What I Came to Tell You (24 page)

Sudie and Grover walked up to the rental with Jessie to see what the workmen had done today, but as they cut across the yard, Sudie picked up something out of the grass, right by the front steps. “Look,” she said, holding it out to Grover as Jessie went on inside.

As Grover took it, he realized it was a pair of mangled and muddy black-framed glasses. They must’ve been there a good while and been trampled on more than a few times. As he turned them over, he had a flash of Matthew with new wire-rim glasses.

That night Grover went out to the kitchen and found his father at the table, drinking a glass of milk and eating a plateful of Oreos while reading the paper. He looked up from the paper and held out the plate of cookies but Grover shook his head.

“Turning down Oreos? Are you ill?” He smiled a tired smile. Grover set the mangled glasses on the kitchen table in front of his father, who picked them up and put his finger through the
hole where a lens was missing. “I’d say these have seen better days.”

“Sudie found them off the porch of the rental house,” Grover said.

“Really? Maybe one of the workmen’s?”

“I’m pretty sure they’re Matthew’s,” Grover said.

“Really?” His father bit into another cookie, then took a drink of milk.

“Matthew, you know, Jessie’s assistant? I think he must’ve been the person who helped me get Emma Lee out of the house that night.”

His father nodded.

“You don’t seem surprised,” Grover said.

“I’d already guessed,” he said. “I was fairly sure he’d been watching over you and Sudie.”

“Watching over us?”

“Ever since that night I wrecked your workshop and the next morning found the weaving hanging back up and the toolbox back where it had been, I had a suspicion.”

“Why would he do that?”

His father sighed and looked up at him. “Matthew was the driver.”

“The driver?”

“Of the car that hit your mother.”

The force of this news shoved Grover down in a chair and sent his heart racing. Strange as it might seem, he’d never given much thought about who’d been driving the car. The image that
had camped out in his mind was of his mother following Biscuit out into the road. He heard the screech of brakes and there it always stopped, the moment frozen, car and driver just out of the frame.

“Matthew was devastated,” his father said.

“It wasn’t his fault,” Grover said, feeling almost numb. “Everybody said it wasn’t the driver’s fault.”

“Even so, I imagine that’s not something you get over easily.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You and Sudie had been through enough without having to bring it all back up,” he said. “Jessie asked me if I minded if he hired him. He thought it might help him. I told him that was fine as long Matthew didn’t bother y’all or try to talk to you. I figured he’d be finished up with school and gone soon enough.”

“But you said he’s been watching over us?” Grover said.

“That’s my guess,” he said.

“Why didn’t you do anything? It’s creepy.”

“What was there to do? I couldn’t prove anything. Besides, I knew he was basically a good guy, a little on the strange side, but a good guy, and I thought it might help his recovery.”

“
His
recovery?” Grover said, feeling a surge of anger. “It was
our
mother he hit.”

“And she would’ve been worried about him,” his father said.

Grover thought back to the mysterious straightenings of his workshop and of his mother’s grave. He remembered the day he and Sudie had fought with the guy who wanted the realtor’s phone number off the sign, how his car began to mysteriously
roll away. He remembered the firm hand on his shoulder, guiding him through the smoke, helping him carry Emma Lee to safety. Who knew what all Matthew had done for them in the past couple of months? Yet gratitude wasn’t among the feelings that trailed him back to his room.

He lay in bed unable to sleep and looked out at the rustling bamboo. In the back of his mind, he had believed that his mother’s spirit had been watching over them, and that at least some of these happenings might’ve been her doing. How foolish he’d been. He felt cheated, tricked and, in a way, as if he’d lost his mother all over again.

D
ead, dead, dead is what I am
, thought Grover as he walked to the Wolfe house. His father had called Claxton and asked that he come straight to his office after school
without
Sudie. For the rest of the school day Grover’d wondered why his father wanted him to come alone. The only explanation could’ve been that he’d found out about Grover’s slipping grades. But if he was in trouble, part of him didn’t care. Ever since he’d learned about who was behind the mysterious happenings in the Bamboo Forest, nothing seemed to matter as much.

His father met Grover at the door of the Wolfe house, put his arm on his shoulder, looked him in the eyes and said, “It’s time.” He started walking Grover along downtown streets.

After they’d walked a couple of blocks Grover finally screwed up enough courage to ask where they were going.

“To buy you a coat.”

“A coat?”

“For the Christmas Waltz.”

He was surprised his father had remembered the waltz, which was tomorrow. He himself had all but forgotten. Still, every sixth grader had to attend. Although he wasn’t a big fan of shopping, shopping for clothes with his father had always been less painful. His father would take him to
a
store, let him try on a few clothes and then buy whatever Grover liked. There was no driving around to five different stores and trying on every shirt or pair of pants or shirts or shoes in his size in the city of Asheville. There were no female hands fluttering over him, tugging his pants, straightening his collar, pushing the hair back out of his face. There were no frowning salesladies. Grover missed many things about his mother but shopping with her was not one of them.

Grover and his father walked the few blocks to Berkowitz’s, a men’s store where his father had always bought clothes, but this was the first time Grover had gone there to buy clothes for himself. It made him feel like he was entering a kind of club. The bell rang when they walked in, and Mr. Berkowitz came out of a back room. Bald with wild bushy eyebrows and a yellow tape measure always hanging around his neck, Mr. Berkowitz had been in business downtown for almost fifty years. What impressed Grover most about Mr. Berkowitz was that he drew his own ads that ran in the
Asheville Citizen-Times
. He sketched coats, shirts, ties and pants.

“Grover’s going to the Christmas Waltz,” his father said.

“Ah, the Christmas Waltz,” said Mr. Berkowitz, looking over
his glasses at Grover. “Are you taking a girl?” Mr. Berkowitz pronounced
girl
like “goyel.”

Grover shook his head, his face on fire.

“And he needs a coat,” his father said.

“Ah, a jacket,” Mr. Berkowitz said. “Where I’m from it’s a jacket. Down here it’s a coat. Either way, Grover, we’ll find a nice one that’ll have the girls lining up.” Without asking Grover’s size or even lifting the tape measure from around his neck, Mr. Berkowitz ran his fingers along the rack, slipped a coat off its hanger and held it out for Grover to try on. A gray tweed coat. Grover’s father sometimes wore tweed. Grover pushed his arms through the silky lining of the sleeves, then Mr. Berkowitz buttoned the buttons, and Grover stood in front of the mirror with his father and Mr. Berkowitz behind him, all three looking at the coat. It fit.

“You’re a wizard,” his father said to Mr. Berkowitz.

“When the boy is ready for the jacket,” said Mr. Berkowitz, “the jacket is ready for the boy.” Mr. Berkowitz tugged on the sleeves, patted the shoulders and then said, “What do you tink, Grover?”

“I like it,” he said.

“He sounds surprised,” Mr. Berkowitz said, turning to his father.

He
was
surprised. Looking at his reflection in the mirror, he appeared different. Bigger. Older. More solid. The coat itself, the form of it, the weight of it along his back, across his shoulders and down his arms, made him feel stronger and more grown up.

Mr. Berkowitz had him try on pants that went with the coat
and pinned the cuffs. He picked out a shirt and a tie that would go with the coat. He promised he’d have the pants ready by tomorrow.

His father carried a bag with Grover’s shirt and tie, and Grover carried the coat, which came with a nice plastic protector with a zipper on it. They rode the bus home. Grover hung the coat on the handhold above his seat, and watched it sway with every turn the driver made. He looked at his watch. The whole thing had taken half an hour.

“Why did Mama always take so long to shop?” he asked his father.

“To women,” his father said, “it’s not the clothes as much as it is the process of shopping for them.”

“I don’t get it,” Grover said.

“Case in point.” His father raised his finger, like he’d been waiting for this question. “When your mother and I were about to marry, we drove to a mall to shop for a dress for the reception. The first store, she tried on a red silk dress that looked stunning. I assumed we could buy it and leave.” His father looked at him. “I was woefully undereducated in the ways of women.”

“You didn’t buy the dress?”

“Your mother insisted that we look at every other store in the mall. She must’ve tried on close to a hundred dresses. None came close to that first dress, and she knew none would. She continued trying on dress after dress. Ten stores and five hours later we returned to the first store, exhausted. Or at least I was. Only then was she ready to buy the red dress.”

“Why did you have to go through all that?” Grover asked.

“That’s what I asked her.”

“What did she say?”

“She said it would have been too easy.”

“You mean if she had bought the dress when she first tried it on, she wouldn’t have liked it as much?”

“Exactly. The worth of that dress increased with every other dress she tried on.”

“But she ended up buying the same dress,” Grover said.

“Oh, but it
wasn’t
the same dress,” his father said.

“It wasn’t?”

“Not to your mother. To her way of thinking, by trying on all the other dresses, she transformed
a
dress into
the
dress.” His father’s voice cracked a little. “And I have to admit, she was right. It was
the
dress. She was stunning.” His father was quiet for a moment. He put his hand on Grover’s knee. “I wish you could’ve seen her.”

Grover stood in a clump of sixth-grade boys, who tugged on their ties, glanced uncertainly across the gym at a clump of girls and then out toward No Man’s Land. Daniel and Sarah, a girl in Miss Shook’s class, along with two or three other brave couples, waltzed around the gym floor. The glaring overhead gym lights had been dimmed, and lamps with warm yellow shades had been set up around the edge. Christmas lights crisscrossed the
ceiling. Mr. Godleski, a second-grade teacher, had his bluegrass band, Buncombe Turnpike, set up on the stage. A short fat man played fiddle, a horse-faced man played the electric piano, and Mr. Godleski stood next to them, plucking his bass fiddle. All three wore coats and ties.

At one end of the gym, a large table had been set up with cookies, cakes and brownies PTO parents had made. Next to that table, Miss Snyder in a black, tight-fitting dress stood behind the punch bowl, ladling punch into cups.

“Miss Snyder is hot,” Sam said, coming up to Grover. “And why aren’t you dancing?”

“Why aren’t you?”

“You know why.”

“Ashley doesn’t own you.”

“I know that,” Sam said. “But I’m not sure she knows that.” Then he said, “Look who’s coming.”

Mira crossed the gym floor, wearing a long white dress, a pearl necklace and pearl earrings. She looked to Grover like some African princess.

“Hi, Grover,” Mira said. “Hey, Sam.”

Grover wanted to say something about Mira’s dress but was in a kind of trance just looking at her.

“You look nice,” Sam said.

“Thanks,” Mira said. She turned to Grover. “I love your coat.”

“It’s tweed,” Grover said, putting his hands in the coat pockets.

Mira nodded, then crossed her arms and looked out at Daniel and Sarah dancing.

Sam gave Grover a nudge and nodded toward Mira.

“They sure are good dancers,” Mira said.

Sam nudged Grover again.

“Mira?” Grover said hoarsely. “Want to dance?”

“I thought you’d never ask.” She reached for Grover’s hand and led him onto the dance floor.

“The only thing is,” Grover said, “I don’t know how.”

“Grover Johnston,” Mira said, putting her hands on her hips. “Don’t tell me that after all those lessons, you don’t know how.” For the past two months, Mrs. Brown had devoted ten minutes of every gym class to practice waltzing. Since the classes were divided into boys and girls, boys had to waltz with boys and girls with girls.

“Listen to the music,” Mira said. “Let’s stand here and count for a minute. One, two, three. One, two, three. Count with me.”