Addie and the King of Hearts
Page 7
“I didn’t like it either,” he said. “Tanya was dancing up a storm with everybody else, and she said she didn’t care if I stayed or not, so I just left. Anyway,” he said, talking very fast. “I had this over at my house and I just wanted to give it to you since tomorrow is Valentine’s Day and I didn’t send out cards or anything.”
He quickly shoved the box at me, and I took it.
“Thanks,” I said. No one had ever given me a box of candy before in my life.
“Well, Billy, come in and have a piece of cake with us,” Grandma said.
“Yeah,” I said. “You might as well, now that you’re here.”
Billy joined us at the table, and I cut a big piece of cake for him and poured him a glass of milk.
“Well, it’s not very often I get to sit down to the table with a king,” laughed Irene. “Congratulations, Billy.”
“Thanks,” he said, and blushed.
“You’re not a bad dancer, either,” Irene said to him. “I saw you flittin’ around out there.”
I had a feeling Irene was building him up to impress me, but I wasn’t quite sure. Billy seemed embarrassed, but Irene took no notice and rattled on.
“I remember my high school prom,” she said. “I invited a boy I just barely knew from another town, and when we went out on the dance floor, it turned out his town did the two-step different than our town.” She laughed. “Well, you shoulda seen us staggering around that floor—like two hogs on ice. Couldn’t get together to save our souls!”
She had a big, contagious laugh, and we were all laughing with her by the time she finished. I could see what Dad had meant about her being a lot of fun.
And I could see a change in him. He looked more relaxed and happy than I could remember in a long time. I thought of the snapshots in our family photo album; pictures of him and my mother before I was born—they were fishing, hiking, sleigh-riding—happy and enjoying themselves. I had seldom seen that carefree side of Dad, but I thought I saw a touch of it now. I felt a moment of jealousy that Irene had been able to do that for him and I hadn’t. But then I knew I could laugh with someone like Billy about things Dad would never understand. It really wasn’t something to be jealous about, and I was glad Irene was there.
Billy seemed to have caught the storytelling bug from Irene.
“You should have seen us trying to dance in the spotlight,” Billy said to Grandma. “They had this dumb light right in our eyes so we couldn’t see where we were going, and I kept tripping over my robe and my crown kept slipping.”
He got up and demonstrated for Grandma, stumbling around the kitchen floor. He was so funny that she laughed and laughed, and the rest of us did too, until I thought we would choke on our chocolate cake.
“Then Addie made a terrific basket,” he said. “A one-handed jump shot.”
“Did you see that?” I asked, rather proud he had noticed it.
“Yeah, it was neat.”
“Mr. Davenport didn’t think so,” I said quietly.
“Listen,” said Irene. “That Mr. Davenport is a little on the stuffy side if you ask me. I thought the basketball game was the best part of the whole dance.”
“Yeah,” said Billy, laughing, “Me, too!”
I went over to the counter and got the box of candy he had brought and put it on the table. Everyone admired it, and I opened it and we all had some. Dad said our teeth would fall out from all the sweets, which was the kind of thing he always said, and Grandma said Valentine’s Day was only once a year, which was the kind of thing she always said.
Then I went into the bedroom, unlocked my private drawer and took out the special valentine I had made for Mr. Davenport.
As I removed it, the scent of Mr. Davenport’s Rum and Maple tobacco wafted up toward me, and I felt suddenly wounded. What a stupid thing to have kept someone’s tobacco!
I grabbed the knotted handkerchief and ran to the window with it. I opened the window wide, untied the knot and thrust the handkerchief out into the cold. A gust of wind fluttered it, and the loose tobacco drifted away in the night air. I closed the window with a bang and pressed the handkerchief to my face. It still smelled like Rum and Maple, I thought, annoyed, but I knew it would wash out.
I went back to the dresser and picked up the valentine. I looked at Mr. Davenport’s name on the envelope for a moment. I took out the valentine. I had worked on it for hours. It was layer upon layer of hearts, made in alternating pieces of red paper, lace doily, tin foil, red glitter, white glitter and red velvet, with white and red ribbons laced all through it. The bottom heart was the largest, with each one on top progressively smaller, so that it had a fantastic three-dimensional effect. On the top heart it said simply “Be My Valentine, From Addie.” I had not wanted an elaborate verse to detract from my design.
I put it down carefully on the dresser, then picked up the envelope with Mr. Davenport’s name on it and tore it up into little pieces. I took another envelope from my valentine box and wrote. “To the King of Hearts, From Addie” on it.
I went back to the kitchen. Billy was still at the table, joking and talking and trying to help Irene figure out which chocolate was a coconut cream.
I looked at him and thought about how we had been friends for so many years. There was even a snapshot in our family album of my first birthday party, and Billy was one of the guests, bawling his head off while I was busy plunging my fist into the cake. We had shared a double desk in kindergarten. We went to the same Sunday School class, rode horses together, quarrelled, giggled, and competed with each other for nearly thirteen years. Maybe Dad had a point. Billy had been there all along, and I was so used to seeing him that I hadn’t really taken a good look at him.
I motioned to him to join me over by the door, and he left the table. I shoved the envelope at him the same way he had given me the box of candy.
“Don’t open this till you get home,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said, and gave me a big grin.
Then Billy and I went back to the table, and we all clinked our coffee cups and glasses of milk together and wished each other a Happy Valentine’s Day.
Epilogue
Billy and I were good friends all through high school. I learned not to take his friendship for granted, and he treated me with the same regard. When we went away to different universities, we wrote letters and saw each other in the summer. Then I went off to New York to become an artist and Billy married a girl he met in college. But we still keep in touch. We’re still friends, and I think we always will be.
I never saw Mr. Davenport again after he moved away. In a few years I had to look at the class picture to remember his face, but I would never forget how I had felt about him.
I knew Dad had been right. Feeling something for other people was the important thing, even if it didn’t always work out the way you thought it would.
When I realized that, I knew I was beginning to grow up—that Valentine’s Day in 1949.
About the Author
Gail Rock grew up in Valley, Nebraska. After receiving a BA in fine arts from the University of Nebraska, she moved to New York and began a career in journalism. She has worked as a film and TV critic and has done freelance writing for newspapers and magazines.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1976 by Gail Rock
Cover design by Kelly Parr
ISBN: 978-1-4976-7384-7
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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