Читать книгу Better Food for a Better World - Erin McGraw - Страница 11

After a few weeks working from home, Vivy had already lined up a dozen acts for the store, including the Hula King (twenty Hula-Hoops in motion at once), the Two Toms (political impersonations), and Extraordinary Laurel LaRue (feminist jokes while reassembling a carburetor). On a tip from Laurel, Vivy had also penciled in a parrot choir, although birds weren’t her favorite kind of animal act. She was still trying to track down the waltzing dogs. Sam was certain they had retired their dancing slippers—even poodles, he said, couldn’t waltz forever. But Vivy kept sleuthing anyway, calling agencies and old friends, straining to remember the name of the dogs’ trainer. A man who had been able to get six teacup poodles to balance on their front legs and spin in unison wouldn’t just stop.

Phone call led to phone call, and Vivy set up office in the kitchen, spreading her calendar and computer and calculator across the table. The old acts had moved to Nevada, New Hampshire, San Diego, to towns and trailer parks where they could live with family and find work driving school buses. “Oh jeez!” shrieked Teeny Marteeny, the four-foot-ten contortionist, when Vivy finally tracked her down in a tiny town in California so far north it might as well have been in Oregon. “Oh jeez Louise! You can’t hire me—I’ve gotten fat!”

“I’ll bet you can still do handstands. Anyway, this is an ice cream store, not Winterland. Why don’t you come down and give us a try?”

“I’m huge. I look like a beach ball.” She started to cry, and Vivy patiently held on to her end of the line. She’d been hearing a lot of tears. Many of the old acts hadn’t seen a stage since Vivy and Sam had folded the company, and Vivy’s calls reminded them of the lives and hopes they’d used to have.

She heard the story over and over: when no other promoter had shown any love for peculiar talents or countercultural agendas, the performers had tried to represent themselves. They printed up business cards and contacted civic centers. They were willing to entertain at grade schools. They accepted $100, $50, $30, fees Vivy would have hung up on.

“I wanted to perform,” the Hula King told her. “I figured that if I got enough low-rent gigs, I’d eventually break big.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Vivy said. “If you sell low, you stay low.”

“I shagged my butt,” the Hula King said. He paused between words to gather himself. “I was going to show everybody some hustle. Make the rubber meet the road. But once you and Sam were gone, you know what I learned? Personally, all by myself, I didn’t see any reason people would want to see a guy standing up on a stage with twenty Hula-Hoops. I mean, I wouldn’t pay to see me. Without you there to talk me up, all I could think was people would be better off going to a movie. All those years I thought I was paying you to get me gigs, but I was really paying you to tell me I was worth something.”

Vivy scheduled him three months out, to give him time to get his old moves back.

Now, while Marteeny stammered and hiccupped, Vivy calmly wrote her in for the second Saturday in June. “You can stay with us. Laszlo will love to see you.”

“Laszlo. He must be almost a grown-up now.”

“He’s ten,” Vivy said.

“I’ll tell people I’m going to visit old friends. A family. They’ll understand that.” She cleared her throat. “There’s a man here who wants me to marry him. People here don’t know what I used to do.”

“That’s for sure,” Vivy said, laughing. In the old days Marteeny had been at least as famous for her ardent kisses, distributed equally among males and females, as she had been for her yielding, pliant joints. “Do you want to marry him?”

“I don’t know. He has very strong opinions. It doesn’t seem right to say yes, and it doesn’t seem right to say no.” Marteeny sighed. “You and Sam—you guys were cut out of the same piece of cloth. You guys are obvious. This man and I aren’t obvious.”

“I called just in time. You need to talk to some friends,” Vivy said.

Sam strolled into the kitchen and started rummaging in the cupboard. Vivy nodded when he held up a can of refried beans. The kids liked tostadas, which Annie treated as an opportunity to mound nothing but cheese and olives on her plate. “We can’t wait to see you,” she said gently into the phone. “Sam sends his love.”

“Who do I love?” Sam said when she hung up.

“Teeny Marteeny. Hold onto your hat: she’s gotten fat, and she’s going to get married.”

“Jump back. To a man?”

“A cattle rancher. He doesn’t know about her dark past. You want some help with dinner?”

“You could round up the kids. This rancher’s going to be surprised when she presents him with triple-jointed babies.”

“He wants a wife, and she’s ready to try out for the role. She told me she couldn’t keep doing the split forever.” Vivy waited for Sam’s quick laugh before she trolled into the backyard, where Annie was dressing paper dolls in geranium petals, and then into the living room, where Laszlo was prone in front of a cartoon.

“Just till the commercial,” he mumbled. A girl with a triangular head was explaining to a wizard that his potion hadn’t worked. Now the world was in bigger trouble than ever.

“If Annie gets the table set before you come in, you’re going to have to do all the cleanup after dinner.”

“I’m safe.”

Vivy shrugged and headed back for the kitchen, where Annie was sitting on the unset table. Vivy lifted her off and put a stack of plates in her hands. “See if you can get it all set before your brother comes in. Surprise him,” Vivy whispered.

“Surprise,” Annie stage-whispered, and started enthusiastically clattering the plates into place. Vivy handed her the forks and said to Sam, “I told Marteeny she could stay with us for a few days. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“Who’s Marteeny?” said Annie.

“She’s our old friend. You’ll like her,” Vivy said.

“Does she have a little girl?”

Sam said, “She’s pretty little herself. And she can pick up her leg and put it right behind her head.”

“No way,” said Annie.

“Can so,” said Laszlo, sauntering in from the living room just in time to grab the plastic cups from Annie and toss one down at each plate. “I remember her. She could turn her arm all the way around just to scratch her back. How cool is that?”

“She’s one of the stranger strangers we’ve taken in,” Sam said.

“Marteeny’s not a stranger,” said Vivy. “She’s long lost family, and it’s time for us to get reacquainted. And not just with Marteeny.”

“Vivy—” Sam began.

She handed him the cheese grater. “I’m not doing anything wrong. The store isn’t going to lose money. These people are coming so cheap it hurts. I had to force the Hula King to accept more than fifty bucks.”

“Well, see now, right there—”

“These are talented performers. They are professionals.”

“Okay,” Sam said. “Uncle.”

“Are they all going to stay here?” Annie said eagerly.

“No, baby. Just Marteeny.” Vivy glanced at Sam, wondering if he remembered the mornings spent looking for performers who had slipped out of motel rooms to score drugs or find sex or take walks in breathtakingly dangerous parts of town. Perhaps he did; he was grating enough cheese to feed all of the Strikes and Spares.

“Have you booked any musicians?” he said. “Audiences always turn out for music.”

“The flute players all seem to have gone back to Peru. I can’t track down Sweet Baby John or Buck the Yodeler. Fredd said he could get me some leads on a drum orchestra, but he hasn’t called me back yet. Napkins under the forks, Annie.”

“Get Marsha Marsha!” Annie said.

Laszlo plucked the bunched-up napkins that Annie held like a bouquet. “Marsha Marsha’s a cartoon, dummy. She can’t give a concert.”

“Laszlo,” said Sam and Vivy on the same breath.

“Sorry-I-said-dummy. But she’s still a cartoon.”

“Okay. No Marsha Marsha,” Vivy said. “Who wants juice?”

“If you want to book a musician, you’re overlooking one,” Sam said.

“Who?”

“Cecilia Moore.”

Handing the carton of apple juice to Laszlo, Vivy studied her husband’s face. Suddenly it looked overly innocent, the smile too cheerful, the eyes too scrubbed of guile.

“I stopped by her apartment the other day to pick up handbills for the store, and she played her violin for me. She’s a real violinist. I mean, she’s an artist.”

“She played her violin for you,” Vivy said. “Golly.”

“I hate violins,” Laszlo announced.

“Me too,” said Annie.

“You would have liked this,” Sam said.

Vivy was having trouble tamping down a smile; Sam hadn’t tried to sneak anything past her in years, and he didn’t know how out of practice he was. His earnest, unwavering eyes reminded her of nothing so much as Laszlo, age six, his face streaked with chocolate, swearing he hadn’t eaten any brownies. “I’m with the kids on this one. Violins make me want to go into another room.”

“If you heard Cecilia play, you’d want to stay and hear more.”

“Sure sounds like you wanted to hear more.”

He had the grace to laugh. “She sounds like somebody you’d hear on the radio.”

“I turn on the radio to hear T ‘n’ T,” Laszlo said. “Radio Jam.”

“Marsha Marsha,” Annie said.

“You’re really not getting this, are you?” Vivy said to Sam, who had scooped the mountain of cheese into a bowl and moved on to chopping tomatoes. “If Natural High books acts regularly, we can start to bring the old business back. Alternative art, remember? ‘On the streets, from the heart, for the people.’”

“Are you going to start up your own series of napkins?”

“Maybe. That was your line, by the way.”

“I remember,” Sam said. “I also remember that even when we were managing acts full-time, the old company went belly-up.” Laszlo crashed to the floor, his hands drumming on his skinny stomach. “Yeah, son, just like that.”

“Belly, belly, belly,” said Annie.

“Call it auld lang syne, then,” Vivy said. “I want to see our old friends. That’s not so terrible. And when they play the store, Natural High benefits. Even Nancy admits that performers bring in customers.”

“I’ll be a performer,” Laszlo said.

“What’s your act?” Vivy said.

The boy squirmed for a moment. “I’m at level eight on Deathmaster VI.”

“I’m not sure how much of a draw that’ll be,” Vivy said, and was surprised to see her son’s face cloud over. “What?”

“I just want to do something,” he muttered. He looked away from her roughly, and Vivy had to check her impulse to pull him to her. In the last few months he’d started to get moody, flinching away from her touch. Previews of coming attractions, she’d told Sam.

“We can work something out,” she said, studying the back of his head and his reddening neck. “Maybe Fredd could teach you to juggle.”

“Never mind.”

“We could have a talent show for kids.”

“I never said anything, okay?” He sidled over to the refrigerator and started pounding it with the side of his fist, thump-thump-thump, then thumpetty-tap, tap-thump, a little performance. Vivy flattened her hands on her hips. Nothing made her feel so helpless as her children. She looked at Sam, who shook his head and asked Annie what she’d done in school today. They were halfway through dinner before she concluded her account of the songs, the butterflies, the teacher’s moss collection. Somewhere in the butterflies Laszlo lifted his head and started eating, and the fist around Vivy’s heart relaxed. Still, she wondered what new hunger the boy was feeling.

Not until after dinner, when the kids had crashed their way through cleanup and Vivy and Sam lingered over coffee, did Sam bring up Cecilia again. Vivy was startled. Lost in Laszlo’s unhappiness, she had forgotten about Cecilia. “Just keep her in mind,” Sam was saying. “Schedule her for some middle-of-the-week night when you can’t get anybody else. You don’t want to go only backwards, retrieving the old acts. You want to go forward, too.”

“I am going forward. Fast-forward.” Vivy leaned toward him and separated the dark curls on his forehead into separate ringlets. Seeing the sheen of moisture on his nose and cheeks, she fanned the air above his face. “I hope you’re this gallant when I need defending.”

“I’m way more gallant than this,” he said, and then, after a moment, “You never need defending.”

“Guess I’ll have to work on that.” She pushed back her chair. “Time for me to go earn the family bacon. Can you pick up groceries? We’re all out of lettuce, and the kids haven’t eaten anything green in a week.”

“I’ll go to Safeway if you’ll think about booking Cecilia.”

“I won’t think about anything else all night.”

In fact, she intended to think about everything except Cecilia, but once she and David were installed on their shift—early evening, midweek, business slow despite the repaired air conditioner—Vivy found her mind circling back to Sam. Despite that plastered-on grin when he talked about Cecilia, his voice had been pleading. Ten years ago he would have managed the request with more dexterity.

Ten years ago they had struggled with accounts books and argued with boorish auditorium managers while lithe bodies slid into splits at their feet. In the mornings Vivy would stumble yawning into the living room and find half the members of Strikes and Spares, wearing only their skivvies, practicing handstands, their shapely legs scissoring the air. One of the legs usually managed to wrap itself around her on her way to the kitchen—sometimes it took her half an hour to get the coffee made. In those days she and Sam had juggled two or three flirtations apiece, and a pleasant, electrical thrill surged through their days. Some tantalizing body was always stretching nearby, heating up desire until it boiled over into Vivy and Sam’s sex life, and Vivy said, laughing, that she couldn’t keep track of how many people their imaginations pulled into bed with them.

Their marriage had never been fully open, but its door was left ajar. Neither Sam nor Vivy saw any reason to forego romance and excitement just because they were married. They sneaked phone calls, arranged lunches, collapsed into illicit, engulfing embraces from which they emerged tingling—never quite in bed, but not far from one. And when they weren’t falling into those embraces themselves, they watched each other with quick eyes.

In those days Vivy thought of her marriage to Sam as a game that depended on hot grace as much as cunning; the winner of a round was the one who managed to signal an infatuation with the least fuss, the fewest clues. Or perhaps the winner was the partner who ignored signs of dalliance, too preoccupied to notice the other’s sighs, long walks, lunges for the telephone. Either way, the loser was the one who broke down and demanded to know exactly what was going on, leaving the other to smile and say, “What are you talking about? You shouldn’t get so worked up.”

Vivy had loved the game, which kept her marriage just enough off balance that she could feel the tip and roll under her feet. Every day promised adventure. She and Sam fairly leaped out of bed in the mornings. But when the business dissolved, they lost their intimacy with muscular, sexy performers who didn’t think much of such middle-class concepts as somebody else’s marriage.

Instead, Vivy and Sam worked elbow to elbow with Nancy and Paul and David and Cecilia, who believed marriage was a state in which two people merged without boundaries or divisions. As if a little air and scandal, secrecy and fun in a marriage would destroy it. As if a good marriage required border guards and razor wire. Mottoes. Meetings. “We gather in order to build better marriages with our shared strength.” She had gone into Life Ties with a willing spirit, but five years of meetings had taught Vivy that she and Sam had a better marriage back in the days when they could tantalize each other. Now every moment of every day was filled with duty, and Vivy felt as if the supple canoe that used to bear them had been turned into a barge.

Over the store stereo the carefully inoffensive CD—ocean waves, French horns, chanting—came to an end, and Vivy released a breath she hadn’t meant to be holding. Sam might have an awkwardly lovesick heart, but he was right to point out that they needed some decent music in there. As the next CD started in with birdcalls and some kind of whistle, a kid at one of the tables cocked his finger like a gun at the speaker. Vivy called to him, “Have you got anything else?”

She had to repeat herself twice before the boy understood that she was talking to him. He shook his head. “I don’t exactly carry spare CDs around with me.”

Vivy ignored the sneer. “Bring something in next time. If I’m here, I’ll put it on. If it doesn’t chase people out, we’ll play the whole thing.”

“Deal.” The kid smirked while the other boys at his table shoved him.

David, who was polishing the length of the counter with cleanser and a sponge, said, “I might be one of the people who gets chased out.”

“Come on. Anything would be better than these symphonies for wind chimes and groaning whales. I hear those damn whales in my nightmares.”

“I don’t mind whales. At least you don’t have to worry about the lyrics.”

“You don’t know that. Whales might be rapping. We could be listening to them singing, ‘It’s time to take a stand. Kill the fisher man. Huh.’”

“You’re funny, Vivy.”

“Just trying to keep the troops entertained.”

He smiled and sponged around the freezers with his usual meticulous pep, sweating lightly despite the regulated, seventy-two degree air. Leaning back against the counter, Vivy considered him: soft, rounded body; brown arms; stiff beard that stuck away from his chin like a shovel. He’d had that beard since she’d met him in their co-ed college dormitory, a boy who could talk for twenty uninterrupted minutes about plant propagation, pruning techniques, California’s indigenous flora. Since half the students in the dorm were trying to grow pot plants in their closets, people put up with his lectures. He held consultations about drooping leaves and root rot and helped rig grow lights. Although he himself never grew anything more contraband than marigolds, he never turned anyone in.

He must have had girlfriends, although Vivy couldn’t remember any. Light, meek girls, proto-Cecilias, might well have padded around after him and discussed the depletion of the water table, but Vivy’s days had been a raucous haze of rum and drugs and Sam, and David had hardly made a dent in her consciousness. When Nancy proposed that David Moore should join Natural High, Vivy had said, “Who?”

So now, trying to imagine life at home with David and Cecilia, all Vivy could envision was long, quiet, extremely polite evenings. The Moores weren’t fighters, she was sure. David’s hands, presently plunged in the rinse water, lacked the spiny nerves required to pick up a plate and fire it across a room. And if he and Cecilia weren’t fighters, they weren’t likely to be much as lovers. They were so careful all the time. When somebody at Life Ties told a joke, David would smile and Cecilia make a little snick snick snick sound, like scissors cutting through chintz. Vivy could imagine their lovemaking as if she had a ringside seat—neat covers, considerate division of labor. No more than fifteen minutes, beginning to end, with both parties springing to their feet as soon as they were finished. She envisioned David’s scramble to wash his hands.

“Ick,” she said, imagining Cecilia handing David the hand towel. Would she make artless, calibrated comments about Sam Jilet, as if he were a lump of gold she’d just stumbled over? For the first time—she was out of practice herself—Vivy wondered exactly why Cecilia had played her violin for Sam, and she wondered if David had heard about the concert. Vivy and David, the excluded spouses, had been pushed into their own, special partnership, and she wondered whether David knew that.

“They say the heat’s going to break soon,” he said, running fresh rinse water and tucking the sponge up behind the faucet.

“Good. Laszlo and Annie are whining so much that I made them sleep out on the porch last night.” She handed him a towel to fold. “How are you and Cecilia holding up?”

“She likes hot weather. So do my tomatoes. The ones on my porch are already knee high. The ones in my community plot are taller than that. I water them every night.” He smiled, encouraging her to congratulate him on his tall tomatoes.

“So you leave poor Cecilia all alone?”

“I don’t think she minds.”

“I’d be careful. This is how thrillers all start—the young missus by herself in the early evening, unbuttoning her blouse in front of the window to get a breeze. Startled when a drifter comes to the door.”

He laughed, then leaned on the freezer lid to latch it tight. “Cecilia hasn’t told me about any drifters. There was a kid selling candy bars for a school trip. You want one? She bought six.”

“There you go. A younger man.”

Vivy paused, then said, “Sam came to see her the other day. I was a little startled to hear about it.”

“She told me. He ran the new design to the copy shop for her. She was glad for the help.”

“He heard her play her violin. Sam said she sounded like a professional. He couldn’t believe you hadn’t told us what an artist we have in our midst.”

“She wanted to play with an orchestra once. I don’t think she wants to anymore.”

“Sam’s all set to get her back on the road to stardom.”

“You make him sound like he has a crush on her.”

“He does.”

“The fellow’s got good taste.” David turned to the mother and toddler who were approaching the counter. The boy, a shy child, twisted around his mother while she coaxed him into pointing at the flavor he wanted. In all, the transaction took close to five minutes, a track and a half of tootly Indian whistle and drums. By the time David had counted out change and rinsed the ice cream scoop, Vivy could see he had forgotten all about his wife, in whom he had untroubled faith. Many spouses at Life Ties wandered from their marriages specifically to jolt their partners out of such confidence, which was indistinguishable from complacency.

He reached into the freezer case to wrestle the empty Maple Walnut carton out, and Vivy said, “I’ll get you another gallon from the back.”

He shook his head. “All gone. Didn’t you see Nancy’s memo on this? The last two shipments of walnuts were bad, so we need to find a new supplier.”

“How hard can it be to grow nuts?”

“Harder than you think, actually, especially if you want to stay away from sprays. I did a study in graduate school on borers,” David said.

“You should send a copy to that orchard in Mineville. Maybe they’ll take you on.”

“What are you talking about?”

David’s broad, mild face was curious, and Vivy briefly wondered what exactly filled up his brain. The fertile valley that held El Campo and Mineville and a handful of other towns was only sixty miles wide from the foothills to Sacramento, and didn’t exactly bubble over with news. After reading the twelve-page Valley-Herald, Vivy felt as if she could recite every church’s upcoming call for renewal, every diner that needed a fry cook. She said, “There’s a spread up in Mineville that’s looking for somebody to re-do its walnut orchards. Replant, prune, I don’t know what all. Part-time. Pretty much a David Moore job, if you ask me.”

“Nice of you to say, but David Moore has a job.”

“Not one he did studies on.”

“Thanks all the same.” Wiping the clean countertop, his smile took on the crimp it bore whenever anyone presented him with a new idea.

“It’s part-time. You wouldn’t have to leave Natural High. And you’d get to do what you like for twenty hours a week.”

“I like what I do now.”

“Okay. You’d get to do what you love.”

“You have quite a way of seeing things,” David said, bearing down so hard she could see the soft muscles in his back shift from side to side. “I don’t think everything in the world has to be a big quest. I like my life already. I don’t have to change things.”

“I just thought you should know what your options are.”

“I’m not looking for options,” he said. “I have commitments.”

“A commitment doesn’t have to mean you’re locked in place. Just ask Sam and Cecilia.” When David raised his startled gaze, she said, “Sorry. That was supposed to be a joke.”

“It’s kind of a compliment. Not many people would cast me as part of a romantic triangle.”

He was right about that. Even though Vivy’s frustration with him had momentarily ebbed, there was no overlooking his thinning hair, doughy waist, his nose as pudgy as a baby’s fist. She said, “I know I sounded catty, but I was actually trying to help.”

When he grinned he showed his gray teeth. Somewhere behind that beard lurked a dimple. “You’re a good egg, Vivy. You think about people more than you get credit for. Would you be happier if I went up and looked at this job?”

“I don’t really care who grows our walnuts. You and the job just seemed like a good match.”

“Nice of you to think of me.”

“I’m being practical. We need a new supplier for walnuts, and nobody would be more reliable than you.”

“Well, now, don’t get too excited. I’ll go up there, but I may not want them. They may not want me.” Catching the protest forming in Vivy’s mouth, he added, “I’ve got a PhD that’s five years old and no professional experience. Would you hire me?”

“I would if I knew how hard you work, and how dependable you are,” Vivy said, avoiding his humid, affectionate eyes. “You should bring some ideas for long-term plans to the interview. Tell them what to do about borers. Five years as a partner here should have taught you how to do projections.”

“It hasn’t taught me to make plans on my own,” David said, a bit of near-sarcasm that heartened Vivy. “Look, I know this is the kind of thing you love—new job, interviews, the whole thing—but I hate even thinking about it. My life is in order. I don’t want to rearrange it.”

“Jesus, David. How do you know you’re not dead?”

“My tomatoes look terrific,” he said.

Vivy glanced at him twice before she found the hint of a smile, an expression that quickly reverted to his normal, fond placidity. He was like some rounded-off life form, evolved beyond the skeleton and muscles of desire. She shivered. She would rather think of David as fiercely selfish, encircling every moment and squeezing it empty of possibility. At least selfishness had a little vigor.

“I’ll bring you tomatoes in a few weeks,” David said. “I planted Early Boys. Does Sam like tomatoes? I’ll bring you a lot.”

“He loves them. I won’t tell him they come from you, though. If he knows they’re connected to Cecilia he’ll want to put them on an altar and worship them.”

“Ha,” David said. Turning to face her, he dropped one eyelid in a slow wink, like the gesture of a clumsy, fleshy uncle. A sleepy-eyed kid, one of two customers in the store, looked up and she frowned at him.

“We don’t need two people up front,” she announced, yanking the hot water nozzle to full spray and plunging her hands in. “I’ll go chop almonds.”

“Atoning for something?” David said. Often the partners prepared mix-ins after Life Ties meetings, pondering mistakes they’d made on the home front. After especially heated meetings Sam said the back room sounded like a flamenco troupe was practicing.

“Nope. This one’s for charity.”

David made a fond shooing motion, and Vivy wondered, as she slipped through the swinging door, how he had managed to jump straight into a grandfather’s mannerisms without ever pausing at fatherhood.

Her sandals slapped across the isthmus of tile flooring between the chopping board and the enormous freezer. Vivy had arranged to buy that freezer, slightly used, from a restaurant that closed its doors after six months. The thing took up the whole back wall and saved the partnership over $1,000. Vivy briefly wondered, as she often did, whether she could apply the $1,000 to her and Sam’s debt.

She pulled down the good knife, the one as long as her forearm, then reached in the freezer for a carton of almonds. She’d barely had time for the first rough chops when the phone rang—most likely Nancy, the only person who regularly called the store. Vivy was careful to sound cheerful when she picked up the phone and said, “Natural High Ice Cream,” and so was reduced to a delighted sputter when Fredd’s voice said, “Christ, Vivy, calm down. You sound like Shirley Temple.”

“I had my tap shoes on.”

“Take them off. You could scare a guy.” Vivy could hear a clicking noise behind his voice, and wondered what he was juggling. Sounded like dried beans. “Listen, I heard about a festival down in Watsonville. I’ll bet they need a juggler.”

“So call.”

“I was thinking you could do it for me. Take a cut. I’ll feel better if you take care of the details.”

“Flatter me, why don’t you?”

“No problem. Seeing you the other day reminded me how much I need you in my life.”

Vivy snorted. “Fredd, are you trying to proposition me?”

“In a way.” Click. “I got to thinking about how things used to be. It was easier when you were around, reminding me of things, looking out for me. So I want you to go back to being my agent. All my gigs. Straight ten percent, right? This can be just between us. Nobody else needs to know.”

“What the hell are you juggling over there?”

“Pennies. I’m practicing one-handed. What do you say? Get back in the saddle?”

“I guess you’ve overlooked the pesky fact that I already have a job.” David’s words rolled out of her mouth before she could stop them.

“Come on, Vivy. You don’t need forty hours a week to book one juggler. You can make phone calls while you’re cooking dinner. You don’t even have to go to the gigs—I can set myself up. You’ll still keep track of stuff better than I do, and you’ll get some extra dough for whatever you want. Clothes, a car. You win, I win.”

“We all scream for ice cream. If I went out and bought a car, my butt would be in a crack in a big way. Sam and I are in the hole eighty thousand bucks. No new cars until that’s paid off.”

“Well, this will help you start socking away some bread.”

“I don’t mean to make you doubt yourself, but I’ll have to represent you for two hundred years to sock away eighty grand.”

“That’s the other reason I called. My nephew’s in a band. Elphenevel. They play songs about Dungeons & Dragons games, with heavy metal guitar.”

“Save me.”

“No joke. Seventeen-year-old boys are nuts for this. The band played at a high school last week, and two thousand kids showed up. Two thousand kids, and the band brought home five hundred bucks. They need you.”

“Heavy metal wizards? No thanks.”

“You don’t have to love it, Vivy. But they could fill the Civic Auditorium. You could catch them at the beginning of a real career. T-shirts. Posters.”

“I get it,” Vivy said.

“The guys are in college, in case music doesn’t pan out. They don’t want to play but a couple nights a month.”

“I get it,” she said. She ran her tongue back and forth across her teeth, an old nervous habit. This was a band that would call for big management, full promotion, the kind of work she and Sam had barely glimpsed before the old company slipped away from them. House managers, stagehands and the IATSE, contracts stipulating eight percent—was it still eight percent?—of the box office. The Civic Auditorium held five thousand, at no less than $15 a seat.

Fredd mumbled “Shit” and grunted—scrambling after one of the pennies, Vivy assumed. His voice sounded coaxing when he came back to the phone. “You’re going to do this for me, aren’t you?”

“Yup,” she said. “For you and your nephew. But twenty percent, not ten.”

“For crying out loud, Vivy, people have to make a living. I thought I’d be helping you, not bled dry.”

“You want jobs? Twenty.”

“Fifteen,” he said.

“Done.” Picking up the knife again, she lined up a handful of almonds and sliced them like a machine. Usually she couldn’t manage such precision.

“Still a shyster. I feel better already.”

“Checks will come through me,” she said, missing the angle on one almond and watching it ping off the wall. “And nobody knows about this. Nobody.”

“You’re not even going to tell Sam?”

“I’ll get around to telling Sam,” she said. “I just want to wait a little. Right now he’s developing his own act.”

“He better not be juggling. I don’t like competition.”

“He’s juggling, all right,” she said. “He’s juggling and walking a tightrope and balancing an egg on his nose.”

“I didn’t know he was so talented.”

“You just forgot,” Vivy said. “Stick around. The old acts are coming back to life.”