He’s offering me his hand but my hands are still filthy from shingling. Tar-black nails and dried blood all across my knuckles. I sort of show Lyle my hands to apologize for not shaking his, and of course he asks me what I’ve been up to. So I tell him about Kurlansky Roofing, and before I know it he’s taking down the number because apparently your roof has needed reshingling for about a decade.
On the other side of your dad is this guy Cody, who Lyle tells me plays bass in their band. Cody says he used to work for a roofing company as a teenager too. He flexes his bicep and says, You’ll be thankful for that job later in life.
You know how when you’re in an audience and you talk to the stranger next to you, and then for the whole rest of the show it’s like you’re sort of watching it together? I mean it’s not like you say anything more to the person or even glance over at each other much. But somehow it feels like you’re sharing your reactions with each other. That’s pretty much how it was for your dad and me. Some of the kids in our school are really bad. It’s not even lack of talent so much as lack of judgment. Trying to tap-dance to a Beyoncé song is never going to be a good idea no matter who’s doing it. And that thing with the yoga and the yodeling. That was one of the times Lyle and I sort of looked sideways at each other. He did this whole elaborate coughing maneuver into his fist to cover up his laughter. You could probably hear him from backstage, Jo.
Shayna’s voice isn’t at all how I imagined. I guess I expected some airy, folky sound. You know those songs with the cutesy chorus and the verses with too many lyrics crammed in? Instead Shayna sounds like a sixty-year-old chain-smoker. And I’m saying that in a good way.
Watching you two onstage Lyle can’t even help himself. He leans over and goes, Those are my kids up there. Grinning like a maniac with fatherly pride.
Shayna is a good singer but I have to say the real shocker was you. I mean you never said anything about playing the mandolin. Okay yes, I had to ask Lyle what the thing was. I’d never seen one before.
You said you were Shayna’s backup band but you didn’t say you were going to sing. And you didn’t say you were so good at it. Your voice is the opposite of Shayna’s. Higher than hers, for one. It made me realize I’ve never really heard you talk, even. It’s weird to know so much about the way a person thinks without ever having heard their voice. When you sang it was this high, pure kind of sound. I don’t know. It felt like I recognized you and didn’t recognize you at the same time.
Then the judges did their thing. One of them compared your sound to Donny and Marie Osmond and Lyle said, You’ve got to be kidding me. He was laughing but actually looking sort of irritated about it.
Cody said, She should be in the band, man.
Don’t tell her that, Lyle said, or I’ll have her down my throat about it twenty-four-seven.
Exact same sound as Rapha, Cody said. That could have been Rapha up there.
Lyle didn’t answer, and Cody sort of ducked his head and gave Lyle a quick little pat on the shoulder as if to say sorry. I guess Rapha must be Raphael, a.k.a. your mom?
I asked whether you and Shayna took voice lessons et cetera. Lyle said it was never really necessary. You could tell he was trying not to brag, not to talk about you too much, but he couldn’t help himself. While the next kids were performing he leaned in and told me how you, Jo, quit talking for almost a year when you first started school. They had you tested and everything, Lyle said, but then he discovered that you really liked to sing, and it was as if you somehow didn’t realize that song lyrics were words. So Lyle would sing with you all the time. Not just real songs but made-up stuff, songs about How was your day? and What shall we have for dinner? so that you would communicate with him that way. Even Shayna got in on the action apparently. The year our life became a musical, Lyle called it.
I think I dozed off for a few of the remaining acts. Three hours on a roof and no time for supper will do that to you. Sorry I didn’t stick around afterward to congratulate you in person. When I heard the vote-with-your-phone system was glitching out and they would have to recount, I said a quick goodbye to Lyle and Cody and took off.
This morning I heard that somebody else won. I hope you’re not taking it personally, Jo. You and Shayna weren’t flashy enough is all. You should be proud because I know your Hopkirk motto is Be real and be true. On the way home last night I remembered that and I thought, That’s how they sounded up there. Real and true.
Sincerely,
AK
Friday, October 9
Dear Kurl,
After school yesterday you pulled up to the bus stop and unrolled your window. “Where’s your bike?” you called.
It caught me off guard. “Nowhere,” I said.
“What?” you said.
“I’ll tell you later,” I said, and I felt my face get hot, so I turned away and scurried into the bus shelter, behind the map. I apologize for my extreme awkwardness-bordering-on-rudeness. But you and I don’t, technically, “tell” each other things, do we? We write them, but it would have been even more bizarre for me to say “I’ll write you all about it later.” And anyway, truth be told, I didn’t want to tell you about my bike. Its name was Nelly, a.k.a. the Fagmobile (so christened by the butcherboys the first time they saw me locking it at school). Suffice it to say that Nelly has met with a violent, homophobic death and now lies, hopefully finally at peace, in her watery grave. Drew Saarinen, whose brother Michael hangs out with Dowell, told me in Civics that they dumped Nelly in Cherry Valley. I went down there yesterday to fish her out, but she’s in the spillwater portion of the creek, half sunk in the mud and dead leaves, and those six feet of water appeared bone-shatteringly cold. I couldn’t tell from the embankment, but I imagine the butcherboys probably slashed the tires and cut the brake cables before they dumped the bike, anyhow.
Enough! On to a pleasanter topic: Today the blackboard invites us to Describe your Inner Sanctum. A portion of the class began sniggering when Ms. Khang wrote this on the board, because they’d somehow managed to read the word as scrotum. There were a lot of jokes—“Mine is wrinkly and has my balls in it”—that sort of thing. Thanks all the same, Alex Federsholm, but there’s a mental image with which I really didn’t need to be saddled.
My Inner Sanctum is my bedroom, because it houses my two most prized possessions. The first is my record player, a 1970s made-in-Holland Philips that Lyle had refurbished for me for Christmas when I was thirteen. I have a few favorite artists, of course, but Lyle’s vinyl collection is so massive that I feel as though cultivating too intense a loyalty to certain records would be premature at my age. When I get home from school, the first thing I do after taking off my shoes and backpack is head directly upstairs to my room, close the door, put on a record, and climb into my tent.
The tent is the second reason my room is my sanctuary. Instead of a bed, I sleep on a double mattress on the floor of an old army tent. Another of Lyle’s youthful castoffs, this heavy canvas-and-aluminum structure was his and my mother’s Inner Sanctum back when his band was too poor for motels, and they’d pull into whatever highway rest stop was closest to their next gig and pitch the tent on the grass. Lyle set the old beast up for me a few years ago when I was going through a period of insomnia for some reason or another, and it hasn’t come down since.