Welcome, Caller, This Is Chloe (13 page)

“Nor is Jester Clem. She has different tastes. We need to respect her choices.”

Clementine turned on her mic and piped in, “Can you knight her?”

I cleared my throat. “Only one knight a night, but I’m making a royal decree. We must respect Jester Clem, and . . . we must respect beets.”

For the next forty-five minutes we talked about comfort food. At one point, Clementine popped on air and talked about foods scientifically proven to alter moods. “Chocolate increases endorphin levels, making you happier, and turkey is loaded with amino acids that make you calm.”

Note to self: Give Clementine a chocolate-covered turkey for Valentine’s Day next month. She was working as hard as me to pull this off.

When we reached the top of the final hour, the phone bank was full. I had to turn away callers. People wanted to spend time with me.
Me
.

“Unfortunately minions, it’s time for the queen to abdicate the throne, but only for a week. Be sure to tune in next Friday for the only show with one queen, one universe, one Chloe. KDRS 88.8 The Edge.”

Duncan cued my theme music and set the Ghost to run the automated programming for the rest of the night. I left the control room, my ankles wobbly. But in a good way. I gave the KDRS staffers a queenly wave (elbow, elbow, wrist, wrist, wrist), and slumped into the chair in front of my whiteboard. “Well?” I asked.

Mr. Martinez, who was gathering the papers on his desk, saluted me with his red pen.

“You didn’t do anything to get us kicked off the air.” Clementine’s concession trilled through my head. I hadn’t tanked. I filled two hours with witty and engaging conversation. I made Duncan smile. And I hadn’t had to deal with Brie. “How many total callers did we get?”

Frack looked at a notepad.

“Come on, Frack, let’s hear,” I said. I wanted specific numbers, proof that people liked my show, that they liked me.

“S-s-seventeen.”

I thumped Frack’s back. “That’s more than four times the four listeners who admitted on our survey to tuning in.” Note to self: Include data in weekly JISP progress report to A. Lungren.

“Don’t forget we had to turn away four at the end,” Frick added. “We could have easily gone on another ten minutes.”

“Chloe’s survey suggested it, and tonight’s show proved it. Our listeners loved being on the air,” Taysom added.

It was odd, sitting around the graveyard radio station on a Friday night with a family of sorts. Didn’t these people have places to go? Friends to see? Movies to watch?

Speaking of movies, I turned to Haley, who had finished watching her DVD and was writing on a notepad. “How was the movie?” I asked.

“Four out of four comets.”

“What was it?”

Haley tossed me the DVD.
The Women
, a 1939 Oscar winner, according to the box. “Great shoes.”

One by one each of the staffers and Mr. Martinez left, until it was only Duncan and me. Both Duncan and Clem had keys to Portable Five, and while I don’t think school admin knew, Mr. Martinez occasionally left them to lock up the station. As for me, I didn’t want to leave. For the first time in weeks the universe was in alignment.

I walked over to the control room, where Duncan was working on what looked like a CD player.

“No garbage tonight?” I asked.

“The thrift store closes at six on Fridays. I pushed it and got the trash done early.”

I sat on my royal throne and kicked off my shoes. “Is it like this every Friday night at the station? I mean with everyone here?”

He nodded.

“But why? It’s not like everyone’s needed. Haley could have watched her old movie at home. Frack could have recorded his PSAs elsewhere, and Frick could have written his sports wrap at Extreme Bean, but everyone chose to be here together, yet apart, all of them doing their own thing.”

Duncan tapped a small screwdriver on the faded denim of his thigh. “Weird, huh?”

“Like beets.”

A slow smile slid across Duncan’s lips and fired his eyes. He tossed the screwdriver into a small toolbox and opened his mouth, then closed it. “It’s late,” he said.

A nice exhaustion hung over me as I followed him out of the control room. It had been a good show and a good night, despite the havoc Brie had caused for the past two weeks.

I didn’t need her, or Mercedes. I had KDRS, my show, the staff, and Duncan.

He came back from putting away his toolbox and flicked out all the lights but one over the door. I thought of the paper airplane he’d made. Duncan had reached out to me in his own quiet way.

I took a pen from a nearby desk and, before he could back away, grabbed Duncan’s hand. My thumb ran across the calluses before I scribbled my phone number on his palm.

Duncan looked at his palm as if it were an alien body part, but his face softened. “There’s nothing subtle about you, is there?” His voice was barely audible over the transmitter that buzzed in the corner.

No, I wasn’t subtle or quiet, and I didn’t like distance between me and others. “Does it bother you?” I held my breath.

He shook his head. “No, I don’t mind.”

Cool, wonderful air flooded my lungs, and I almost spun on my glittery toes. I refrained, instead tilting my chin toward his hand. “So you’ll call me tomorrow?”

His fingers curled into his palm against his chest, and he smiled.

Stop by tuna cn. Big prob. Brng HER.

N rain b%ts.

Grams

---

I am a pelican. Fear me.

IT WAS SATURDAY MORNING, THE DAY AFTER MY SUCCESSFUL
radio debut as Chloe, Queen of the Universe, and I should have been reclining in my queenly bed and eating chocolate bonbons iced with the royal crest. That or chatting on the phone with sexy-eyed, scarf-wearing Duncan Moore. Or at least daydreaming about sexy-eyed, scarf-wearing Duncan Moore.

Instead, I stood in the Tuna Can living room, opening the windows to let out clouds of smoke as an inch of water lapped at my plain white Keds. Grams stood near me, soot on her right cheek, her gnarled fingers wrapped around a broom handle. Mom and Dad were outside with the ceramic squirrel and the Plumber King. Only the squirrel grinned.

Grams shoved the broom across the floor, sending a violent wave of water out the front door. “Piece of crap pipes.”

What could I say?
There wasn’t anything wrong with your pipes, Grams, until you took a hammer to them
. Or maybe,
Be glad for those pipes and the sprinkler system that flooded the Tuna Can because they saved your life. You could have been killed!

“Piece of crap hammer. Piece of crap teapot . . .”

My shaking hands opened the next window. When Grams woke this morning, she put a teapot on the stove to boil and forgot about it. The water boiled away, the teapot overheated, and a roll of paper towels near the stove caught fire, along with the kitchen curtains and a stack of mail. The fire alarm didn’t go off because Grams had taken out the batteries for her portable DVD player and had forgotten to replace them. Luckily, the fire sprinklers Mom insisted on having installed last year went off and put out the fire before it spread beyond the stove area. Grams, however, couldn’t remember how to turn off the sprinklers, so she hammered the valves, breaking them and sending a torrent of water throughout the trailer. Even worse, Grams tried more than an hour to fix it herself before calling for help. Water now slicked the ceiling and walls and soaked every piece of furniture. Drips still echoed in the closets and cupboards.

I yanked open another window. Grams should have called someone immediately. There was nothing wrong with asking for help. For the past week I’d relied on help from the entire KDRS staff, and with them I’d pulled off a killer debut show.

With the windows open, I pulled out the trash basket and thought of Duncan, my trash-toting, fix-it guy. It would be nice to have him here this morning, but something told me not even my fix-it guy could repair this mess.

Footsteps clanked on the metal porch, and Mom waded into the living room. Her hands, the gentle ones that stitched people’s broken hearts, knotted into tight balls at her hips.

Please, please, don’t start yelling at Grams
.

Mom stretched her neck and said in an oddly calm voice, “I paid the Plumber King.”

Grams said nothing. With Mom in the doorway, Grams aimed her sweeping elsewhere, disturbing the water but sending it nowhere.

Mom looked at the ceiling, her face a blank mask. “Jack called the water-damage repair and restoration people,” Mom continued in that controlled voice. “He’s waiting outside for them. They should be here any minute.”

Grams swished a broom full of water under the couch. Why wasn’t Grams saying anything? Why wasn’t Mom yelling at Grams and telling her she could have been seriously hurt? That she could have died? My Keds squished as I shifted from one foot to the other.

Grams swished another wave of water under the bookshelf that held her DVD collection. Then another.
Swish. Splatter. Swish. Splatter
.

“I also called the insurance company, and they’re sending out an adjuster,” Mom added.

Swish. Splatter. Swish. Splatter. SWISH
. The water smacked into the bookshelf, and a stack of DVDs crashed to the floor.
Ocean’s Eleven
, the 2001 Brad Pitt version, sailed past my Keds.

Now would be the time to say something witty to cheer up
Grams and ease the tension. But I couldn’t. There was nothing amusing about this situation.

Grams left a teapot on the stove. It started a fire. The sprinklers went off. She caused more damage when she hammered the pipes. This mess was her fault. This mess changed everything.

The same realization must have hit Grams as she dropped her broom and slumped onto the couch. Water seeped from the cushions. Grams went to that far-off place, the one that glazed her eyes and slackened her jaw.

Mom took a seat on the soggy recliner and cleared her throat. “You can’t stay here.”

Grams’s eyes brightened and narrowed. “Can it, Deb. I don’t want to hear it right now.”

“Given the current state of the Tuna Can, you don’t have a choice but to hear it
right now.”

My fingers tightened around the garbage can. I wished my mom would stop using the word
choice
in that tone of voice, as if she was giving a child a choice between carrots or peas.

Grams wagged her index finger at Mom. “You are my daughter, and you will not tell me what to do.”

“There are six excellent residential facilities you’ve previewed.” Mom went on as if Grams hadn’t spoken. She reached into her bag and pulled out a thick folder. “Well-maintained, exceptional staff, private rooms. All are within close proximity to quality medical care, and two are near the high school, so Chloe can easily stop in for visits and drive you on errands.”

Grams had been the one who used to drive me places. Again the earth spun, sending everything all topsy-turvy.

Grams stood, turned her back on Mom, and started wringing water from a throw pillow on the sofa. Her trembling hands squeezed, and streams of water soaked the front of her bathrobe and plinked to the water lapping at her house slippers.

Mom pulled two brochures from the folder. “I seem to recall you liked this one the best. Minnie’s Place.”

Grams clutched another pillow and squeezed. Squeeze.
Plink
. Squeeze.
Plink
.

Mom unfolded one of the brochures with shaky fingers, hardly the steady hands of a person who spent her days mending people’s hearts. “When you visited Minnie’s Place, you told the woman giving you the tour you liked the pretty little swing in the butterfly garden.”

With the pillows squeezed to death, Grams reached for the sofa cushions. Her hands shook so much, she couldn’t get the Velcro strap undone.

“Minnie’s Place also allowed you to have a microwave in your room, so you could still do some cooking,” Mom went on. “And they have complimentary shuttle service to the beach.”

Grams tugged and tugged, sodden locks of scraggly gray hair falling over her red face.

“It’s not too far from here, so Noreen and your other neighbors can visit.”

Grams pulled harder, grunting and showing teeth, but the strap wouldn’t let go.

“And it’s close to your neurologist and physical therapist and that new acupressure clinic and—”

“Stop it! Both of you!” The garbage can slipped from my hands and splashed onto the floor. “Mom, you can’t take control of Grams’s life. And you, Grams”—I pointed a shaky finger at her— “talk to her. Tell her what you want, what you
need
. You have to speak for yourself.” While you can.

Grams stared at me. Did she see my worry? My fear? Did she know I wanted to throw myself into her arms like I did when I was six because the world always made sense in her arms?

At last Grams straightened her spine notch by notch. She reminded me of the matriarchs on the soaps who survived brain tumors, airplane crashes, and cheating husbands with murderous mistresses. “All right, Chloe, all right.” She pushed her wet hair out of her face and turned to my mom. “The Tuna Can’s shot to hell, at least for now.” She strutted into the kitchen and grabbed her purse. “Get your heinies in gear. It’s time to go.”