Here, There, Everywhere

  “A-one, a-two, a-three . . . Take me out to the ball game, take me out with the crowd!” Letty sang.

  A few simply listened, George Larsen snored, but most of the bus joined in and belted out the rest of the song.

  “For it’s ONE! TWO! THREE strikes you’re out at the old ball game!” Letty finished with a heroic fist in the air.

  “Play ball!” someone shouted.

  “Go, Cubbies!” shouted another.

  The bus parked in a handicapped zone in front of the stadium, where dozens of people milled about beneath the bright red Wrigley Field sign. Across the marquee, the golden words Welcome Hilltop Residents scrolled by. Rose and I waited for everyone to exit the bus, then joined them on the sidewalk and made our way to the gates. Letty was first in line, followed by the Bettys. When Letty reached the checkpoint, she held her arms in the air.

  “Go ahead and pat me down, big fella. I ain’t scared. I might even like it,” she said to the man with the ticket scanner.

  “That’s right, she ain’t scared,” said Betty.

  “Go on, pat her down!” said the other Betty. And then all three cackled and laughed.

  Rose and I were last in line. Once the others had passed the ticket and security check, I took a deep breath. Candy and I made eye contact and she winked at me. I winked back.

  “My first major league baseball game,” said Rose, smiling up at the stadium.

  “Actually, that will have to wait.”

  Rose whipped her head around at me. “What?”

  I raised my eyebrows at her. “Follow me.”

  I took Rose by the hand and we raced across the street. I led her down the block as far as possible from Wrigley Field, for we’d never find a taxi there. We wove between people, around kiosks, and past gated beer gardens. We crossed another street, then another. Cars honked at us. Pigeons scattered into the air as we rounded a corner. We passed hot dog vendors, music stores, and at least seventeen Starbucks. Eventually I stopped, walked to the curb, and looked down the street.

  “Where are we going?” Rose asked, breathless from running. “What about the game?”

  “Have you forgotten? It’s Sunday,” I said between breaths. “This is the surprise part!” I flagged a taxi and we slid into the rear seat. “Now, cover your ears.” Rose put her hands over her ears and I told the driver where to go. Our heads flew back as he accelerated into traffic, narrowly missing another car.

  Rose gripped my arm as we slid across the vinyl seat with every lane change.

  “Is the surprise that we make it there alive?” she said under her breath.

  “Think of it as a hair-raising adventure.”

  It took us fifteen minutes to get from Wrigley Field to our destination. We turned onto Michigan Avenue, and our driver pulled over to the curb. I paid him with my tip money, and we stepped into the summer sun.

  I took Rose by the hand and led her up a wide staircase flanked by two stone lions.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “CHECK THIS OUT!” SAID ROSE AS WE APPROACHED A CHISELED SCULPTURE of a portly nude fellow. She read the placard aloud. “Portrait of Balzac by Auguste Rodin. I’ve read about Balzac. He was a French writer.”

  “Oh, nice. Hey, let’s look at this one,” I said, grabbing her hand and walking toward something else—anything besides a naked man with a name that made me think of frank and beans, as Letty would say. Clearly, my art appreciation left much to be desired.

  I’d been to the Art Institute before, but it had been a while. Fourth-grade field trip. I remembered thinking it was boring except for the medieval armor room, but today was for Rose, not me. Even though things had been going great since I’d apologized and played the song, I still felt the need to make it up to her. So, having remembered the stack of books about art and museums on her coffee table, I’d been banking on today to blow her away.

  We’d only been there ten minutes, and already it had been a huge success.

  We stood before the centerpiece of the room, Georges Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte. I looked at the massive painting with my arms crossed, nodding thoughtfully. “It’s interesting,” I said after a while. Those two words summed up my entire understanding of art.

  “It’s pointillism,” said Rose.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, as if I understood. “It looks like a bunch of dots.”

  “Right, it’s just a bunch of dots up close. But when you step back, you get the whole picture.”

  We stepped back twenty feet or so to observe, then walked up close again. “Cool,” I said. “So what’s with the monkey in the corner?”

  “Who knows? Maybe Seurat had a monkey fetish. Or maybe he put it there so people would talk about it.”

  “Like a conversation starter?”

  “Right.”

  “I wonder how many people have stood right here and had this very conversation?”

  Rose turned to face me. “Probably just us.” She planted a quick kiss on my mouth. I puckered at the air as her face went away. “Too slow,” she said, grinning.

  We wandered down a long hallway that opened into various rooms on either side. We picked the one that looked the least crowded and walked in. Paintings of naked women and ugly babies lined the walls. We approached one featuring a particularly hideous cherub gazing disdainfully into the middle distance.

  “Remember what Mo the psychic said? About you being a painter in a past life?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You definitely painted this one,” I told Rose.

  Rose made a face. “You think?”

  “Definitely. You were the premier ugly baby painter of your time. People traveled great distances to meet the famous Rose Santos: Ugly Baby Painter Extraordinaire.”

  Rose tilted her head to the side. “He isn’t that ugly.”

  I turned to face her. “Are you kidding me? That kid has a severe appearance deficit.”

  “This says it’s Cupid,” said Rose, reading the placard.

  “The God of Love? No way. That baby’s a poster boy for abstinence,” I said.

  Rose gave me a slight elbow to the ribs. “Come on, art boy.”

  We split apart in the next room, where I found myself confronted by a painting of souls entering heaven. A guy in his early twenties appeared next to me, twiddling his curled mustache like a cartoon villain. His hair had been shaved on the sides and left long on top, dyed blue, and wrapped tightly in a bun. Circular, yellow-framed glasses—which I’m not entirely sure had lenses—perched on the end of his nose. Cuffed, skin-tight jeans met worn, leather boots, screaming accessory over necessary. I wanted to remind him it was July.

  I glanced down at my own ensemble—T-shirt, shorts, and sandals—and decided it was perfectly sensible and efficient. I also swallowed the realization I was becoming my mom.

  I continued to look at the painting, watching hipster dude out of the corner of my eye. He seemed like the type of person whose museum behavior had been groomed and perfected after many long appointments with mirrors. Maybe I could learn something from him. I crossed my arms and rubbed my chin, not having a mustache to twirl myself. I wondered how much time should pass before commenting on the painting, or if I should say anything at all. I tried to think of something profound to offer, perhaps a reference to the meaning of life or the existence of God. On the other hand, maybe I could slink away, unnoticed.

  “Your thoughts?” hipster dude asked, nodding toward the painting.

  Damn. Don’t say it’s interesting, don’t say it’s interesting.

  “It’s interesting,” I said.

  He raised an eyebrow and returned his gaze to the painting. “Heaven is a place, a place where nothing, nothing ever happens. David Byrne.”

  Don’t say cool.

  “Cool,” I said.

  “Namaste.” He gave me a slight bow, then walked off, trailed by a breeze of patchouli and pretense.

  Rose returned and joined me. “What did that guy say?”

  “That noth
ing ever happens in heaven. Then I think he said something in Spanish.”

  “Huh. So I say we bail on the Ugly Babies and Naked People Wing.”

  “Agreed.”

  We roamed into a long, wide room with display cases of terra-cotta heads, clay pots, and jewelry from Southeast Asia, most of them hundreds if not thousands of years old. Rose loved the Buddhas in particular and told me how her dad had promised to take her to the Philippines someday.

  “Of course, that was before he got remarried in May and became insta-dad to three new stepkids,” she said with a rueful smile.

  “I suppose you’ll be wanting me to take you to the Philippines now. How many Sundays are left this summer?”

  Rose laughed, a sound I loved more than music. “Are you going to ride me there on your bike?”

  “Have you seen what these legs can do?” I said, gesturing to my skinny legs as if they were the limbs of Adonis.

  Rose shook her head. “Yeah, we wouldn’t get far with those bean poles. Maybe we could hitch a ride on a whale.”

  “Good idea. I could hold on to the blowhole, and you could ride bazooka on the dorsal fin.” I shook my head at our exchange. “You know, we have very strange conversations, you and I.”

  “I know,” Rose replied. “That’s why I like you.”

  As we reached the staircase leading down to the lobby, Rose checked her phone for the time and made a pouty face. “We should probably get back to the bus, huh?”

  “You’re right, we should cruise. Letty’s probably behind home plate right now flashing her boobs at the pitcher.”

  Rose bit back a smile. “It’s her ninetieth birthday in a few weeks. She gave me a list of songs to play at her party.”

  “For what, the male strippers?” I joked.

  “Stop!” she said, snorting. “But seriously, we should learn a song to play together.”

  I chuckled. “Yeah, right.”

  “Come on, it’ll be fun!”

  I stopped walking and looked at her. “I’m not that great, Rose. You’ve heard me play.” Obviously, the idea of playing a song with her sounded incredible, but also a bit terrifying. I wasn’t sure I could keep up.

  “I’ll teach you something then. Tom Jones, or Frank Sinatra, or Dean Martin, or whatever Letty wants.”

  “All right, if you insist. I’m warning you though, I’m very average.”

  “No, you aren’t. You’re quite above average.” Rose grabbed my hand and interlaced our fingers. “In fact, you’re one of the most above-average people I know.”

  How did she always know the right thing to say? “You’re pretty above average yourself, Rose.”

  We walked down the marble stairs into the lobby, where our path once again crossed with hipster dude’s. He walked out of the gift shop carrying a medieval helmet replica under his arm, looking right past me to Rose.

  “M’lady,” he said, smiling and genuflecting. Then he turned his eyes to me. “Good day, sir,” he clipped, in a way that felt insulting. As he turned on his heel to walk away, I almost shook my fist and shouted, “May all your hens lay rotten eggs!”

  Instead, I just stood there.

  “I think I’ll dye my hair blue,” I said to Rose.

  Rose brushed the hair from my forehead, as if consoling a small child. “Aw, you should. It would match your eyes.”

  We walked back out to the sunshine. I’d forgotten how alive the city felt; it almost had a pulse, almost breathed. Suddenly, it felt good to be back, if only just for an afternoon. I was glad I got to share it with Rose.

  I thought back to the painting. “So do you believe in heaven?” I asked her as we descended the stairs to the sidewalk.

  Rose paused. “Honestly, I don’t know. The idea of spending eternity in the clouds where everything is perfect kind of horrifies me. I mean, wouldn’t you get sick of it? How would you even know what perfect is if every day was exactly the same?”

  “True,” I replied. “What is a perfect day? And compared to what? The perfect yesterday? The perfect tomorrow?”

  We walked half a block before either of us spoke again.

  “So what would your heaven include if you could choose?” I asked.

  Rose thought about it for a minute before answering. “Playing Chopin on piano. Lying on a blanket outside, staring at the stars. My grandmother’s hands. Sleeping in on the weekend. The ocean. Poetry. Art. Your mom’s brownies,” she said with a grin. “What about you? What’s your heaven?”

  I put my arm around her and pulled her close. “Here. This. Now.”

  You, I thought.

  Eventually we hailed a taxi and made it back to the bus on time. Rose slept on my shoulder the entire ride home. I didn’t sleep though.

  I couldn’t.

  Sometimes when a day is perfect, it needs to last just a little while longer.

  TWENTY-SIX

  SO MUCH HAPPENED OVER THE NEXT FEW WEEKS THE DAYS BLURRED together. Monday after the Art Institute, as if his ears were burning, Rose’s dad asked her to join him on a last-minute trip to Saint Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Sounds great, right? Well, yes and no. First of all, it’d be Rose’s introduction to her new stepfamily, which didn’t thrill her. Second—and possibly more important—it meant a whole week of us apart. In the end, she decided that accepting the invitation was the right thing to do and left a few days later.

  We decided we’d talk on the phone every night, and reminded each other it was only seven days. But the night they arrived at the resort, her dad won an extra three nights for attending some time-share presentation. They rescheduled their flights, and seven days became ten days. Then we found out international calling costs an arm, a leg, and a couple fingers, limiting us to a single, five-minute conversation. Our connection was poor, but I’ll try to summarize: (1) Saint Thomas was the most beautiful place in the galaxy; (2) amazing didn’t begin to describe the great time Rose was having; and (3) apparently my “as long as Rose is happy, I’m happy” feeling only applied when we were in the same country.

  She was having fun without me and it sucked.

  I swallowed my jealousy like a bad case of acid reflux.

  On the home front, things weren’t much better. Some lady at the grocery store had glared at Grub while he was undertaking his usual reconnaissance in the dairy aisle, and then—adding insult to injury—she’d mumbled something about “kids being out of control these days.”

  Mom, predictably, took it like an enraged she bear.

  “The nerve of that woman!” she ranted while doing dishes that night.

  “Well, it couldn’t hurt for Grub to behave a little more normally, at least in public,” I said, drying the plate she handed me.

  Mom glared at me as if I’d just denounced oxygen. “Don’t tell me you’re siding with her intolerant small-town parenting mumbo jumbo.”

  I recoiled slightly but held my ground. “All I’m saying is maybe she has a point. I mean, the kid’s best friend is an elderly Alzheimer’s patient. Not to mention the whole white-and-yellow food thing, the World War II obsession, the compulsive mapmaking . . .”

  Mom poked her head into the hallway to make sure Grub couldn’t hear us. He was still in the living room drawing maps—big surprise. Mom lowered her voice and pointed at me with a sudsy spatula. “There’s nothing wrong with that boy, do you hear me? I’ll take him back to Chicago before I deal with this kind of claptrap judgment.”

  I wiped some spatula soap from my cheek, then took a deep breath. “I’m serious, Mom, I’m a little worried about him. Blackjack hasn’t been doing so well. Sometimes he doesn’t even remember who Grub is. And that army game they play has been walking a fine line between reality and fiction lately.”

  Mom raised an eyebrow and continued on. “Well, it’s still better than what most kids his age are doing, staring at screens and numbing their minds. And besides, you’re always with him at Hilltop, right?”

  “Well, yeah, but . . .” I paused. That wasn’t exactly true, or was
it? I guess it depended on whether Mom meant with him generally or with him in the same room. In either case, I decided now was not a good time to ask. Whenever Mom’s parenting skills got questioned, there was hell to pay. Maybe I’d bring it up again after she cooled down.

  “In fact, I think what Manny’s doing is a wonderful thing. He’s expressing his creativity and learning from his elders. All those years Grandma was sick, I was so grateful when people took the time to talk to her, to treat her with compassion. That’s what Manny’s doing with Mr. Porter. Your brother has a good heart. He’s a special—”

  “Special snowflake, I get it, Mom.” I raised my white flag in surrender, and then used it to dry the spatula. I decided if Mom wasn’t going to worry about him, I wouldn’t either. I changed the subject. “So what are you making for that catering job at the nursing home? Letty’s birthday party.”

  “I can’t even think about that right now, I’m so pissed at that grocery store woman.”

  “Everyone loves your triple chocolate brownies.”

  “I don’t own a damn confectionery,” she snapped.

  I threw my hands in the air, conceding defeat. We finished the dishes in silence. Mom mostly grumbled to herself for the next few days, and I kept my distance.

  The one small ray of sunshine during an otherwise bleak stretch was the amount of time I spent with Dylan, Axl, and Novie. And that went well for about one whole day until Dylan’s girlfriend dumped him.

  That evening, Axl and Novie had decided to play some songs for their great-grandmother’s birthday party, so we’d been going through Letty’s handwritten list in Dylan’s basement. After crossing off song after song, we’d narrowed our selections to two: “Life Could Be a Dream” and “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.”

  “What time does the party start?” asked Dylan.

  “Six o’clock,” I replied.

  “Right on. Our first official show as a band,” said Axl.