Upsie-Daisy

by Jane Lebak

  We reach the train station, and down we go. We’ll take the C train together as far as 34th Street where I’ll get off and take the R.

  Myron is thanking me for going out with him, his manners probably copied out longhand and studied from a Miss Manners book. “How is Avery doing?” he asks, seemingly the first time all night he’s remembered the reason we even spoke in the first place, and I shrug: she’s fine.

  We’re at 34th Street, and the doors open. I turn to him. This is it. Just tell him: I’m sending my resume because I’m a mechanic, and I want that job.

  I look up at him.

  The doors tone.

  I take a step backward off the train and let them close.

  I’m playing Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours Album on my iPod while driving to visit Avery.

  “You can still send Myron your resume,” Bucky says.

  “That ship has sailed,” I reply. “Literally.”

  Bucky shakes his head. “It’s not a sailboat, so you mean figuratively.”

  I huff. “This is the thanks I get. I play Fleetwood Mac for you, and you correct my grammar.”

  “Syntax,” Bucky says. “I’m correcting your syntax.”

  In other words, life is normal again. Myron has come and gone like so many other guys, and yeah, I’m not working on a robot sub, but I’ve also made peace with the fact that I’m never going to work on the Space Shuttle program either. I like working on cars, so it’s not like I’m stuck inspecting elevators.

  Avery doesn’t know I’m coming until I’ve actually arrived at her apartment door. “Aunt Lee!” she exclaims. “Hey, come in! You’ve got to see this!”

  She shows me this funny video of a cat and a squid, and Corinne joins us, shaking her head. “The poor cat,” she’s saying while Avery laughs out loud.

  I drop my winter jacket on the couch and say, “Guess what I have for you?” and when Avery looks up, I hand her a package that arrived in the mail for me yesterday from the Deep Sea Science Institute.

  “Oh! That guy!” She rips it open, and inside is a shrunken head with a metal ring embedded in the top. “I totally need to put this on my keychain!”

  Corinne picks it up from her palm. “That’s...wild.”

  “Roboticists do all sorts of weird things.” My heart twinges, but I shake it off.

  “He put his business card in too,” Avery says. “The school has me doing a report to make up for the fact that I jumped off the train, so I asked if I could maybe write about the undersea explorer thing. I’ll email him a few questions and then I can say I interviewed a scientist.”

  “Marine roboticist,” I reply. “They like it when you know their specialty.”

  She rolls her eyes. “Dork.”

  Corinne says, “Hey!” but I just retort with, “Isn’t that an aunt’s job? Being a dork?”

  Using her phone, she gets a picture of the shrunken head, then fiddles with it until she says, “Oh, cool! I already got two likes.”

  Corinne says to me, “You and me?”

  Avery rolls her eyes. “You guys don’t count.”

  “Of course I don’t count.” I snicker. “I’ve never even been on TV.”

  Avery looks up. “What?”

  “Remember that pen from the day you were at the garage?” I root in my bag and pull it out. “Well, the company never got back to me about making a commercial with it.”

  “What? Aunt Lee, you really are a dork. That’s not how you become famous now.”

  She has me hold up the pen and pose looking perky, then snaps a picture with her phone. Two minutes later, she has it online and crafts a pithy little thing, ending with, “Turns out this pen really is mightier than a sword.”

  “I’m posting it to their page.” Avery grins as she works. “Now I’m sharing it to all my friends so they’ll like it too, and I’m going to share it from my other social media accounts.”

  Avery plugs the URL into my phone so I can watch it getting liked. Three people have liked it already. Cool!

  I follow Corinne out to the kitchen, but she gets called away to help one of the kids with something, so I stand at the stove. Pasta and sauce. Even I can cook this.

  While I’m stirring the sauce, I hear Bucky without seeing him. I know you’re okay, but this is kind of a big deal. I thought I understood why you were lying, but you’ve turned it all on its head.

  I whisper, “Let it drop.”

  The truth will set you free.

  “After it’s done making me miserable.”

  Bucky says, It’s not about other people’s opinions.

  “No.” I set the spoon back on the counter. “It’s not.”

  Corinne comes back into the kitchen, and as I let her take over, I check my phone. The pen company has shared Avery’s photo, and there I am on their Facebook page, wearing my work shirt and holding up their mighty-as-a-sword pen. “Look!” I tell Corinne. “I’ve got twenty-five likes already.”

  That’s almost like being on television. And that’s pretty amazing.

  Thank you for reading Upsie-Daisy! You can spend more time with Lee and Bucky in their first full-length novel, Honest and For True, available everywhere in print and ebook.

  Thank you!

  Thank you so much for reading Upsie-Daisy! I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Lee and Bucky are pretty awesome, and I hope to keep telling their adventures for a long time to come.

  If you want to be on my mailing list so you can hear about their adventures when they come up, please join at http://eepurl.com/b2xkCf. New subscribers get a free copy of the Seven Angels Short Story Bundle, too.

  I adore reviews. As in, I really, really adore reviews. If you enjoyed this story, please go back to wherever you bought it and let other people know that they might enjoy it too.

  And finally, if this is your first introduction to the Lee and Bucky stories, you’ll be delighted to know there are more! You’ll find the current lineup at my website, http://janelebak.com/the-contemporary-stories/

  I’ve included a sample of my novel Pickup Notes after the page break because you might enjoy that too. It’s about the growing pains (and the fun!) of a string quartet in Manhattan.

  Again, thank you so much for spending time with my characters.

  Pickup Notes, just a sample

  Our scene: a black-tie wedding at Manhattan’s University Club, a banquet hall with mile-high ceilings, two thousand pounds of crystal dangling over our heads, and sound-swallowing acoustics. Breathtaking, gorgeous, and home to the reception of many a blushing bride.

  Tonight’s bride was blushing courtesy of the open bar.

  “You have to play ‘Hotel California’!” She kept shouting her demand right into our first violinist’s face, and this time she added something that’s made me want to wrap a C string around my own neck too many times. “It’s my day!”

  Her day. Well, her evening. Judging from the flush of her cheeks, tomorrow wasn’t going to be her morning, so she might as well live it up tonight.

  Rational conversation hadn’t helped. Harrison had already protested four times that we couldn’t play it. That we hadn’t practiced it. That we had no sheet music for it. And had she failed to notice string quartets make classical music?

  We’d stopped playing, but we were still entertaining the crowd. Gone were the clinks of silverware and the thrum of conversation. Who wouldn’t be fascinated by a three-sheets-to-the-wind bride and a baffled quartet with no guitars, no drums, and no singer? They probably thought it was the most outrageous thing that ever happened at a wedding, but they didn’t know about the time a chipmunk got into the church and hid beneath our client’s bridal gown.

  Although come to think of it, the chipmunk wasn’t screaming that any high school garage band could have managed this very simple request. The chipmunk also hadn’t threatened to stop payment on the check.

  I glanced at the cellist on my left, wearing a tuxedo now that he wasn’t driving a cab. Shock had replaced t
he mischief in his eyes.

  The groom dragged over the emcee, shouting, “Make them do it!”

  The emcee leaned closer to Harrison. “Can’t you try?”

  Harrison hissed back, “Are you out of your mind?”

  Ah, the permanent standoff. Harrison wasn’t going to play and the bride wasn’t going to back down and the emcee wasn’t going to stand up to her. That left us how many options? So I tucked my viola and bow against my side. Approaching the bride, I pitched my voice low like my instrument. “This is such a beautiful wedding. Let’s take a walk to the head table. You can show me the cake topper.”

  The bride swung to glare at me, and her anger drew all the air out of the hall, leaving me unable to breathe. “Don’t you dare tell me what to do! If I want to hear about hotels and eagles, I’m going to have it!”

  I stepped backward, only to have the bride grab the scroll of my viola. I yanked away, but she said, “Now play it!”

  That’s when our second violinist took the floor. With her height enhanced by her floor-length sheath dress, Shreya raised her violin with authority.

  Me? I authoritatively fled.

  I had no idea what Shreya planned to do, but with her black hair loose to her waist, she would look pretty darned good doing it. And then, to my surprise, she played eight bars of the usually-done-on-guitar riff made famous by the Eagles.

  Seeming too small for his tuxedo, Harrison whispered, “Oh, God.”

  Hands clasped, the bride nodded: do it again.

  Shreya laid bow to strings and repeated the riff, this time going all the way through. I detected subtle differences between the first and second attempts, but I didn’t think the bride could have, even if she’d been sober, nor that she’d have cared. Shreya was improvising, in other words. And just like that, we were flying without a net.

  I caught Harrison’s eye. Did panic harmonize with horror? For all I knew, Harrison might have been the only one in America who’d never heard “Hotel California.” But we already had our heads in the guillotine, so I raised my viola. If Shreya could fashion a performance out of a drunken bride’s demand, surely I could pick up the key and fake it.

  After all, the joke goes that in order to imitate a violist, you only need to hit a lot of wrong notes in the low register.

  Once I started, Josh our cellist laid down rapid bass notes on my other side.

  After Shreya ran through it a third time, she gave her head a good shake. Then clamping her violin between her chin and shoulder, she raised her left hand to yank off the black-haired wig, revealing a head of ultra-short blue hair.

  The bride squealed as Shreya resumed playing, her hips never still, her violin so in motion that I couldn’t believe it stayed aloft. Partners, she and the violin fully inhabited the space of the music. Beneath the chandelier crystals were the bride all in white and Shreya all in black, the bride still and Shreya in motion, the bride alone but Shreya and her violin together.

  God, she’s good. I scanned the guests to see if anyone else recognized the magic, but no. At setup, the events manager had said the bridal party arrived drunk to the ceremony, and most of the guests hadn’t taken long to follow suit.

  The groom stood slack-jawed while several groomsmen cat-called, and that’s when the bride snatched the emcee’s mike so she could warble on about Califo-o-oornia. Rather than change key to follow her, Shreya kept repeating the riff. The videographer wore the world’s wickedest grin as he encouraged the bride to mug for the camera.

  Ever our heroic leader, Harrison set his violin on the chair and laid his arm across the bride’s shoulders, guiding the mike toward himself. Finally. This was fun and all, but maybe he could stop this Titanic from sinking not only itself but our quartet’s career.

  “Thank you very much!” He sounded enthusiastic rather than horrified, and it stopped her mid-lyric. He guided the mike free of her hands. “Let’s have some applause for our bride Melissa and her stunning performance!”

  Stunning. Unintentional irony was not Harrison’s strong suit, but it got applause. Heaven help our reputation. Worse, if the bride woke up tomorrow and remembered any of this, that check would end up bouncing harder than a home run whacking the upper deck at Yankee Stadium.

  Heart thrumming a staccato, I glanced sideways, and this time Josh caught my eye. He winked. I snickered.

  Cocking her head, Shreya sauntered to her seat, flashing us a grin. It was as if she’d said, We’re a team. We might be a newish quartet, but it’d take more than one wasted bride to knock us to the ground.

  Struggling to relax my shoulders enough to play, I looked to Harrison for our cue.

  Only then did I see Harrison still standing with the mike, and what he held in his hand. Before I could react, he earned us the eternal enmity of Miss Manners and anyone else with good taste. “If anyone wants to buy a copy of our CD, it’s on sale tonight for fifteen dollars!”

  Do you want to keep reading more? Awesome! Click here. And thanks!

  Footnotes for Upsie-Daisy, because we had to put them somewhere:

  1 Note to scientists everywhere: just because you forget about your used-up donut after you’ve replaced a flat doesn’t mean the donut has forgotten; it’s going to ride around, dead, until the next time you need it, when you will abruptly remember that yes, there was something to do at the garage. [Go Back]

  2 I’ve never actually eaten at a place like that, but I’m sure you could find one in Manhattan. [Go Back]

  Also by Jane Lebak

  Seven Archangels

  Hired Man

  The Adventures Of Lee And Bucky

  Honest and for True

  Forever and for Keeps

  Upsie-Daisy

  Standalone

  Even A Stone

  Seven Angels Short Story Bundle

  Damage

  Winter Branches

  Half Missing

  Pickup Notes

  Carrying to Term: A Guide for Parents After a Devastating Prenatal Diagnosis