she was an errand runner, an actor fetcher, a snack cleaner-upper and a whatever-Miss-Davis-needs-er. She’d already proven invaluable to me, as much for her helpfulness as for her bright and cheerful spirit. But—and this was the reason for the cast’s groans—she was not an actress by any stretch of the imagination, and her voice and accent did nothing to convey the solemnity of 1950s Oxford. So whenever she stepped onto the stage to replace
a missing actor, the scene invariably dissolved into something akin to auditory slapstick.

“It’s only for a few minutes,” I told the cast. “And it’s more for the memorization than for the acting, so give Meagan a break.”

“Seriously, y’all,” Meagan added, her voice too high for her age but oh-so-cute.

Seth, Kate, and I found a table in the cafeteria just outside the auditorium.

“Okay,” I said. “Seth, read your line again and try to put some real affection into it. Then touching her face will come from a whole context of emotions and might not feel so forced. Go ahead. The actual proposal.”

I’d discovered, in the short time I’d been a play director, that acting had as much to do with psychology as with stage technique and vocal production. This had come as a relief to me, as I had much more experience with being an armchair psychologist than with teaching amateur actors to become juvenile De Niros and Hepburns.

Seth’s tall frame hunched a little as he first read the words silently, then attempted to speak them. “Will you marry this foolish, frightened old man, who needs you more than he can bear to say, and loves you even though he hardly knows how?”

“To which you reply, with feeling . . .” I prompted Kate.

She dutifully said her line. “Okay. Just this once.”

It was the Edsel of proposals, the Pacer of all things intimate. “All right, Seth,” I sighed, “what do you think was wrong with that?”

He looked at me as if I’d asked him for the square root of an astronomical number.

I tried another tack. “What’s missing that would make it sound like an adult man who is finally—at long last—asking the woman he loves to marry him?”

“How’s he supposed to know?” Kate asked in frustration. “He’s not a man yet!”

I was just about to lecture her on respecting her castmate when she caught sight of something over my shoulder and rose from the table, waving her arms.

“Hey, Coach Taylor! Coach Taylor!”

I froze. In fact, I think my lungs might have suffered some sudden-onset frostbite because for a moment there, they felt like they didn’t really want to work anymore.

“What’s up?”

I turned to find Scott sauntering up to the table in a tracksuit and a knit hat. I assumed my best nonchalant voice. “Kate, I’m sure Coach Taylor has other things to—”

“If you were an adult man . . . ,” Kate interrupted, blushing when Scott tilted his head a little and gave her a look. “I mean,
since
you are an adult man, tell us how you would do it if you were proposing to a woman who was dying of cancer.”

“Sounds cheerful.” Poor Scott. He did a great job of not, say, busting out laughing and leaving the cafeteria as fast as he could. He did, however, get that I’m-about-to-launch-into-a-yodel look I’d seen before, so I knew there was some laughter in there somewhere. I felt a little sorry for him, but I felt sorrier for myself. I just wasn’t very good at real-life awkward situations. I preferred them on a stage.

“Please feel free to tell Kate to find another guinea pig,” I told him. What I really wanted to say was, “This was not my idea and I’d really rather not have to deal with you.” I turned on Kate. “This isn’t Coach Taylor’s problem, Kate; it’s yours and Seth’s. So how ’bout we concentrate on the two people who can actually do something about it?”

“What are the lines?” Scott asked, pulling a chair up to the table and sitting on it backward.

“Don’t you have a practice to run?” I asked as Seth handed him his script and Kate pointed to Lewis’s proposal.

“They’re running the
Wolfsschlucht
,” he said, referring to the cross-country course in the woods behind the school. “Besides, I haven’t been in a play since high school, so this might be fun.”

“You used to act?” This from Seth—with a little more desperation than he’d probably intended.

“Scott, really, if—”

“Wow. Pretty serious stuff,” he said, ignoring my second attempt at allowing him to leave. He glanced at Seth. “So you’re telling her you want to marry her?”

“He’s supposed to be,” Kate interjected.

“And you’re supposed to love her—I mean really love her. Like a guy who finally gets the guts to propose. Right?”

“
Guts
is the key word there, Seth.
Guts.
” Kate was on a roll.

I, on the other hand, was not. My body was anchored to my chair and so, apparently, was my brain. I wasn’t sure what was most traumatic at that moment: Kate’s behavior, my inability to change the situation, Seth’s bordering-on-physical discomfort, or the fact that Scott—whom I really did not want to know—was about to utter intimate words in what I feared would be a powerful way. I didn’t want to be there to witness it. At all. But I did have an overwhelming craving for cheesecake.

Scott cleared his throat and took a moment to focus. While he did that, I took a moment to look for the nearest emergency exit, but as my brains were anchored to the chair, running for my life would have been a dangerous proposition. So I sat there and tried to assume a casual expression.

Scott began. “Will you marry this foolish, frightened old man . . .”

I snorted. It was very unladylike and very insulting and very, oh so very, unintentional. Scott shot a be-quiet look my way and continued in the most horrendous faux-British accent I’d ever heard, his voice crackling so badly in a semblance of age that an audience would have thought he was the one dying of cancer. “. . . an old man who needs you more than he can bear to say, and loves you even though he hardly knows how?”

Kate was speechless, which, after the last hour of rehearsal, was a bit of a relief. Seth was dumbfounded and hugely disappointed. And I was desperately trying to regain the composure that seemed to have slipped out the door along with Scott’s real accent. At first, I’d feared that Scott had been serious in his interpretation, and if that had been the case, my snorting and carrying on would have probably irreparably damaged his self-esteem. But one good look at his grin had convinced me that his self-esteem was intact, as intact as the sense of humor that had apparently motivated the world’s worst
Shadowlands
performance.

Scott slapped Seth on the back and flashed Kate a smile. “Sorry about that, guys,” he said jovially. “Guess I’d better stick to sports!”

“Coach Taylor,” Kate said suspiciously, “what play were you ever in in high school?”

“Play 99—full-court press, man on man,” he answered. “We won the game 89 to 33. It was fabulous.” He turned to me. “You walking home tonight?”

The headlights were coming my way, and I was a deer. “Uh . . .”

“Maybe I’ll see you then.” He smiled and trotted away.

“All right, Seth,” I said, firmly forcing ridiculous panic to the back of my mind, “let’s talk romance.”

I was halfway to the Johnsons’ an hour later when I heard someone jogging up behind me.

“Don’t be startled. It’s Scott!” he called to me.

“Who?” I kept walking.

“The world’s greatest actor.”

“Oh, him. You come near me, I’ll douse you with Mace.”

He slowed down beside me and matched his pace with mine. “That bad, huh?”

“By Academy Award standards, you were on par with, say, Dorothy’s dog.”

“Toto? That’s a compliment. I would have ranked myself more along the lines of what he’d leave behind.”

“Speaking of . . .” I sidestepped to avoid a little pile of doggie doo. “You really don’t have to walk me to Gus and Bev’s, you know,” I said when the silence had outstayed its welcome, which was about one and a half seconds after it had started. I wasn’t good with silence. Actually, I was, just not when it involved other people.

“I was a Boy Scout. I have to protect the weak and beat up on the bad guys.”

“And I’m . . . ?”

“Going to hit me if I call you weak, so I guess that leaves the bad guys.”

“I doubt I’ll be mugged in the streets of Kandern. It makes Mayberry look like a crime capital.”

“Which means it’s boring as all get-out, but kind of nice for raising a daughter, huh.”

“Beats Chicago any day.”

“So does the weather.”

“Except for the rain.”

“I’m from Seattle—the rain just feels like home. So how’s your daughter doing?”

“Shayla?”

“No, your other daughter.” There was a little bit of Trey in him, but I tried not to register that fact.

“Shay’s doing okay. Bev’s wonderful with her.”

“Can I ask you something . . . personal?”

“Too late,” I said. “We’re here.” And sure enough, we’d reached the Johnsons’ front door.

“Wow. Time flies when you only have thirty seconds to talk.”

I smirked. He hesitated.

“So . . . do you want me to wait and walk you back to your place?”

Absolutely not.
“Actually, that’s kind of my time to catch up with Shayla. She tells me something else about her day with every streetlight we pass. You know.”

“Wouldn’t want to stand in the way of a mother-daughter streetlight routine,” he said, and I wondered if there was a simple way of just slipping “She’s really my half sister left for me by my dead abusive father along with a condo and a ’64 Impala” into the conversation. But I figured what he didn’t know couldn’t harm me.

“Well, it’s been nice talking to you, Shelby,” he said lightly. “Thanks for not Macing me, or we’d have had even less time to chat.”

“No problem. Guess you’ll just have to talk faster next time.”

He smiled and raked his fingers through his wavy hair. “Next time, huh?” I decided his dimple was dangerous. “Say hi to Shayla from me.”

“I will. Thanks for the escort, Cub Scout. This damsel’s safe and sound.”

He raised a hand in a half wave, pivoted, and took off jogging down the road at a leisurely pace.

Me? I told myself not to be flattered and that I didn’t have time for the likes of Scott Taylor. Then I opened the door to greet the sunshine of my life.