Don’t Let Me Go(58)

The silence that followed seemed to make everybody uneasy except Grace. Rayleen looked at her fingernails, and Felipe bounced his knee up and down. Grace looked across the hall at Billy, and he had that anxious, stressed look on his face, even though Grace was pretty sure he hadn’t heard most of Mrs. Hinman’s speech.

Mrs. Hinman sat weirdly upright, hands clasped in her lap, a shocked look on her face, as if someone else had said all those things, and she hadn’t approved of any of them.

“This is a good meeting so far,” Grace said, to correct anyone who might be thinking otherwise. “Who wants to go next?”

No one made a sound.

So it startled everyone, even Grace, when someone appeared in the open doorway and banged hard on the door, causing it to slam back against the wall.

Grace looked up to see that it was Yolanda, and that Yolanda was pissed.

Rayleen said, “Oh, hi, Yolanda,” and stood up to greet her.

And Yolanda said, “What’s this I hear about you taking Grace away from her own mother?”

Grace got right between them, fast, so there couldn’t be any trouble. Well, not too much, anyway. “It was all my idea,” she said.

“Yours? You wanted to be taken away from your mother?”

“We wanted to…not…oh, crap, now I forgot the word again. Guys, what’s that thing we wanted not to do with my mom?”

“Enable,” Rayleen said, still standing. Still looking aware of the fact that Yolanda was pissed. “We wanted to stop enabling her.”

“OK. Now how ‘bout you explain to me how letting her raise her own kid is enabling her.”

“I will!” Grace shouted. “Please let me! I know this one real well! It’s because she was doing nothing but sleep all day long, and all my nice neighbors here were taking care of me, but then we figured out that if they just kept taking care of me, she could take all the drugs she wanted and still know I’d be OK. And so we knew that was no good. So we figured sometimes people get better when they know they’re about to lose something, if it’s something they really, really don’t want to lose. Like me. So we told her she couldn’t see me again until she got clean.”

A brief pause, during which it was hard to guess what Yolanda was thinking. She wasn’t giving anything away so far.

“Oh, my God,” Yolanda said. “That’s brilliant.”

“It is?” Grace asked, surprised that Yolanda liked it.

“Grace, you thought that up all by yourself?”

“Not really. I got a lot of advice from Mr. Lafferty.”

“Actually, she put a lot of it together on her own,” Rayleen said.

“OK, tell you what,” Yolanda said. “I’ll go back down there right now and tell her she’s shit out of luck, because I’m on your side. She’ll be pissed, but oh, well. Life’s like that sometimes. So, how long does she have to stay clean before she gets Grace back?”

Silence.

“Oh,” Rayleen said. “We didn’t set a time.”

“We should set a time,” Yolanda said. “Because she keeps cleaning up for a day or two. Getting everybody’s hopes up for nothing. I say we make her get thirty days. I’m right there with her at the meetings, and I’ll know if it’s the real deal.”

Everybody looked at everybody else.

“OK,” Rayleen said.

“Done,” Yolanda said, and rushed out.

“That was kind of weird,” Felipe said.

“Yeah, but it worked out OK,” Grace replied. “And it doesn’t get us out of having our meeting.”

“I think we should put off the meeting,” Rayleen said. “In case your mom gets upset. I don’t think we should be sitting here with the doors open after Yolanda has this little talk with her. Besides, we lost Billy again.”

Grace looked across the hall to see Billy’s apartment door closed, apparently with Billy inside it. She sighed.

“I better go over there and talk to him,” she said.

? ? ?

“You know,” she said to Billy, who was sitting on the couch, looking shorter and more curled-up than usual, and hugging the cat, “I need you to be at my school when I do my dance. You know. In the audience. Clapping for me and all.”

Billy snorted laughter. As if he really thought it was a joke. As if he hadn’t seen this coming.

“No, seriously,” she said.

She watched the color drain out of his face, suddenly. At least, what little color he’d had to begin with.

“Grace. You know I can’t do that.”

“No. I know you can.”

“Grace, I—”

“Look. Billy. Do you want to just do the easy thing, because it’s what you always do? Or do you want to shine?”

He turned his eyes to her, looking bruised.

“That’s not fair.”

“It was fair when you asked it to me.”

“That was different.”

“How was it different?”

“Because that was me asking you.”

“Just think about it. OK? Promise me you’ll think about it. I know you’ll come up with the right thing.”

“Overconfidence is a wonderful attribute of youth,” Billy said, quietly.