Stand by Your Manny

by Amy Lane

  “I, uh, got intense there for a moment.”

  Of all things, he didn’t expect Sammy’s low, rumbling chuckle. “Don’t apologize for looking sort of hot, Cooper. It’s my fault for gawking.”

  And now Coop was gaping. “Uh….”

  Sammy grimaced. “I’m sorry—I came in and talked when you probably felt like resting. It’s just been….” He bit his lip and looked away. “I’ve just really enjoyed the conversation.” He looked back and smiled. “Here—let me clear the dishes and leave you alone, okay?”

  “No! I mean, I don’t want you to—” Cooper yawned, the pain pills and the healing and the day hitting him just that quickly. “I enjoyed the conversation too!” he said pathetically through the yawn.

  Sammy’s expression—the tentative smile, the bit lip, the wide gray eyes—did such devastating things to Coop’s insides, he was surprised he’d ever been able to say a word. “Good,” he acknowledged with a nod. “Because tomorrow after everyone goes to school, I’m it for company. You’re stuck with me. And when everyone goes to the city, it’s the entire day. If we didn’t get along, our lives could be really uncomfortable, right?”

  Coop nodded, torn between mortal embarrassment at the thought of Sammy not liking him and a sort of helpless joy at the knowledge that this, this stolen moment between scraping by, between worrying about rent, and food, and work, and Felicity-oh-my-God-how-could-he-keep-Felicity wasn’t just a onetime thing.

  He was living in Sammy’s house.

  They could do this again.

  Sammy made for the doorway, tray balanced in his hands, pausing to pull the door shut with his foot.

  “No!” Cooper burst out, almost involuntarily. “I, uh, like it open.”

  “Sure—not a problem. Do you want the hall light off?”

  “Okay,” he conceded unwillingly. Right now the light was stabbing into his eyes like the piercing sword of justice. “Thank you.”

  And again, that knee-melting smile. “No problem. The TV remote’s by the lamp if you get bored, and the bathroom is through the door to your left. Give us a holler if you need anything!”

  Coop nodded dumbly, thinking that he’d need a nap just to be able to get up and pee. “Course,” he said, eyes already closing. Through the open door, he could hear voices—the children’s voices chattering merrily, the adults’ voices a kind bass counterpoint. For a moment it was like he’d fallen off that roof, hit his head, and died.

  And this was heaven, a place where his next meal was brought to him with cheerful company and family was warm and happy in the next room.

  Quiet House

  SAMMY’S composition homework was not going well.

  At first he’d been thrilled to have the excuse to stay home when the rest of the family went to San Francisco. Of course, he loved family outings and vacations. Channing and Tino were particularly deft at including everybody on the trip in all facets of the outing, and he had fond memories of being an only child wandering the streets of Vancouver between his uncles, then a middle schooler holding his brother’s hand in Mexico City, and barely three years ago, a high school graduate carrying his little sister through the bustle of Paris, keeping Channing’s blond head in sight while Tino kept Keenan from wandering off.

  The happy, the excitement, the chatter—and ultimately the learning about a bigger world than the one offered by school and home and lessons—all that made his childhood rich.

  But he really had to finish his damned composition.

  Besides, he thought Channing and Tino were starting to really care for Felicity, and it relieved him to think she was becoming part of the family too. The longer he talked to Cooper, the more he thought the young man deserved to have some of the burden lifted from his shoulders.

  He’d been surprised when Cooper first walked through the front door—he’d imagined a big, musclebound woof man’s man, like Brandon. But Cooper stood barely five nine, and while it was easy to see hard-won, stringy muscles in his shoulders and arms, his overall frame was not quite what Sammy had imagined when Brandon told him he’d been hurt wrestling an AC unit from a roof.

  He was handsome—streaked brown hair, a little long, surrounded a narrow face. His hazel eyes were oddly asymmetrical, and he had grooves bracketing his mouth whenever he offered one of his guarded smiles.

  In fact, Sammy had the uncomfortable feeling that Cooper worked hard to be invisible. The intimate little bubble of conversation he’d initiated with Felicity had made Sammy’s chest hurt. He’d imagined two children adrift on a life raft, clinging to each other to stay afloat.

  Sammy’s throat ached at how happy he’d been when Cooper opened up a little, told him the story of the fall from the cherry picker, tried hard to make Sammy laugh. He was funny in a self-deprecating way, offering up a quirky charm to match his oddly offset eyes. Laughter had come easily until Sammy saw the bruises on Coop’s face and realized this was real life, and Cooper’s real life hurt.

  Cooper Hoskins had looked at the open door to the hallway and kitchen so wistfully, Sammy would have laughed even if he hadn’t been funny, just to make him smile.

  Sammy played nervously with the piano keys, trying to find the melody he’d been humming all week but that so eluded him now.

  And it was gone.

  In a fit of desperation, he struck the opening chords for one of those infectious earworms that had plagued mankind for over fifty years.

  “Do-wah-diddy?”

  Sammy’s fingers, more at home on a keyboard than doing almost anything else in the world, crashed in a tumble of chords.

  “You’re supposed to be resting,” he mumbled, embarrassed.

  Cooper was walking better now, the stiffness that had marked his back and rib injuries obviously easing up. He still wore a brace around his ribs and collarbone and a sling for his arm and shoulder, but Sammy was starting to see some self-sufficiency in the young man who had seemed so very helpless before.

  “I’m bored,” Cooper confessed, shrugging his good shoulder. “Felicity and I usually find something to do on the weekends.”

  “She told me,” Sammy said, turning on the piano bench to smile at him as Cooper eased down into the same overstuffed chair Keenan had sat in the week before. “She thinks the world of you.”

  The trouble that washed Cooper’s expression marred the peace of the moment.

  “What? Are you worried about her being with Channing and Tino? Because don’t—they’re veterans at the kid wars, trust me. They’re, like, the best dads ever—”

  “No!” Cooper protested, but then the anxiety returned. “You… I didn’t give them her insurance card. I… I mean, I’m not supposed to have it. She had to….” He grimaced. “Sammy, you know she’s officially a runaway, right? We had to steal her card from the mailbox of her old foster home so I could so much as take her to the doctor when she got an ear infection. We had to—I couldn’t pay for that!”

  Sammy stared at him. “Oh wow—see, I don’t think you have to—”

  “That’s a felony, you know.” Cooper was nodding like Sammy would see this suddenly meant the whole Felicity-in-San-Francisco thing was a bad idea. “And what if something happens to her? I didn’t tell them about the insurance or—”

  “Cooper!” He was panicking. Sammy didn’t blame him; he’d apparently lived in fear of something like this for two years. “Don’t worry. Channing and Tino have great insurance, and they’ll put her on their cards. If anything happens. While she’s out playing in the city. She’s going to be okay, and you just have to worry about getting rest, okay?”

  Cooper let out a sigh. “Until you all figure out I can’t possibly nanny three kids, it’ll be fine!”

  Sammy laughed. “You met Taylor, right?”

  “Yeah.” Oh—Sammy recognized that bit lip. It was the expression Sammy used to get around Brandon. “He’s really nice.”

  “He’s a dick—but an awesome one.”

  Cooper laughed. “Well, yeah. But he gets shit
done.”

  “Truth. Anyway, when he first showed up to nanny Nica’s kids, Brandon was sure he’d suck. But he didn’t. He was really good. He still he takes them out for stuff now, even though they hired another nanny. As far as he and Brandon are concerned, those kids are family. But he made mistakes. I know Nica never let him hear her bitching about the state of the rug after his first week. It was okay, though. Better the rug gets beat up than the kids, right? And these kids won’t assault the rug—well, you can’t let Letty have juice in the living room. She can sort of spaz out and spill stuff. But don’t worry. Felicity won’t get hurt, and if she so much as scrapes her knee, Tino carries a first aid kit, and Channing would probably carry Felicity to the nearest med station, their treat. It’s all going to be fine.”

  Cooper’s headshake almost broke Sammy’s heart. “It’s never fine,” he whispered. A look of such exhaustion settled onto his face—his whole body—that for a moment Sammy felt tired too.

  “Here,” Sammy said gently, standing up and stretching. “Let me get you something to eat—it’s past lunch. I’ll come back, and you can listen to me screw up my homework some more, and then we can watch TV.”

  Cooper nodded, still disheartened, but he did perk up a little when Sammy brought him back a roast beef sandwich and a glass of milk, with cookies on the side.

  “What are you eating?” he asked, and Sammy shrugged.

  “Not hungry.” He was never hungry during the school year. Tino and Channing fussed at him, and for good reason, but food never set well when he was stressed. “I’ll eat something at dinnertime. Here—do you want more cookies?”

  “No, I’m fine.” Cooper grabbed a throw pillow and transferred it to his injured side so he could prop up his shoulder. “Tell me what you’re doing.”

  Sammy laughed ruefully. “I’m trying to write a song. It’s stupid, because since, like, I was a little kid, I could always… you know, think in music.” He placed his fingers just so for a major chord and ran a rippling trill up the scale. “That was happy.” And now, two or three minor chords in ponderous succession. “That’s sad.” He relaxed his fingers and his back and allowed himself to play, major chord, minor chord, tripping solo note and its friend falling on the scale. “And that’s in between. And I had this… this idea running through my head all week, but I forgot to write it down, and when I was practicing I was working on my school recital, and now….” He pounded the keys in frustration. “It’s just not coming.”

  Behind him he heard Cooper’s helpless chuckle. “I’m just so impressed you can do any of that.” Sammy turned to smile at him when Cooper—biting his lip again—said, “Could you… I don’t know, just play me something you like?”

  Such a shy request—and so much more productive than hammering the keys in a fruitless search for inspiration that wouldn’t come. “Sure,” he said. “Here—this….” He laughed. “This is one of the first complicated things I ever wrote. It’s called ‘Keenan’s World Things.’”

  He turned back toward the keyboard and pulled the composition up in his head. As his music progressed, he realized the form was laughably easy—but he’d written this in his sophomore year in high school, right after Letty had been brought home. He’d adored Keenan with all his heart. Having a little brother had been every bit as awesome as he’d always imagined as a kid. But Letty—Letty had been a surprise. The adoption had gone through with insane speed, for one, and Channing and Tino had been caught flat-footed, with maybe four days to prepare a nursery and to rearrange their schedules over the arrival of a newborn.

  Sammy had been the one to prepare Keenan for what would happen next, and Keenan had been upset and fractious, sure that bringing home a little girl—one with skin lighter than his and darker than Sammy’s—would mean nobody would love him anymore. Sammy didn’t question his logic. Too painfully, he remembered how he thought the first Wednesday of the month would bring his mother home. Little boys didn’t always see the world in adult terms. Sammy had to work hard to figure out a way to show Keenan a world he’d understand.

  The day before Letty arrived, Jacob and Nica took their kids—at the time only two—as well as Sammy and Keenan, to an art celebration in downtown Sacramento featuring art and artists as diverse as their household.

  Entranced, Keenan had asked every artist, “Who are you? Where are you from? Why do you paint like that?” And even Sammy had been impressed by the assortment of answers.

  On the way home, an exhausted Keenan had drowsed in his booster seat, holding a hand-felted stuffed animal to his chest.

  “All the different people. Some like me, some like Sammy.”

  “Yup.”

  “Don’t know how to look like me,” Keenan said sadly, looking at the back of his hand.

  Oh God oh God oh God—there was no right response to that statement. “Who says you don’t know how? Any way you want to be, that’s how you’re supposed to be. But you know what? I can ask Jacob to stop at the bookstore and buy art books and music books and story books by people with your ancestry, and you can study them, and we can study them, and I have friends you can talk to, and Channing and Tino have friends you can visit—and all of them are black, but all of them are different. It can be like your toy. Look at all the choices in the world and pick the way you want to be.”

  The world was not that simple—even at fifteen, Sammy knew it wasn’t. But he loved Keenan with everything he had. He wanted the same world to open up for his little brother that had been given to him.

  When they’d gotten home, they’d made a corner of the library and filled it with “Keenan’s World Things”—books about everyone from Dizzy Gillespie to LL Cool J to Michael Jordan and Sojourner Truth. As the years had gone by, they’d added a “Letty’s World Things” to the corner, but Letty was still pretty fuzzy on the idea of ancestry, and her corner had everyone from Frida Kahlo to Sonia Sotomayor to Tinker Bell. But not even Letty or her future corner mattered that day.

  What had mattered was that Sammy gave his brother something just for him.

  He came home and looked through his music books and pulled out a blues riff here and a jazz riff there, one from reggae, and a heartfelt spiritual. He found a common place in every riff, a bridge, and soldered them together to form something beautiful and poignant. It couldn’t be called an original composition—Sammy had been very careful to credit every writer, even as he’d been making the notations—but it had been original to Keenan.

  He called it “Keenan’s World Things.”

  He closed his eyes and played “Keenan’s World Things” for Cooper, embellishing each riff with all the knowledge and technique he’d picked up in the years since.

  When he was done, he let the final notes fade through the darkening house and smiled to himself. Such a good memory. He could never sell that song—it would never get him money or acclaim. It wasn’t an assignment and hadn’t helped him pass his music classes.

  But Keenan still asked him to play it when the world got scary, or when a classmate was thoughtless or cruel.

  He turned to smile at Cooper and was taken aback when he saw a surreptitious swipe of his palm under his eyes. “Uh, I’m sorry—”

  Cooper shook his head. “That was beautiful,” he said, voice choked. “I mean… beautiful. I’ve never… you can do that. Make a song like that—make music real.”

  Sammy bit his lip. “Yeah,” he said, his voice falling softly in the twilight. He stood restlessly and turned on the lamp over the music stand and then moved to turn on the other lights in the room. As he moved, wondering if he should give Cooper his space or if he should go get a Kleenex so Coop didn’t have to use a napkin, he suddenly heard it.

  The elusive melody that had been escaping his brain all afternoon.

  Cooper wasn’t forgotten, but he became a part of the moment, another heartbeat in the room, as Sammy sat down at his little stool again and began to compose.

  HE wasn’t sure how long he’d been there, the music flowi
ng from his fingers to the keyboard, before he stopped playing and wrote a quick flurry of notes in his book. And again. And again. These days, people were using electronic keyboards with memory to hold their compositions, but Sammy had never been tempted. He wasn’t a genius or a prodigy—he loved this piano, where his mother had taught him his first notes and then his first song.

  Letty wasn’t the only one who’d started with “Heart and Soul.”

  Finally it was full dark, and a hand on his shoulder pulled him out of composing so quickly that he gave a little shriek.

  “Sammy?”

  Sammy blinked at Cooper, his face going in and out of focus. “I’m sorry. I haven’t been very good company—”

  “No worries. I actually fell asleep for a couple of hours. But I warmed you up some of the food in the fridge. Won’t you come eat?”

  Sammy scrubbed at his face with both hands. “Mm… not hungry, really. Must have eaten a big lunch. I’ll get something when I’m do—”

  “You skipped lunch—it’s around eight o’clock. Tino and Channing just called to say they stopped for dinner and will be home in an hour. I swear, Sammy, your face is ghost white. If you haven’t eaten by the time they get here, I’ll… I’ll tell your uncles on you!”

  Sammy chuckled woozily and ran his hand through his hair. “That’s sweet—you’ve got this nanny thing down. I don’t know why you were worried.” He turned to the song and frowned, playing with a couple of the keys dreamily. “Just this last bar here—see?” He smiled at Cooper and pointed to the page.

  “I’ll bring you a sandwich,” Cooper muttered. “I’ve been hungry, Sammy. You can’t think like that. I don’t know how you just sat there for so long and did anything at all.”

  Sammy heard a hurt sound coming from his own throat. “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. His hand floated up, with a mind of his own, and he touched Cooper’s cheek gently, wondering if Cooper would deck him or protest or—

  Or catch his fingers and squeeze gently.