Only John Winters sits.
“You need to go, Billie,” Mash says. “They’re waving at you.”
While we’ve been having this chat, the band has taken the field, and two stages that were poised on the track have been wheeled to the fifty-yard line. Janie Lee and Woods are atop one, mic’d and ready to perform in conjunction with the band at the conductor’s command. Woods is wearing a sweater that does him no favors. Cable-knit. If it didn’t have the wooden toggle buttons, the whole thing could be repurposed for a rag, and yet he is still very good-looking. Janie Lee is even better still.
Fifty hollers, “Yeah, Woodsey! Yeah, Janie!”
The field commander climbs onto her box, flips her wrists. Brass and flutes and drums are everywhere. The first feat: Someone creative has ripped the explicit words from “Starships.” The second: The band has moves. The third: Janie Lee and Woods dance and sing on their stage as if they own the field.
“Damn,” Fifty says.
“Go,” Davey says. “I’ll be fine.”
He says this, but he’s drawn up, distant, other.
Mash nudges me. Nods at John. “What do we do about him?”
I say, “I. Do. Not. Know.”
We both wish Woods were here. But he is on the stage, right hand lifted in a final note. Around him, the color-guard flags slow to a stop. The band’s horns are all lifted and gleaming under the stadium lights. Everyone applauds. Woods and Janie Lee bow. The band breaks into the fight song to file off the field.
And now I must go. I can wait no longer. I have to entrust Davey to Mash and Fifty.
Tawny Jacobs and Caroline Cheatham stand, fidgeting and nervous, behind Ada May Adcock, Rebecca Carnicky, Wilma Frist, and several other committee members. They are all looking frantic that I’m not there. Here is what is supposed to happen: the mayor will say something about each of us and we will step forward and wave and then step back. It sounded very manageable when I read the mailed instructions from the mayor’s office. The same instructions that said Sunday-best attire was suggested but not required.
I perform a stadium check. Where is my dad? My mom? How furious will they be when I walk out on that stage in dirty jeans and an orange Otters Holt sweatshirt?
I reach Ada May and apologize. “I had an accident,” I have only managed to say when she whirls me around to face the crowd.
We are three women. Three generations. Who are supposed to be perfect specimens. Tawny in her pearls to my left. Caroline to my right in her diamonds. My competitors are draped in expensive clothes, are trimmed with et cetera, and I think, Women are made of et cetera.
Our mayor, a stout, well-respected man with a nose the shape of a lightbulb, holds the microphone. He reads about Tawny, long sweeping paragraphs about her financial generosity and kind demeanor that everyone knows is bullshit. Then he reads about Caroline, who is the poet laureate of Kentucky and a retired lieutenant colonel in the Army.
I’m next. Feeling ridiculous, I step forward, wave. He reads: “Elizabeth McCaffrey is the daughter of local minister Scott McCaffrey and local artist Clare McCaffrey. She is a third-generation McCaffrey to attend Otters Holt High School. She is the first teenager in the history of Otters Holt to be nominated for a Corn Dolly.”
That’s it. People are polite enough to clap. Including my parents, but they wear bewildered faces, either from his short paragraph or my clothes.
He didn’t mention rescuing Janie Lee from the water moccasin or the recent service projects. Perhaps because I was late. Perhaps because the person in charge of writing them isn’t my fan. Instead, I am a blazing example of why Woods put me on the guys’ side of the Hexagon. Hair tangled. Clothes rumpled. Hot dog chunks on my jeans.
He pets the air, begging the crowd to pipe down. “As you’ve probably guessed, with the passing of our benefactor, this year will be the last Harvest Festival. So the last awarded Corn Dolly will go to one of these ladies.” Whether it is planned for effect or he’s momentarily overcome, he pauses, keeps pausing, keeps pausing, says, “Let’s make sure it’s the best one yet.”
A pattering, polite as a golf crowd, moves through the bleachers. The mayor disappears like a referee after a terrible ballgame. The platforms are wheeled away by a high school crew.
The football team returns to a quiet stadium.
23
At halftime, a swarm of people are gossiping and searching for another bag of popcorn. All around me, the old tell the very young they are “sorry” and the young ask the old, “For what?” Many of them, like the John Winterses of the world, don’t understand the joy of eating roasted corn row-on-row or the pleasure of savoring Mrs. Rankin’s pumpkin-flavored lollipops to the last lick. The very young haven’t danced “Sally Down the Alley” or the “Potta Potta” or stayed up watching a movie on the side of Vilmer’s Barn. The very young don’t know the crescendo of emotions when a woman climbs three stage steps and accepts the Corn Dolly.
In my mind, I taste, I dance, I watch, I swell with memories. I am nostalgic for a future where I will have done all these things for decades.
I am not very young.
I am also in trouble.
Dad invites me into a makeshift office under the bleachers. We are among the bubble gum wrappers and dropped popcorn and paper cups. The throwaway things. Directly above us are the Corn Dolly winners. They are talking about me. Some using the word disgrace, others modern. Unaware that we are beneath them, one says, “I don’t see how Scott McCaffrey can control a congregation when he lets his daughter run all over him.”
“Do you even go to Community Church?” someone asks.
The accuser says, “No.” She says No as if to say Why would I?
Dad and I are frozen, listening for the next comment, but some football thing happens and cheers drown out the discussion. Dad points upward and gives me a face. The this-is-what-I’m-talking-about face. And I try to give him a face too. Just because they’re talking . . . are they right? His hands dive deep in his pockets; I get a view of his chin. A long view. As he prays or decides what to say first.
“What happened?” he asks.
A level question. The benefit of doubt.
Rather than explain, I say, “Nothing you’ll believe.”
“Try me.”
When I reach for explanations, they are not there. He is furious and ashamed of my behavior, but he hugs me anyway. I am pressed against him, his arms circle my back, we twist in a tiny swaying arc of love. I am inside his jacket, the silky lining soft and warm on my arms. I do not cry; I am numb with disappointment.
I tell him what happened. How John Winters showed up and I couldn’t leave Davey. How my gut was ringing and singing that being there was more important than dressing up. But that I did have dress clothes hanging in the girls’ bathroom. That I even had lipstick in my pocket. Bright red that could be seen from the top of the stands.
“It’ll be okay,” he tells me.
But we both know the words are as empty as the cups that have fallen from above.
Behind us, Coach Tilghman, Fifty’s uncle, barks, “Hustle up!” and “Come on, defense!” at his players. The scoreboard changes by three points. Above us the crowd watches and follows the cheerleaders’ prompts. “Give me an O! Give me a T!” But I doubt they have forgotten the halftime show. They will take to landlines. Sit in booths at the Fork and Spoon. Gather on porches, in cars and church pews, by newspaper stands, and they will “discuss” with vigor the faults of Elizabeth McCaffrey. It is easy to speculate, because it is a repeating piece of history. Some will blame my parents. Some will blame my youth. Some will blame the modern age. But they will blame.
“I love living here and I hate living here,” I whisper.
Dad puts a finger under my chin. He looks directly into my eyes. He says, not sweetly, not firmly, but somewhere in between, “You did your best. Anytime you can promise me, ‘Dad, that was my best,’ it’ll always be enough for me. If we move, we move.”
Three hou
rs later, he will forget what he has said.
24
Davey’s Part
A phone conversation between David Winters and Thomas Cahill after the football game.
THOMAS: You don’t sound good.
DAVID: Thom, if I tell you something, will you promise not to laugh?
THOMAS: No. But I promise I’ll stop eventually.
DAVID: You know the Harvest Festival?
THOMAS: The one your Octagon is working to save? The one you talk about all the frickin’ time?
DAVID: Hexagon.
THOMAS: Parallelogram. Rhombus. I’ll stop.
DAVID: Thank you.
THOMAS: What’s going on now?
DAVID: It’s stupid.
THOMAS: When has that ever stopped you before?
DAVID: When I was a kid, maybe six or seven, Big T took me to the festival.
THOMAS: Nostalgia is not stupid. What’s that Santayana quote? “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
DAVID: I can hear you googling.
THOMAS: I want to make sure I said it right. Keep talking.
DAVID: My parents went to the festival. I have all these vague fond memories. Playing Wiffle ball. Meeting a girl in a Batman costume. I even have this memory of my parents dancing. They might not have been happy, but in my head, they still loved each other then. They met at the Harvest Festival. Evidently, in college, my dad owned a couple of those inflatable bouncy things and rented them out to make money.
THOMAS: Sounds like him.
DAVID: And I know it’s childish, but if it ends—
THOMAS: You’ll lose your parents again.
DAVID: No. It’s not so much them. It’s that a piece of the place I came from will be gone. Does that make sense?
THOMAS: I want to hear more. By the way, the quote is right.
DAVID: Of course it is. Anyway, my grandfather invested so much in the festival, because he thought it brought people together. And I guess, even though my parents aren’t a great fit, and my dad is a total d-bag, I feel . . . I don’t know . . . a sense of responsibility.
THOMAS: That’s deep, Winters.
DAVID: I’m thinking about making a donation, but I know it’ll piss my dad off.
THOMAS: What doesn’t piss your dad off?
DAVID: If I do it, I’m not sure . . . I’m not sure if we can come back from it. It’ll be a betrayal.
THOMAS: Why don’t you wait and see if you win LaserCon?
DAVID: True.
THOMAS: That way you don’t necessarily have to burn the bridge with your dad.
DAVID: Good point.
THOMAS: You’re fighting awfully hard to stay there.
DAVID: Unexpectedly, yes.
THOMAS: Happy in Podunk, a memoir by David Winters.
DAVID: Don’t call it Podunk.
THOMAS: I’ve been waiting months for you to tell me that.
DAVID: (Laughs)
THOMAS: What can I do to help Save. The. Festival?
DAVID: How do you feel about kickball?
THOMAS: Like I’m on my way to Otters Holt right now.
DAVID: No, seriously.
THOMAS: I was serious. Name the time and the place.
DAVID: Saturday after LaserCon.
THOMAS. Consider it done. Hey, you told Billie the truth about the Corn Dolly stuff yet?
DAVID: No.
THOMAS: Clock’s ticking.
DAVID: I know. I know.
25
I shower off the hot dog and humiliation and retreat to the garage to flatten some aluminum cans with a mallet.
Janie Lee is turning the screws on the bow of her violin, tightening the hairs to practice. When they are perfectly taut, she applies the rosin. I like to watch her complete this methodical process. It is the most disciplined thing she does, and has always told me so much about her.
She followed me home from the game like a puppy. We didn’t discuss the concern in her eyes, but I saw it there, leaning toward me like a conversation. “I don’t need to talk about it,” I said as I hung her borrowed clothes from the handle above the backseat window. But she probably did need to talk about it. Because any time I am not fine, or she thinks I am not fine, it pecks at her like a chicken.
She plays the sad, lonely notes from Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D Major.
To make matters worse, she wears the same clothes from the night of the fire—the dream clothes. Pajamas and flannel and lips I tried to kiss off her face.
Elizabeth McCaffrey, born 1999—d. ? IN LOVING MEMORY: Murdered by UGGs.
These feelings need sorting. Just friends is better, I think.
I am capable of mind-over-mattering anything. For instance . . . these cans. They were round beverage holders. Nearly forty of them have gone under my X-Acto knife and lie like thin sheets of aluminum paper on the worktable, ready to be Guinevere’s breastplate. After I make this, I will move on to the Beauty and the Beast costumes Davey says will win us a thousand dollars. The supplies are set up on the far wall. Maybe I’ll start tonight after Janie Lee goes home.
One long note rises from the violin. It is not part of a known song. I stop flattening the cans. “What is it?” I ask.
She cuts big clear eyes toward the driveway, toward something unseen. “I was just thinking about you standing up there tonight,” she says.
The aluminum can is as flat as my mallet will make it. “I was a disaster.”
“You weren’t,” she insists. “You were just yourself. The mayor was an asshole.”
We battle eye on eye, me knowing that if I say, Me being myself is the problem, then she has a best friend obligation to dispute me. Something sugary and sweet like, Woods and I thought you were perfect. Which A) discounts the praise entirely, and B) is utter bullshit.
“Regardless of what the mayor said, I looked awful.”
“You didn’t.”
I skip this praise too. “I was worried about Davey. His dad, man, he’s a ruckus.” Ruckus is the nicest word in my vocabulary for John Winters. “I couldn’t make myself go and get ready.”
“Fifty told me. Said Davey’s dad is pressuring him to move back to Nashville.”
“Yeah.”
She looks uncertain. She asks, “How will you feel about that?”
“I’ll miss him.”
Davey is Hexagon, but he does not specifically belong to her the way it feels that he does to me. She is sad on my behalf, but it only stretches so far. “Are you going to kiss him?” she asks.
Her fingertips idly touch the hair on her bow, so I’m aware that she’s very unfocused. She is very methodical about the oils in her skin and their relationship to all things violin.
I am honest with her. “I would like to. You know, just to see if anything is there. I’m not even sure if he’s available.”
“I have people like that.”
That’s when my heart starts its galloping. Pieces of the dream, ones that had drifted hazily away, come punching back to reality.
“You know the day of the Hexagon of Love?” she asks.
I set the mallet away. “Sure,” I say.
“I know you were hurt about Woods putting you on the guys’ side, but did you notice anything else?”
What else was there to notice? Woods picking Mary Dancy? Old news. He does not, nor did he ever like her, and we both know that. This was either a diversionary tactic or cowardly action. I remind her of this, and she plays three lines of a Lindsey Stirling song she’s been obsessing over. Then she says, “Did you see our names? How it almost looked like they matched?”
I take my mallet back. Banging it against the cans, over and over, I consider my options. To answer is to take a flying leap into dangerous territory. Her shirt is blue, and I am noticing that her eyes are bluer right now than they were when she was dressed up earlier. She is noticing I am not answering her.
With the larger end of the violin, she pokes my stomach. “McCaffrey?”
“Yeah,
I saw,” I admit.
“And what did it make you think?”
She is opening a door. We both hear the hinges squeak. She told me a week ago that just friends is better. What has changed other than me wearing upchucked hot dog in front of the whole town? Nothing. And pity is a terrible reason to kiss someone you love.
I flatten my voice, remove every trace of passion like I am sweeping the corner of a dusty room. “I was pretty upset about the whole you’re-a-dude thing. I didn’t think about much else.”
With Woods, we decided to kiss the way we decided we would save the Harvest Festival or blow up a sock. Thoughtfully, strategically, antiseptically. It was simple because it was always somewhere I knew I might land. With Janie Lee, this is all so new. There are other barriers. Do we really want to go there? Risk changing the fundamental nature of our friendship? She isn’t Gerry. I’ll have to see her regularly. There could be residue if this shakes out poorly. And do two names, across from each other on Einstein, mean anything?
As far as she knows, I’m buying a hundred acres beneath Molly the Corn Dolly and living here until I have an actual tombstone. She specifically cited future plans in another city as a reason things with Woods wouldn’t work out. By her own ideals, I am a bad choice. Why do this now?
But I know why. We’re curious. I’m fixated on the idea of What if? We may never get another moment when we are this open. And although I am afraid it will change us, Woods and I are doing just fine. Courage begets courage.
“All right, Miller. Let’s do this thing,” I say.
Neither of us needs a definition. She does not give me a chance to change my mind. In a familiar way, she moves closer, pushes the mallet until it falls off the table and bounces under the saw. She twirls a piece of my hair around her finger.
I duplicate her action, touching her hair, and then her earlobe. She’s always touching, petting, stroking, and cuddling. I am none of these things.
The moment to bail arrives. She stares at my hand, aware. Stares at my mouth, aware. The tip of her tongue is poised on her bottom lip. The violin hangs between us. History is between us too.
Dress Codes for Small Towns Page 16
