In Broken Places

by Michele Phoenix

  “I’m tackling Mount Everest next!”

  She laughed. “Gus says to give a kiss to Lady Shay from him.”

  “Done.”

  “Thanks for thinking of us! We’ll look forward to next week.”

  “No problem. Bye, Bev!”

  I hung up the phone and answered Shayla’s look. “They’re coming next week, honey. They have company of their own for dinner tonight.” I gave her a kiss. “That’s from Gus. I think he kinda likes you.”

  She grinned and got back to important things. “Can we eat?”

  I loved that girl. And it frightened the you-know-what out of me to admit it. She might have been my father’s daughter, but she reminded me of me. Another reason to be scared. “Sure. You get the usual and I’ll bring the usual.” Which, in Shay-Shell talk, meant, “You set the table and I’ll bring the food over.” Of course, I ended up doing most of the table-setting, too, as Shayla wasn’t exactly the quickest table-setter in the land, but I thought it was good for her to have little jobs around the house.

  We’d gotten into so many natural routines lately that this pseudo-mother-daughter thing was starting to feel comfy, like the steam off a cup of hot chocolate—warm and sweet. And again, that scared me. It scared me so much, sometimes, that I felt a near-panic while performing some of our routines, as if I couldn’t let myself get too used to them in case my dad suddenly came back from the dead and took Shayla away from me and started calling me the names he used to hurl at me. They weren’t pretty names, and just the thought of them turned the world a little blotchy in my mind. But we stuck to our routines despite the thoughts that made me feel kooky. There were bedtime routines and Sunday routines and garbage routines and reading routines and after-school routines.

  The after-school routines weren’t so much Shay-Shell affairs as Scott-Shell and then Shay-Shell. No matter what time I left the school after play rehearsals, and no matter what door I used to exit the school (I switched them up—just for the sport), he always managed to catch up with me. After our first trek to the Johnsons’ had yielded little information other than his Boy Scout history, he’d started to come prepared for conversational blitzes that went something like this:

  Sound of jogging feet. “Hi, Shelby.”

  “Low, Scott.” Sometimes I had to resort to kindergarten humor. I found it refreshing.

  “How was rehearsal?”

  “Seth actually touched Kate’s cheek without any visible seizures, so I think we’re making progress.”

  “And all because I was able to inspire them.”

  “Right. I’m sure that’s what did it.”

  “So do you think God has a sense of humor?” He tried to get down to the serious stuff by the time we got to the halfway mark, just so I couldn’t use Gus and Bev’s house as an excuse not to answer.

  “He created Meagan, didn’t he?”

  “What’s your position on predestination?”

  “I was predestined to eat cheesecake. You were predestined to harass cheesecake eaters.”

  “Do you really not like any sports at all?”

  “I like to watch them if I know someone who’s playing. If I’m expected to participate, I’d rather throw myself off a tall building and get my eyelid caught on a protruding nail. Or something more painful—like conversational whiplash from these little talks with you.”

  I tried to throw in the occasional barb or two just to keep things light, but they never really seemed to hit home.

  “Did you name your daughter Shayla so both your names could start with the same sound?”

  I made a noise like a buzzer and declared the round over. We’d reached the front steps of the Johnsons’ house.

  “Thanks for talking,” he said.

  “It gave me a headache.”

  “I wouldn’t have to talk so fast if you walked more slowly. Or took a longer road. Or . . . you know . . .”

  “It’s not so much the speed as the topic-hopping.”

  “Just trying to cover some interesting bases in the two minutes and forty seconds you allow.”

  I smiled. “There’s no practice tomorrow.” Fridays were our down days, and I didn’t want him walking the sidewalks alone, carrying on a monologue.

  “You could always come by the gym and have an orange with the guys.”

  “I don’t do oranges. They’re too much like fruit.”

  “Invitation’s open.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “Bye, Shelby.”

  I did my best imitation of a flight attendant. “Buh-bye now.”

  I’d lie in bed at night and rack my brain trying to figure out what kept him coming back for more day after day, barb after barb, buzzer after buzzer. I couldn’t ever figure it out. Maybe he was just a glutton for punishment. Maybe he felt sorry for me. Maybe he was bored and would move on in time. I liked that last option best. It made me feel safe and less off-balance. And feeling safe was a big deal for me.

  I think Gus and Bev caught on to the after-school ritual pretty fast. Sometimes I saw the living room curtain rustle a bit when we reached the front steps, and I suspected they waited to tell Shayla I was there until Scott had started trotting back down the street. They always welcomed me warmly, but their smiles, some days, made me wonder if they hadn’t plastered their ears to the front door and gotten a sampling of the Scott and Shelby Show. There was an undertone of plotting in the air and it made me uncomfortable. Like seeing German bicyclers in spandex shorts riding by on too-narrow seats. Uncomfortable.

  Germany’s weather was an accurate reflection of its people. It was generally mild, though it tended toward cloudy. But there were times when the clouds seemed to suddenly march away as if by celestial decree, instantly making way for the kind of brightening that left me squinting and confused. The greenness of the German countryside was a wondrous result of so much gloom and drizzle, which only went to prove that there were silver linings around every cloud, green fields under every downpour, and friendly smiles behind every scowl. It was just a question of sticking around long enough to see it happen.

  The Germans hadn’t been unfriendly so much as just blank. No frowns, no smiles, no scowls. Nothing that let me know they even noticed my existence, let alone welcomed or resented it. Just rigid backs and mildly disapproving stares. We did exchange Tags in the daytime and Abends in the evening, but I knew they were merely a pleasant German custom that fostered little personal connection and certainly didn’t bridge the gulf of miscommunication and suspicion between us.

  Shayla, of course, had been on the receiving end of smiles and pats ever since her arrival in Kandern. But me? I’d been the woman standing next to her, living in perpetual certainty that I was doing something culturally wrong and that, someday soon, someone was simply going to tell me to go back to the States, where I belonged.

  I kept reminding myself that all the newness in my life had left my morale weakened, and I commanded my mind to think positively—mostly because the alternative would have hampered my sanity. And there were times, on my more optimistic days, when I actually thought I glimpsed a bit of a softening from the man at the post office, the lady at the bank, and the gentleman across the way who had reprimanded us for washing our car on a holiday, though I was fairly sure that none of them were about to shed their natural reserve and try to engage in a full-fledged bilingual conversation with me. And there was probably no hugging or high-fiving in our future either. They were German, after all. But the smallest of thaws was a positive sign indeed, and I clung to each one with all the fervor of my fears.

  It might have been a desire to finally bridge the abyss that lent me the courage, one Saturday afternoon, to attend a small gathering of German ladies in the Johnson home. Bev hosted twice-yearly Kaffee und Kuchen get-togethers for the handful of German women she knew, and she had invited me to the next one. Though the socializing was a daunting prospect, the coffee-and-cake theme quickly overcame my reservations.

  I hadn’t realized, until five
German ladies overtook Bev’s living room, how much German my friend spoke. I was pretty sure it was heavily laced with a syrupy Southern drawl, but the ladies seemed to understand what she was saying, albeit with the occasional help of some gesticulating and an English-German dictionary. Not only was my German limited to a very restrictive collection of phrases—I had yet to use “Hans and Regina went to the pool” in conversation—but it was also crippled, on that afternoon, by the sheer panic of being trapped in a room crackling with such an abrupt-sounding language. I spent two hours smiling politely, speaking English very slowly in response to the few questions Bev translated for me, and gorging on Linzer torte. By the end of the get-together, my stomach was fairly happy, but my brain and self-esteem were mush.

  Bev and I cleaned up the kitchen together after her guests left, and I basked in the single-language conversation.

  “That wasn’t too bad, was it?” she asked.

  “It was . . .” How could I put it? “Actually, Bev, if it hadn’t been for the torte, I probably would have gone home an hour ago.”

  “Are you saying my tea party was boring?” She smiled and dumped leftover coffee down the drain.

  “Boring? No! It’s just that . . . I tried to listen for words I understood, and I did catch a few, but not enough to follow even the main topics of the conversation. I tried to smile when everyone else smiled and look concerned when everyone else did too, but I was pretty much lost from the moment they walked in until the last lady left!”

  “But you stuck it out in spite of the challenges, right? That’s an accomplishment in itself.”

  “I need to learn German,” I said emphatically. Bev opened her mouth like she was about to tell me when and where to go for lessons. “After my life settles down a bit!” I amended. The last thing I needed to add to my challenge-saturated life was language study.

  “Well, when you think the time is right, I know a lady who’d be a great tutor for you.”

  “Maybe in a month or two—give or take a decade.”

  Bev laughed and plopped down at the kitchen table.

  I sat opposite her. “How did you learn? Did you take lessons when you got here?”

  She smiled like there was a good story there. “Gus would tell you I had to learn German because nobody was obeying my orders when I barked at them in English.”

  “Your orders?”

  “I was a bit of a battle-ax in a previous life.”

  I had trouble believing it. “How ‘previous’?”

  “Oh, you know . . . ongoing.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded and leaned back in her chair. “I was one of those women whose world isn’t so much their oyster as their kingdom. And that worked just fine in South Carolina. I could walk into Walmart and boss the customer service people around like nobody’s business. I’d give waitresses a run for their money demanding this and that and complaining about it when it came. There was a teller at my bank who refused to deal with me—she actually took a coffee break every time I walked in the door.”

  I was dumbfounded. “Really?”

  “Really. And that’s not even mentioning the way I treated my kids’ teachers or the elders at my church. . . .”

  I gave her a disapproving look. “What did you do to your poor elders?”

  “I was the church secretary for nearly ten years before we came over here. And I figured the position gave me the right to turn First Baptist Church into Bev’s Private Playground. If they didn’t do things the way I thought they should be done, I made enough noise about it that it became a bigger issue than it ever should have been. The pastor finally had to ask me to tone it down a little or a couple of his elders were going to resign. Now that, Shelby, is a battle-ax.”

  I shook my head, looking across the table at this woman who seemed the epitome of the genteel Southerner. “Well, I haven’t seen anything battle-axish about you since I’ve been here.”

  “Oh, I had most of it knocked out of me when I got to Germany. You don’t get very far in the grocery stores here by yelling, ‘I demand to speak with your manager!’ in English.”

  “I can’t believe you were like that.”

  “Well, I was. And Gus will tell you I can still be. But it took moving here to cure me of the worst of it. Nothing like a little humility to drive a lesson home. But my need to be understood made me learn German, so I can now kindly tell the mailman that he should leave our packages under the balcony rather than in the pouring rain, and I can gently suggest to the waitress at our favorite restaurant that my pork steak is so rare it’s still oinking. A few years ago, I would have demanded a new dinner—and on the house, too!” She laughed at my astonishment and added, “Gives you a whole new appreciation for my husband, doesn’t it?”

  “The guy’s a saint.” I laughed. “I just . . . I just can’t picture it.”

  “Lucky for you.”

  We sat there grinning at each other for a moment.

  “I should get going,” I finally said, remembering Shayla and suddenly missing her.

  “Can you hold off just a minute? I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something, and this seems like a good time to do it.”

  “Is Shay still refusing to eat her vegetables?” Not that I could blame her. It showed she had good taste.

  “Oh no, it’s not that. I’ve just been wondering if it wouldn’t be good for her to start going to kindergarten in the mornings. There’s a great one right here in Kandern. It might be healthy for her to have more contact with other children, don’t you think? She’d probably pick up the language in a matter of weeks, too.”

  “Kindergarten?” I had visions of Shayla alone on a foreign-speaking playground.

  “It’s just half days.”

  “Is she . . . Is it too much for you to take care of her?” I’d worried that Bev’s child-care duties might have been too taxing, and this suggestion seemed to validate my fear.

  “Oh, heavens, no, Shelby! Having her around is as easy as it gets. This has nothing to do with me. I just hate to see her cooped up with an old lady all day long when she should be out playing with kids her age. And since you’re in Germany now, why not give her some contact with the language and the culture? If there’s a good age to learn it, believe me, it’s hers.”

  I felt irrational fear tightening my throat. “Really? You really think it would be good for her? I mean, with all the changes she’s gone through already this year . . .”

  “Well, it would be another change, for sure, but the payoff might outweigh the adjustments. She’d be able to play with other children again, for one—something she really hasn’t done much since you’ve gotten here. And it’s so important to have that kind of social contact at her age. It’ll stimulate her mind and broaden her world a little in the process.”

  “I don’t know. . . .”

  “Hey, there’s no hurry. Think it over and let me know if you’d like to try it. I know one of the ladies who runs the place, and we could go visit the school together. You can ask around, too—find out how other BFA faculty children have fared. She wouldn’t be the first to go there.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  And I did. I thought about it from that moment all the way until supper, fretting and weighing and pondering, until Shayla’s wide eyes, gazing across the table at me, made me just blurt it out.

  “How would you feel about going to kindergarten, Shay?”

  She frowned a little. “Is that school?” She sounded suspicious.

  “It’s school for kids your age.”

  “Djoh-many kids?”

  I nodded. “Bev said you could go a few mornings a week if you wanted to. Doesn’t that sound like fun?” I hoped with all my heart that she would shake her head and refuse to consider it. Maybe even throw a tantrum. Fling some macaroni.

  Instead, she frowned a little less and said, “Only if my wabbit can come with me.”

  Huh? Someone suggesting that I go to school in a foreign language, ev
en at the ripe old age of thirty-five, would have encountered Hysterical Shelby, the one with the bugged-out eyes, shrill voice, and permanently shaking head. But Shayla? Four-year-old Shayla? She just frowned a little, like she wasn’t sure she liked the flavor of this particular conversation, then shrugged and decided her stuffed animal should come along. I wasn’t sure who was teaching whom in this relationship.

  “You’re sure? I mean, you don’t want to think about it some more?” I told myself to shut up. This was about Shayla, not about me.

  “Will there be Legos?” she asked.

  “Um . . . probably. Or something like Legos.”

  She pursed her lips. “Okay,” she finally said.

  “Okay,” I repeated, a little reluctantly, peering at her closely to detect any minute sign of misgivings. But Shayla was back to concentrating on her macaroni, so I figured the conversation hadn’t exactly traumatized her. “Well,” I said lightly, “I’ll talk with Bev and maybe we can go visit the school this week.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I had expected anxiety and tears and refusals from this child who had suffered such an overdose of change in recent weeks. Instead, her matter-of-fact agreement had put my own fears to shame. What felt like the beginning of a loss to me, to my pseudo-daughter was merely the start of something new.

  9

  THE DAY MY DAD left had started pretty well. It would go down from there for a few hours, then up again for, oh, about a couple decades. Trey and I followed the smell of bacon frying to the kitchen and observed our usual rituals of breakfast in pj’s, doing dishes to the Beatles, and getting dressed to the smell of the lawn being cut. It was a day that felt cheerful—kelly-green around the edges—and that somehow brought out the sports fans in us. So Trey donned his lucky Bulls championship cap, and I donned my lucky McDonald’s Walk for Life T-shirt, which always felt disloyal to Wendy’s. But I was getting over that.

  I think it’s the sports theme that dismantled our lives. That may explain the hate-hate relationship I’ve had with sports ever since then, though I’m pretty sure I was already of that mind-set in preschool, when I staged a sit-in every time my teacher told us to climb the monkey bars. Monkey bars was a deceptive term. Monkey sounded like fun, in a goofy, screechy kinda way. And bars sounded yummy, in a Mars or Snickers kinda way. But climbing? Climbing sounded like something that required physical effort, and that’s where five-year-old Shelby drew the line.