Don’t Let Me Go(28)

She came back to the couch and sat again, slumped, staring out at the rain.

“I heard it was gonna rain all week,” she said.

“There is one thing we could do. But I have no idea how we’d accomplish it.”

“What?”

“Well. It’s not hard to make a little dance floor to practice tapping. All we’d need is a big piece of plywood. Five feet square, six feet square. Whatever we could get. And we can put it right here on the living room rug, and the rug would muffle the sound. Keep it from sounding so sharp by the time it went through the floor. So if we had that, we’d be golden. But that’s sort of like saying, all we need to do is route the freeway though my living room. Easy, right? I don’t go out. You can’t walk to a lumber yard by yourself…”

“I could ask Felipe!”

“Does he have a car?”

“I don’t think so. But maybe he’d walk or take the bus.”

“Big thing to carry home.”

“I could ask him,” she said, already halfway to the door. “If he hasn’t left for work yet.”

“The shoes,” Billy said. “My shoes.”

Grace looked down at her feet, crestfallen. “But I have to hurry, though.”

A tough pause.

Then he said, “Right. Go. Hurry.”

The minute she tapped out into the hall, he felt the deep pang of separation. As if he’d just let her leave the house wearing his dog, or his baby. That is, if he’d had one of either to lose. He stared at the rain for a few minutes, purposely breathing into the anxiety in his chest, trying to honor it without adding to it.

Then Grace slipped back in. Literally. Came through the door, slipped on the rug, and landed on her butt again.

“I’m getting tired of doing that,” she said, still down.

“Maybe you better take the shoes off for today.”

Grace sighed, and began to undo the laces.

“He says he can’t. He says it’s miles and miles to the closest lumber place. And he must know, because he used to work doing construction. He says it’s way too far to carry something that big home. And it would be too big to go on the bus with it. He says Mr. Lafferty has a pickup truck. But he said he doesn’t talk to Mr. Lafferty, which I can sort of understand why, because Mr. Lafferty isn’t very nice to him. Felipe says it’s because he’s from Mexico. Do you think it’s because Felipe’s from Mexico?”

“Probably so, yes.”

“That’s not a very good reason.”

“I agree.”

She sat on the couch beside him, the tap shoes in her hand, and then set them down gently on the couch between them. As if she saw them as being like a baby or a dog, too.

“So he says he won’t ask Mr. Lafferty, but I can ask Mr. Lafferty. If I want.”

“Does Rayleen have a car?”

“Yeah. Rayleen does.”

“Oh. Good.”

“But it’s broken, and she doesn’t have enough money to get it fixed.”

“Oh. Bad.”

“What do you think I should do?”

“I think you should wait and talk to Rayleen before you do anything. Especially before you talk to Lafferty.”

“K,” Grace said.

And they stared at the rain for several minutes more.

“This is really boring,” Grace said.

“I would tend to agree.”

“What do you do when I’m not here?”

“Pretty much this.”

“Let’s play a game,” Grace said.

“I’m not sure I’ve got the energy.”

“It could just be a talking game. You know, like a truth or dare sort of a game.”

“Ooh,” Billy said. “I don’t know. Sounds dangerous.”

“It’s just words. How can words be dangerous?”

“You have a lot to learn about the world, baby girl. Nothing is more dangerous than words.”

“That’s stupid. What about a gun? A gun can kill you dead.”

“Only your body,” Billy said. “It can’t kill your soul. Words can kill your soul.”

“Well, maybe we could just stay away from those words. You know. The dangerous kind.”

“Which ones did you have in mind?”

“I had a friend once. Well, I have a couple of friends, but not anybody I see outside school or anything. But I had a really good friend, Janelle was her name, but then when I was in first grade, she moved with her family to San Antonio. That’s in Texas.”

“So I hear,” Billy said.

“We used to play this game at sleepovers. Like she’d sleep over at my house or I’d sleep over at hers. This was when my mom was clean, and the house was clean, and there was food and everything, and it was OK to have people over. So we’d be in bed, under the covers. We’d pull the covers up over our heads like a tent, like this tent that we could both fit into—”

“We’re not doing that part,” Billy said.

“Right, I know, stop talking. Don’t interrupt.”

“Sorry.”

“So then the game was just two questions. What do you want more than anything? And what do you not want more than anything? Like, what scares you really bad, worse than anything else?”