Out Of Tune

CHAPTER 3

MEGAN

Forty minutes. That was what I had. Forty minutes, a flattened cake box, and three hundred dollars that didn't feel like mine.

I ran out of the alley and stuck out my arm at a yellow cab, something I had never done in my life. Taxis were for people whose time was worth something. I watched the meter climb the whole way, doing sums in my head and hating how fast numbers move.

"What's the hurry?" the driver asked.

"Somebody's anniversary lunch."

He didn't ask anything else. At a red light he went around the block instead of waiting, and we came out ahead. When I paid him, he handed me a dollar in change.

"Good luck, kid."

Sweet Rosa's sat between a laundromat and a shoe repair shop. The sign above the door was faded, and the bell still worked. Rosa took one look at the pink smears on my shirt and laughed. Then she saw my face and stopped.

"Oh, honey. What happened to you?"

"Long story. Do you have another anniversary cake?"

She checked the case and pulled out a white box. Same flowers, a little smaller. Two hundred.

I counted the man's money into her hand. The bills were crumpled and warm and wrong somehow, but I had nothing else. Rosa boxed the cake herself, and before she handed it over, she pressed a cinnamon roll into my fingers.

"Eat this."

"I'm fine."

"You're shaking."

I looked down at my hand. She was right. I hadn't noticed.

At five minutes to one, the woman with the clipboard met me at the Marlowe kitchen door. She checked the box, then checked me, then looked past me at the empty alley. She didn't ask a single question. In my experience, that meant she already knew the answer.

Mr. Dobbs was standing in the shop doorway when I got back. He almost never leaves his desk, so I stopped walking.

He pulled me inside and locked the door.

"A man came by," he said. "Thin. Black suit. Two phones."

I laughed. I couldn't help it. "The shoe guy? Mr. Dobbs, it's a joke. Nobody pays five thousand dollars for shoes."

"He didn't look like a man telling jokes." He took off his glasses. "He said to tell the girl who delivered the cake that Friday is Friday."

My laugh died.

"I told him I'd never heard of you. I don't think he believed me."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet." His voice had gone quiet, which scared me more than the words. "Megan. I've kept this shop open eleven years on a leaking roof and one good van. You're the only one who calls back when I call. I can say I don't know you once. I can't say it forever."

He opened the till, took out two twenty-dollar bills, and pressed them into my hand. "Your fee. You saved the delivery."

I stared at the money. Forty dollars wasn't much to most people, but it could buy groceries. It could fill the rent envelope my mother counted every night. Pride was nice. It didn't keep the lights on. I took it.

I didn't go home. Home meant sitting still and waiting for a stranger to decide what Friday meant. So I did the dumb thing instead. I went back to the Marlowe.

I knew it was dumb. I went anyway, because dumb and moving beat smart and scared.

The clipboard woman opened the kitchen door before I could knock.

"I'm looking for a man in a white jacket," I said. "Very tall. Very loud."

"There was no man."

"There was a man. He owes me an apology."

Her face changed. Not anger. Fear, which was worse.

"Honey. If you're smart, you'll never say that sentence in this building again. Go home."

The door closed in my face. I stood in the alley, staring at the steel. Grown people get strange about their guests, I told myself. Rich people probably get stranger. I walked to the bus stop and didn't look back.

Our apartment was on the third floor over a laundromat, so it always smelled like warm detergent.

My mother sat at the kitchen table with the rent envelope in front of her. She sold soap and hand-stitched pillowcases from our front room, smiling at people who mostly came to look and left without buying. She counted the envelope every night, like the number might fix itself.

"How was the cake?" she asked.

"Delivered."

My dad was putting on his jacket for the night shift. He was tall, thinner than he used to be. When he shifted his weight, the sole of his left boot flapped open like a mouth. He had stuffed it with cardboard from a cereal box.

He caught me looking. "Fashion statement."

"Frank," my mother warned.

He kissed her head, then mine. "Mr. Dobbs says you're the best he's got," he told me. "He said so on Sunday."

"He says that about the van."

"He said it about you." He smiled, and the tired lines around his eyes folded up. Then he stepped into the dark in boots that cost thirty dollars new.

I stood at the table doing math I couldn't stop doing. Five thousand dollars. That was one hundred and sixty-six pairs of my father's boots.

While my mother put the kettle on, I slipped a hundred dollars into the rent envelope.

When she came back, she counted. Her fingers stopped on the new bills, and she looked at me for a long moment.

"A tip," I said. "A really good one."

"A tip," she repeated.

My mother could spot a lie from across the street. She chose not to look at this one. She just reached across the table and held my hand until the kettle began to scream.

I didn't tell them about the shoes. Not with rent due and cereal cardboard in my dad's boot.

Jess came through my bedroom window at nine, because Jess had never believed doors were the only way into a house. She landed, dusted herself off, and sat on my bed.

"Tell me everything."

So I did. She listened with her mouth open and interrupted only to call him names I wouldn't repeat. When I got to the part about five thousand dollars, she shouted so loud I threw a pillow at her.

"For shoes? Who does this guy think he is?"

"A loud man in a white jacket."

"Tall? Dark hair?"

"And a jaw."

"You remembered the jaw."

"It was in my face at the time, Jess."

She grinned, then let the grin go and took my hands. Jess kept every flashcard she had made since ninth grade in a shoebox under her bed, in order, because she was going to be a nurse and nurses don't guess. When Jess got serious, she was the most serious person alive.

"Whatever happens, I'm in," she said. "You're allowed to be scared, you know. You don't have to be the strong one every single day."

"Somebody has to be."

"Not tonight."

She stayed until I was too tired to argue, then talked about everything except the man in the white jacket until my eyes got heavy. For a while, I forgot about the money. Then I fell asleep.

I woke in the middle of the night to three knocks on the wall. It was our code, the one Eli invented when he was seven. Three knocks meant he couldn't sleep.

I tapped twice. Then I sang, soft.

"Roof may leak and floors may creak,

but love is loud when words are weak."

The apartment went quiet.

Then Eli's voice came through the plaster. "You only sing when you're scared."

"I sing all the time."

"You sing when you're scared, and you pretend it's for me."

I smiled despite myself. "Go to sleep, Eli."

A pause. "I don't need the school trip."

"You're going."

"Dad hasn't been eating dinner," he said quietly. "For a month. He always says he already ate."

I stared at the wall. I hadn't noticed. Or maybe I had, and hadn't looked, because I didn't know what to do with it.

"I'll be somebody one day, Meg. Then you and Mom and Dad can stop counting everything."

I pressed my palm flat against the wall, like I could push a hug through it.

"Anyway," he said, shifting into the voice he used right before a confession. "Mrs. Alvarez needed someone to sing at the community center opening on Tuesday. There's a special guest. Nobody knows who."

"Eli. What did you do?"

"I put your name down."

"Eli!"

"It's at two o'clock. Wear something nice."

"I don't own anything nice."

"Then wear something clean."

"Good night, Meg."

He was pretending to be asleep before I could argue.

I lay there in the dark. Rent. Boots. Five thousand dollars. Tuesday.