Other Shepards

by Adele Griffin

  Miss Pia leans forward to clutch Geneva’s palm, but germ-phobic Geneva snatches it away.

  “Can you read without holding?” she asks.

  Miss Pia pauses a moment, then recovers and nods. She drops her head, so close her eyelashes could kiss Geneva’s fingers. “Like I said, you are going on a journey,” she intones in a phony dramatic cadence. “You have been confused for a real long time. Which is from a problem. This problem is hard to see. I do not know where your journey takes you. Aha but wait. A man or a lady appears in your future. He maybe she holds three roses. One rose is for beauty. One is for chance. The last rose—”

  “She’s allergic to roses,” I grumble. Annie hiccups a laugh.

  “Come on!” Geneva exclaims, twisting in her chair to frown at us.

  “Who’s there?” the psychic asks, looking past Geneva.

  “Oh, they’re with me,” Geneva answers. “Go on, back to the fortune. What is the last rose for?”

  “Who’re you?” Miss Pia points at me.

  I look at Annie, who shrugs.

  “I’m Holland. Holland Shepard.”

  “Get outta here!” The Dracula accent is gone, replaced by one more distinctly New York in origin. “Shepard, I knew it.” She taps her chest. “Pia Kredneck—I went to Ambrose. I was a senior Liz’s freshman year. We played on the tennis team together. She was excellent at tennis. I knew Johnnie Shepard better—same grade. Even went on a double date with him. He wasn’t my date, though, he went out with Suki Miller, but I went out with his best buddy, Lentil—Len Tillman—which is how I met Johnnie.”

  I nod. I know Suki Miller, John’s high school girlfriend, who is now Suki Miller Slatey. Mom always says Suki would have been her daughter-in-law, and last year on John’s birthday Suki even sent us some hand-marbleized coasters and such a long letter about missing John that Mom suspected that Suki’s marriage might be heading for trouble. Lentil keeps in touch, too. He’s been living in Seattle and is the father of five-year-old twins. He sent us a cute picture of their last birthday party, two dark-haired boys covered in white frosting. The picture is somewhere in the house, tucked into a drawer with the marbleized coasters and other like mementos.

  “I saw you in the door, and I kept thinking, Who does she remind me of? You could be Liz, I swear!” Pia stands, hands on her hips, Geneva’s fortune forgotten. “Get over here, let me take a look!”

  She reaches across the table and pumps my hand, and her robe falls open to reveal a pair of spandex jogging pants and a halter top.

  “Wow, so this is so something, so surrealish. A long time ago now, but still, looking at you brings me back. Jeez.”

  “And this is my sister, Geneva,” I mention. Pia registers the introduction with a faint wave in Geneva’s direction; her thoughts are focused elsewhere.

  “That memorial service was, I mean, you couldn’t even get in the churchyard. I was there, I wouldn’t have missed it, paying respects. Three kids in one family, it was like you couldn’t stop thinking about it, talking about it. In college I heard you were born, and I was so psyched for your parents. Seemed real positive, after all that negative. I sent over a pair of pink sparkle booties.” She smiles, spacing a finger and thumb an inch apart. “Teeny little baby shoes, pink hearts on the toes.”

  “I don’t really remember them,” I say awkwardly. “But, um, thanks. Oh, I should—this is Annie.” I turn, but Annie is gone.

  “Hey.” Geneva stands up. “Where’d she go?” She skirts past me, out the door and into the street, leaving me to indulge Pia Kredneck’s memories.

  And talk Pia does, many of the same stories that I have heard before, from Brett—how John loved Pink Floyd and followed their concerts up and down the coast, and the time he made bird noises over the school intercom. Then she tells me a new story about Elizabeth being one of the only freshman allowed to sit in the senior lounge because she played varsity tennis. Once Pia gets going on high school memories, she can’t stop, and I nod and listen and think about Geneva turned loose on the streets of Soho. I am relieved when Pia says she has a date tonight and wants to close shop early.

  “I’ll come back and visit,” I promise. “It’s always great to meet people who knew my brothers and sister.” The parents can be selective about who they invite into our home, and to look at Pia is to know she did not make the cut, which is a shame because she seems very lively. Plus you could get all those free lessons on how to read tea leaves and palms.

  “Oh, yeah.” Pia’s little braids quiver as she nods. “Totally. I live upstairs. We’ll put on some Floyd, dish up the old times.”

  After they get a little tipsy on the memories, people who knew my old family almost inevitably forget that I never did.

  I help her lock up—two glass doors, then a roll-down metal grill—and after she is gone I sit on her stoop and wait. I catch sight of my reflection in the restaurant window across the street. The gold buttons of my jacket flash like gentle stars in their blue sky of fabric. I shift my hand to watch the change in my reflection, to make sure I am really here.

  “There you are!”

  “Annie said she’d see us later.” Geneva has crept up to my side, puffing short breaths. “She walks too quick. I didn’t feel like following.”

  “We better get home.”

  She squints at Miss Pia’s shop. “Where’d she go? What about my fortune?”

  “Next time. It’s almost six, anyway.” I pat the pockets of my coat and realize that the few bills I brought with me are back at the thrift shop, tucked in a pocket of my old wool jacket. “Do you have any money?”

  Geneva shakes her head. “I spent it on Miss Pia.”

  “Figures.”

  “But she said I was going on a trip. What do you think she meant by that?”

  “She wanted to make you happy so you felt like it was worth your money. There’s no such thing as a real fortune teller.” I grip Geneva’s fingers in my hand. “There’s no such thing as a psychic, or a future predictor, or whatever you want to call it. It’s not real.”

  “I always thought that what makes something real is deciding it is.” Geneva readjusts her hand so that it notches more tightly into mine. “I wish I knew what that last rose was for, though,” she says sadly, with a small backward glance at the shop.

  “Who cares?” I say. “You make your own fortune, right?”

  And yet it seems sort of typical that the story of my sister’s future was interrupted in order to tell the tales of my family’s past.

  seven

  louis and mom

  “THAT’S A COOL JACKET. Military style.” Louis salutes me and smiles.

  “She traded it for her other one at a thrift shop yesterday. This morning she sneaked it out of the house in her book bag.” For once, Geneva makes me look better instead of worse. Louis whistles approvingly.

  We have bumped into each other in front of our vendor again this morning. Louis knew I would be here. I could tell by the way he stood, looking down the block when Geneva and I were no more than two specks drifting up the sidewalk. I knew by the way that he dawdled, drinking his juice, that he was waiting for me. The thought is still spiking my stomach as my mind memorizes images to savor later. Louis Littlebird has a chip in his bottom front tooth. Louis Littlebird wears a silver chain around his neck and a plain gray sweatshirt under his leather jacket today.

  “I’ll walk you two over to Ambrose, if you want,” Louis says. “I got time.”

  Geneva pushes ahead of us. “I can escort myself,” she declares over her shoulder. I could give her a hug right then for good sisterliness. I did not even have to make a bet.

  Louis walks with a fighting lift in his jaw and a sleepy smile that makes him appear relaxed and thoughtful. I want to imitate his style, to take something of his and make it my own.

  “So where do you usually hang out after school?” he asks. “You and your friends.”

  “Oh, you know. Chatterbox Diner, for one.” Which is not a complete lie.
Kathlyn LeDuc and I have been to the Chatterbox on Friday afternoons whenever I stay over at her house, but it is usually my responsibility to bring Geneva home directly after school. But Louis does not need to know that I spend most afternoons taking care of my little sister. “Except this past week, Geneva and I have been heading straight home after school, since we’ve been helping an artist friend of ours paint our kitchen.”

  “Sounds boring.”

  “No, it isn’t. Really. We get to paint pictures on the wall.”

  “Oh, like a mural? My older brother did that once on one of the outside walls of our school. It was a tribute to the Grateful Dead after Jerry Garcia died. He got suspended. But he said some things are more important than rules.”

  “Totally.” I cannot wait to record this story in my L. L. Notebook of Facts.

  We turn the corner and he slips his hand into mine. “Know how to thumb wrestle?” he asks. “I’m the undefeated champion in my family. It’s easy. Hold your hand in mine like this, all fingers in, but keep your thumb free, like that. Okay, when I say go, try to pin my thumb under yours. Ready?”

  “No, wait.” I stop walking. “I can’t do this and walk. Now I’m ready.”

  “One two three, go!”

  Our thumbs jab and pounce with the mechanized movements of two monsters in an old Godzilla movie. Louis wins promptly, his thumb squeezing mine bloodless.

  “Best outta three,” he says, and beats me again.

  “Strong thumbs,” I comment, shoving my tingling hands in my pockets before he tries for a rematch. “I like that in a guy.” I had only meant to make a joke, but I wonder if my comment was too slinky. Thankfully, Louis doesn’t seem to mind or notice.

  “It’s from giving my mom neck rubs. She gets bad headaches. I know all the right pressure points.”

  Louis’s comment seems kind of slinky, too, and I am not sure what to answer, so I do not say anything.

  We walk quickly to catch up with Geneva. Words that have been stumbling around in my brain now slip past my lips.

  “You could come over,” I say. “After school, I mean. To see our mural.” I feel the tips of my ears ignite.

  “Yeah?”

  “I mean, only if you have time.”

  “As long as I can catch an F train near your house. I’d need to be home by six to help make dinner, otherwise my mom’ll holler.”

  “We’re 176 Waverly. Between Greenwich and Seventh Avenue South, on the corner below West Tenth.”

  “Yeah, that’s easy. Okay. Like four-thirty?”

  “Sure. We’ll be there. You can meet Annie. She’s the artist. She’s very cool.”

  “And your folks?”

  “They’ll be at work. They won’t be home until after six.”

  “You got food?”

  “I think so. Definitely.”

  “And I can paint, too?”

  “Totally.”

  “Okay. See you there, Sergeant Shepard.” Louis salutes me again, then glides to a stop not too short of the curious crowd milling around the school’s entryway. Just as I hope, the whispers and stares begin.

  “Who was that?” Kathlyn pokes me in the shoulder after Louis moves out of earshot.

  “That’s Louis Litterbug, Holland’s new boyfriend,” explains Geneva. “Mom hasn’t met him. She’ll haaate him,” she sings as she skips away to the door where her class is lining up.

  “Don’t call him that,” I call out to her retreating back.

  “Quite the leather-clad rebel escort,” says Tyra Sharp, a stylish, not altogether friendly girl in my class who gets most of her attitude from the fact that her mom is a made-for-TV movie producer. “Do tell more.”

  “Do tell,” parrots Tyra’s best friend, Mindy Bruner. Suddenly I am the focus of more attention than I can remember since I won the tennis award. Except this kind of attention is way better.

  “He’s coming over this afternoon,” I say. From all around me, there are sounds of approval.

  Classes seem to double or triple in length as I wait for the day to be over. Louis is my secret to savor and hoard, and I safeguard it with a bet. If everything goes right with Louis today, then you one-hundred-percent absolutely have to tell the parents about him within the next week. It will be a hard promise to keep, because I am sure the parents won’t like Louis, but I feel better knowing the deal has been made.

  “He’s coming to our house?” Geneva repeats as we walk home from school that afternoon. “Does Mom know?”

  “No, but Annie will be there. She’s our supervisor, and she told me to invite him, remember?”

  “Sure I remember,” Geneva answers.

  At home, however, Annie is nowhere to be found. Books are scattered on the kitchen table, and a box of chalk lies opened on the counter. A thumbnail sketch is taped to the refrigerator.

  “Where do you think she went?” Geneva looks depressed. She rolls a stick of chalk over her palm. “Looks like she has everything all set up for us, like she wants us to get started. That must be the final sketch.”

  “And Louis is coming.” A point of fact that seems more hazardous now that Annie’s not around. “What are we supposed to do?”

  “Change clothes, first off. You don’t want him to think you wear your dumb uniform out of school. And you have pen on your cheek.”

  “Oh, gross!” There is no time to think in the next fifteen minutes, as I concentrate on unearthing the right T-shirt to go with my jeans, brushing my hair fifty flattening strokes, borrowing one of Mom’s hair combs—then tossing it back on her dresser when the hair style makes me look like I tried too hard—and going through the business of sketching on and wiping off makeup.

  I do not even hear the rattle of the front gate, or the doorbell.

  “He’s here!” yells Geneva.

  I squint one last time in my bedroom mirror, then the hall mirror, rub off more lipstick with the back of my hand, and glide down the stairs.

  Geneva and Louis are standing in the kitchen. “It’s called a trompe l’oeil,” Geneva is explaining in her know-it-all voice, “which means trick of the eye in French. That’s what we and Annie are making in our kitchen.” She grabs one of the opened books on the table. “See? These birds are my idea. It’s going to be like a tropical paradise, sky all around. Cerulean blue plus cadmium scarlet are my bird colors. I picked them out.”

  “I never saw anyone’s kitchen look like paradise,” Louis says with a smile as he glances over at me. I wave.

  “We have creamsicles and salt-and-vinegar potato chips,” I tell him. I had practiced saying this sentence in the mirror and it comes out perfectly.

  “What’s wrong with your voice, Holland?” asks Geneva. “If you’re getting a cold, don’t come near me. I’m very susceptible,” she informs Louis.

  “Aren’t we all,” Louis replies seriously. “Do you have juice?”

  “Yep.” I move to the fridge and cupboard.

  “And we have coffee. Look, Holland, did you notice Annie left a full pot on?”

  “Oh, great.” It is Annie’s own blend, too. Inhaling the warmth of spicy vanilla nutmeg makes me feel more at ease. “The artist came by earlier to set up,” I explain to Louis. “But who knows where she is now. She’s a little bit random.” I hand Louis a glass of orange juice, which he drains in an instant and hands back for a refill. His fingertips graze mine in the exchange; they are rough as bark, warm as summer. The sensation leaves me dizzy.

  “She from around here?” Louis asks. He picks up a piece of chalk and jiggles a blue line on the wall, then steps back to look at it.

  “She lives uptown,” I explain, “but she’s an artsy type. Her boyfriend’s an actor.” I immediately wish I hadn’t said the word boyfriend, since Louis might think that I consider him to be my boyfriend, or am considering boyfriends in general. He doesn’t seem to notice.

  “I can do those trees,” Louis says, pointing to the refrigerator. “The sketch shows that you’re going to put a big spiky one right here. I�
��ll do that one, if you want.”

  “I’m like the worst artist in my class, so if I’m allowed to paint, you definitely can.”

  “She’s great at science,” Geneva says. “You should see her cell diorama. She got a ribbon.”

  “Whoa,” says Louis. I can’t tell if he’s being sarcastic or not, so I just roll my eyes and say nothing.

  Geneva turns on the radio and Louis changes the dial.

  “University station,” he explains. “It plays all the buzz clips, no repeats.”

  “I never knew the University had its own music station,” I say.

  “Our dad works for the University,” Geneva tells Louis.

  “If your own dad works for the University, how could you two not know about this station?” he asks.

  “He’s kind of old,” I admit.

  “I knew about it,” Geneva says unconvincingly.

  Louis uses bold, decisive outlines to define his sketch, so that the shape of his tree becomes as strong as the shape of the space around it. Geneva concentrates on details. She works on a far corner of the kitchen, filling a bird of paradise into the arm of a free-floating branch. The bird’s plumed head and rubbery toes are in perfect proportion. The leaves of my own sad shrub are a blur of uncertainty: nothing like the “espalier” diagram I am trying to copy from one of Annie’s books. No matter how I move my chalk against the wall, I cannot give life to my plant.

  “I want my kneaded eraser,” I grumble after a while. Louis and Geneva barely acknowledge my words. Their chalkings are gorgeous compared with my own smudges. As I’m leaving the kitchen, I allow myself a glance at the lazy ripple of muscle that moves across Louis’s back as he works. He wears his sweatpants low, and I can see the white band of his underwear elastic. I watch for a while.

  Upstairs, I cannot locate my eraser. I kneel on the floor and quickly dump out the top drawer of my desk. I don’t even know what I am doing up here, or why I care so much about finding the stupid eraser, anyway. It won’t make my sketch better, that’s for sure. A hot sweat begins to stick under my arms. I should change my T-shirt. No, that would look like I’m thinking about my outfits too much. I stand up and grab my deodorant, then bang it down again. I feel desperate.