For the next hour or so, Billy just lay there and listened, and felt.
He thought about Grace, and worried about her. What if she never came over to his apartment again? What if there were no more dance lessons? What if Grace never again yelled at him for biting his nails, or for interrupting? What if they’d ruined that, forever, with what they’d tried to do, with their little kidnapping plot?
There was no real answer to the questions, at least, nothing available. But the purring helped a little.
It wasn’t until the end of the hour, when he finally rose from bed, that Billy realized he had slept without a visit from the wings.
• • •
At the usual time, around three thirty in the afternoon, Felipe came knocking on Billy’s door.
He did not have Grace in tow.
Billy looked at Felipe and Felipe looked at Billy. It was something a little like having a mirror to look into, Billy thought. An emotional mirror, at least.
“She’s definitely with her mom,” Felipe said.
“You saw her?”
“Yeah. I went to pick her up. But her mom was there to pick her up, too. So what was I supposed to do? Can’t you just see this Hispanic guy taking off with somebody else’s kid while her real mother’s standing right there? That would have been a disaster, huh?”
“Did you even get to talk to her? How did she seem?”
“She tried to come over and talk to me, but her mom wouldn’t let her. So I guess she seemed sort of…not free. Like she wants to do something or be somewhere, but there’s no getting around her mom. But she did call out something to me.”
“Yeah? What did she say?”
“She said, ‘Tell Billy I’m sorry about the cat.’ So then that’s why I came by here. I know you don’t like it too much when people knock on your door, but I just wanted to let you know I’ll take the cat. You know. If you need me to.”
“Oh,” Billy said. “That’s nice. How nice. But, you know what? We seem to be getting used to each other. We’ve actually been getting along OK. We’re kind of…settling in.”
“Oh. OK. Good. Fine, then.”
“You realize,” Billy said, “that if her mom stays clean we may never see her again.”
To his surprise, his lip quivered slightly with the words, as if they might make him cry. Which, in front of Felipe, would be quite humiliating.
“I thought of that, yeah,” Felipe replied, not tearful, but equally down.
“Would you like to come in?” Billy asked.
It was unusual behavior on Billy’s part, and he questioned himself regarding the move, both at the time he said it, and later, after the fact. The simplest possible answer seemed to ring true: he was now used to having company at three thirty in the afternoon.
Felipe came in and sat on Billy’s couch.
“Coffee?” Billy asked.
“Great, yeah,” Felipe said. “I’ll be awake when I get to work. That’ll be good.”
Before Billy could even get into the kitchen to start a pot, the cat came walking in from the bedroom, headed straight for Felipe, and sniffed at the cuffs of his jeans.
“Well, well, well,” Billy said. “Here’s Mr. Lafferty the Cat now.”
Felipe looked up quickly, as if to gauge whether Billy was joking or not.
“Are you kiddin’ me? She named the cat Mr. Lafferty?”
“I would not kid about a thing like that.”
“Geez. There’s just no getting away from the guy.”
“At least this Mr. Lafferty likes you,” Billy noted, just as the cat jumped into Felipe’s lap.
“Yeah. Thank God, huh? Thank God there’s no such thing as an animal bigot.”
Billy went off to make the coffee.
As he was measuring the grounds into the filter, he looked up to see Felipe leaning in the kitchen doorway, watching. Mr. Lafferty the Cat circled back and forth, around and through legs — first Felipe’s and then Billy’s — rubbing and purring and arching his back.
“I guess you two have settled in,” Felipe said.
He indicated with a flip of his head the china cup of water and the saucer of dry cat food, neatly arranged on a cloth placemat on Billy’s kitchen floor.
“Fine china, yet,” Felipe added.
“We all have to eat, and there’s no need being a barbarian.”
“So, I used to have this neighbor,” Felipe said, “years ago, before I lived here. She had this big dog, like a Doberman, I think, and she used to swear to me that this dog was prejudiced. It was such a crock. She told me this story once where she says she’s walking down the street with the dog, and, heading right towards them on the sidewalk, she says, there comes this big black buck—”
“Buck?”
“Right. Exac’ly. I know. This is my point. So she says the dog right away starts growling at the guy. Long story short, turns out this woman is so stupid she doesn’t get how the dog won’t trust black people because it can tell she doesn’t.”
“Wow. What do you even say to a story like that?”
“Well, I started making fun of her. Like laughing at her, in a way. I said, ‘You saw a deer on the street? Right here in L.A.?’ And she’s like, ‘No, it wasn’t a deer, it was a man. A big man.’ And then, I’m like, ‘Well, you said it was a buck. And a buck’s not a man. It’s an animal.’ But she never did get it. She just thought I was confused. But this other neighbor of mine, she’s overhearing all this, and she’s laughing her ass off, kind of behind her hand, you know?”
“Except, really,” Billy said, “much as I like a good joke at a small-minded person’s expense, it’s not all that funny.”
“No. I guess not,” Felipe said, picking up the cat and holding him, scratching gently behind Mr. Lafferty the Cat’s ears. “But sometimes you gotta laugh. I mean, what else you gonna do?”
Billy turned on the coffee maker, and, careful to keep looking at it and not Felipe, said, “You know, he came down here. And gave me a hard time, too. Right before the first time I took care of Grace.”
“Lafferty?”
“Lafferty.”
“About what?”
“He wanted to know if I was gay,” Billy said, still pretending the coffee pot required all of his visual attention. “He said he had a right to ask because, as he put it, ‘Homosexuals are more likely to be child-molesters.’”
He sneaked a quick look at Felipe, who didn’t notice, because he was busy rolling his eyes skyward.
“Oh…my…God! I swear that guy had child-molesting on the brain! It’s like he never thought about nothing else. What the hell’s wrong with a guy like that?”
“We’ll never know,” Billy said. “Now we’ll never know.”
“Just as well,” Felipe said. “I don’t think I even want to know. Less I know about the inside of that guy, the better.”
“Like I could possibly be anything-sexual,” Billy said, purposely regressing the conversation without knowing why. “I mean, look at me. How could I be anything but asexual? There’s nobody here. Just me and this drab little apartment, and a direct-deposit every month from my mother that’s just barely enough to starve on.”
“Well, at least she squeezes you out something.”
Billy laughed.
“My parents are rolling in it,” he said. “Filthy. Rich in the filthiest possible sense of the word.”
“Oh.”
The longest pause in the history of pauses, Billy thought. He did not fill it.
“So…”
“Don’t tell me,” Billy said. “I’ll guess the question. If I come from money, what am I doing in a place like this?”
“None of my business, but yeah. That’s what I was wondering.”
“I think they figure if they give me just barely enough to stave off my literal death, it’ll motivate me.”
“They don’t want to enable you,” Felipe said.
A brief silence, and then they both burst out laughing.
“You can
see how well it’s working out so far,” Billy said, taking a grand and flashy bow in his old red pajamas.
• • •
“Oops,” Felipe said. “I got news for you.”
He was sitting on Billy’s big stuffed chair, with Mr. Lafferty the Cat upside down on his lap, stretched out on his back and purring. Felipe was drinking his coffee with one hand and rubbing the cat’s tummy with the other.
“Bad news?”
“Just news news. We’re going to have to change Mr. Lafferty the Cat’s name to Ms. Lafferty the Cat.”
“Girl cat?”
“Girl cat.”
“Grace will be…”
Then, to his embarrassment, he had to stop talking. So he wouldn’t cry.
A long silence.
Then Felipe said, “I know. I miss her, too.”
“I feel like I’m supposed to be hoping her mom gets clean. You know, for Grace’s sake. But what about us? What about our sakes? What about if she never lets us see her again?”
“I don’t know,” Felipe said. “It’s messed up.” A pause. “Time’ll tell.” He glanced at his watch. “I better get ready for work.” He slugged down the rest of his coffee in one extended gulp. “Thanks for the coffee.”
Felipe slid the cat down on to the floor and headed for the door.
“Let me know if you see her again,” Billy said.
“I will. I mean, both. I’ll see her again, and I’ll let you know, both. I’m going to her school tomorrow, too. And every damn day after that. So if her mom ever screws up and doesn’t come for her? There I’ll be. So I’ll see her. Even if I don’t get to talk to her. And I’ll let you know.”
Felipe let himself out without saying more.
Billy began the process of locking the door after him, but, before he had even finished, he was startled by a sudden knock.
“Yes?”
Felipe’s voice echoed through the door.
“Don’t even bother to unlock it, Billy, it’s just me again. I just wanted to say one more thing. I just wanted to say I wouldn’t care if you were. I’m not like Lafferty. I’m not a prejudiced guy. My father taught me not to look down on nobody, not to think bad about nobody. Except assholes. He said it’s OK to be prejudiced against assholes, because nobody has to be an asshole. It’s voluntary.”
Silence. Billy seemed to have lost the ability to communicate.
“But you’re definitely not an asshole.”
“Thanks,” Billy said.
“Later, mi amigo.”
“Thanks,” Billy said.
If there were any other words in the universe, they were unavailable to him in that moment.
Grace
It was already last period at Grace’s school, and getting closer and closer to the final bell. And the closer it got, the more Grace felt like maybe she was about to throw up. Her face felt hot, and it tingled, and her stomach was feeling rocky, like that time when she had the flu.
But she didn’t have the flu, not this time, and she knew it.
What she had was one of those situations where you get more and more nervous and upset, and then after a while you’re so upset that you think you might throw up.
But there was really nothing much worse than throwing up in class in the fourth grade, unless it was peeing your pants, but even peeing your pants might only have been more or less a tie with throwing up. It was that bad.
So Grace asked her teacher for a hall pass to go to the bathroom.
It took the teacher a long time to write it out.
“Oh my gosh, please hurry,” Grace said, “because I think I’m about to throw up.”
“Oh, dear,” her teacher, Mrs. Placer, said, handing her the pass. “Go to the nurse as soon as you’re done.”
Which was an odd thing to say, since it was last period, and almost time to go home, but Grace figured maybe Mrs. Placer wasn’t thinking clearly about that. Grown-ups say all kinds of odd things, all the time, so this was just one more to add to the ever-growing list.
“OK,” Grace said, and ran down the hall as fast as she could.
It’s almost always better to just say OK. It’s better than arguing with them, just about every time.
She stood in the girls’ room for a while, right at the door of a stall, but now that she was in a place where she could throw up if she needed to, it seemed like maybe she wouldn’t need to after all.
After a while some older girls came in, three of them, maybe from the sixth grade, and they stood close to each other and passed a cigarette around, and one of them looked at Grace over her shoulder, and it wasn’t a friendly look.
Grace hoped they weren’t about to rob her, because that can happen in the bathroom. Not that she had anything to steal. But kids got hurt, too, especially if they didn’t have anything to steal.
“Flu,” she said, thinking if they knew she might be about to throw up on them, and if they thought what she had might be catching, they’d keep away.
Just then the bell rang.
Grace sprinted for the back door.
Her mom was there. And so was Felipe. Just like the day before.
Grace’s mom took her by the hand, too hard, and marched off toward home with her. Grace glanced over her shoulder at Felipe, but, the minute she did, her mom pulled her around by the arm so she faced forward again.
“I’m going to get to tap dance at my school,” she told her mom. “It’s for an assembly. I’ll be dancing in front of almost the whole school. First through sixth grades.”
“When?” her mom asked, sounding like she was thinking about something else entirely, and glancing over her shoulder at Felipe.
Grace turned to see if he was still back there — which he was — but then her mom turned her back around again.
“It’ll be in three months,” she said.
“Good. That’s plenty of time to learn to tap dance, I guess.”
“I already know how to tap dance.”
“Since when?”
“You missed a lot of stuff, you know. You’ve been gone a while.”
“Hasn’t been that long.”
“It’s been weeks.”
“It’s just been a few days.”
“Yeah, a few weeks’ worth of days.”
She expected her mom to maybe yell at her for saying all that. But nothing happened. Her mom just looked back over her shoulder at Felipe again.
“I have to tell Billy about the dancing at school,” Grace said.
“You’re not telling Billy anything.”
“But I have to.”
“But you can’t.”
“But I have to!” Grace shouted, finding a place in herself that just would not back down. Then she said something even braver. Possibly the bravest thing she’d ever said to her mom. “And I will!”
But nobody was paying the slightest bit of attention.
Grace’s mom stopped suddenly in the middle of the sidewalk and turned around and started yelling at Felipe.
“Why are you following us?” she yelled. “Why don’t you just leave us alone?”
Grace said, “He’s not, he just lives the same place we do,” and Felipe said, “I’m not, I’m just going home,” and they both said it at almost exactly the same time.
“Why did you even come down to her school in the first place?” Grace’s mom shouted.
And Felipe said, “In case there was no one there to pick her up.”
“But I was there.”
“In case you weren’t, though,” Felipe said.
Grace looked at Felipe, and he looked so sad and helpless, and it started making her mad, that her mom was being so snotty to him, and not for any really good reason at all. She decided to take matters into her own hands, Mom or no Mom.
She ripped her hand free and ran to Felipe and threw her arms around his waist, one side of her face pressed against his belly. He was wearing a green flannel shirt, and it had been washed a lot of times. Grace could tell, because it was so soft.
>
“Te amo, Felipe,” she said, purposely loud enough for her mom to hear.
“Te amo también, mi amiga.”
“Billy y Rayleen? Dice para mi, ‘Grace te amo.’”
“Sí, mi amiga. Sí, yo lo hare.”
Then Grace ran back to her mom, who grabbed her arm and pulled her down the street again.
“Ow,” Grace said. “Could you loosen up on my arm? And slow down?”
“Just hurry up and walk with me.”
But it hurt, and that made Grace feel extra-defiant again. She stopped dead on the sidewalk, wrenching her arm free.
“Felipe! Would you go ahead of us? Please? Because I’m tired from trying to keep up with my mom, and she’s hurting me.”
Felipe crossed to the other side of the street, while Grace’s mom just stood and watched him, and then he got ahead, and crossed back. But he didn’t look over his shoulder or anything. He just kept walking.
Grace’s mom set off toward home again, but she walked more slowly this time, and didn’t grab on to any part of Grace, so that was an improvement.
“Since when do you speak Spanish?” her mom asked.
“Told you there’s a lot you missed,” Grace said.
• • •
When they got down the stairs to their basement apartment, they found a brown paper grocery sack in front of the door. With a big marking pen, in writing Grace didn’t recognize, someone had written on it, “FOR GRACE.”
Her mom picked it up and tried to look inside, but Grace, who was still feeling defiant, grabbed it out of her mom’s hands.
“It says for Grace, not for Eileen.”
“But I need to see what somebody’s giving you.”
“OK, fine, just give me a second and I’ll show you. Don’t have a total fit.”
Grace reached inside and felt soft cloth. She pulled it out of the bag, and let it unfold. It was a dress. A brand-new dress. Grace held it up in front of her, and it looked like it would fit just right, which was not too surprising, because Mrs. Hinman had measured all the different parts of Grace before she even ordered the pattern. It came down to just Grace’s knees, and it was the most perfect color of blue ever.
“That came out nice!” Grace said.
“Who bought you a dress?”
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