What I Came to Tell You (14 page)

On late Friday afternoons Grover and Sudie would walk down here, meet their parents and decide on a movie together, which wasn’t always easy. They’d get take-out from a little restaurant called The Weeping Duck, then go home and watch the movie and eat wonton soup, egg rolls, and Grover’s favorite, shrimp fried rice.

Sudie and Clay had gone straight to the
Pretty New
section and found
Fantastic Mr. Fox
. They were reading what it said about it on the back of the DVD.

“Let me know if you need any help,” said the guy behind the counter. He had a goatee and wore a turtleneck. He was watching a TV mounted high up on the wall in one corner where a Woody Allen movie was playing. Their father loved Woody Allen. He would laugh and laugh at his movies. Most of the time, Grover didn’t see what was so funny.

Sudie looked up at Grover hopefully, clutching
Fantastic Mr. Fox
to her chest. Grover shook his head. Sudie sighed and set it back on the shelf.

“It’s just one little movie,” she said.

Grover wasn’t about to tell Sudie why just the sight of his sister holding that DVD made him feel almost sick. He’d never tell her that his mother had asked him, when Videolife had first called, if he would pick up the
Fantastic Mr. Fox
DVD that the store was holding for them after school. He’d never tell her that he’d forgotten about it till the day he’d seen their mother through the car’s rear window, headed toward Videolife with Biscuit.

“Sure there isn’t anything I can help you with?” The guy behind the counter glanced away from the movie.

“We just came in to warm up,” Grover said.

“Stay as long as you like,” the guy said, looking back at the TV. But the way he said it made Grover wonder if he knew who they were.

Grover wandered over to the
Funny as All Get-Out
, picking up a DVD of
Fawlty Towers
, a British TV comedy that used to make their mother laugh so hard she’d be wiping away tears. Someone sneezed. He looked up to see Matthew, in his UNC
Asheville sweatshirt this time, looking at a movie, reading the back of the case. Grover quietly set the DVD back in its place, and then quickly stepped around the corner and headed back to find his sister and the others.

They crossed the overpass that led into downtown, passing city workers who fought the wind to hang garlands, wreaths, giant yellow candles and Christmas lights. The workers were decorating for the Christmas parade tomorrow, which was on the Saturday before Thanksgiving.

Grover, Sudie, Clay and Emma Lee ducked into the Grove Arcade. In the entryway, a red-cheeked man dressed in a Salvation Army uniform rang a bell for donations. Clay dug into his pocket, pulled out a crumpled dollar bill and dropped it into the big hanging pot.

“Merry Christmas to y’all,” the man said as the four of them walked on inside.

The first thing to hit them was the warmth, the feeling coming back into their hands and faces, as they looked at the long glistening hallway. Shafts of afternoon sunlight filtered down through the high windows, looking touchable.

“Monet,” Emma Lee said to herself, staring down the hall.

“I gave the fellow a dollar,” Clay said to his sister.

“Not
money
,” she said impatiently. “The painter. It’s like that painting by him.” She looked down the hall. “Of the cathedral.”

“Exactly!” Grover said, looking at her. One year Grover’d given his mother a calendar of Monet’s paintings.

Sudie showed Emma Lee and Clay the model in the middle of the building of how the architect had originally designed the building with a twelve-story tower above the shops, a small skyscraper. Grover had heard this a million times, but it was only now that he thought what it must’ve been like for the architect. How disappointed he must’ve been to have worked so hard on something and created such a beautiful building on paper but never seen the whole thing built.

The arcade was busy with Christmas shoppers. Grover had always been struck by how early Christmas seemed to start downtown. Their father said it was good for business. He said that some stores made most of their money during the holiday season.

A group of people had gathered in the center of the arcade where three musicians—a banjo player, a fiddler and a guitar player—played old-time Christmas music. The fiddler, a bearded man, had left his case open, and it was full of coins and dollar bills. They played fast and hard. People tapped their toes and clapped in time. It was the kind of music that was difficult not to smile to.

“Man, they’re hot.” Clay took off his backpack and started to clog.

“Clay’s won the clogging competition at the Lamar Lunsford Festival every year since he was four,” Emma Lee said.

“Look at that hillbilly go,” said a well-dressed older man to a woman in a fur coat. Grover could tell from his accent that he was not from the South.

“My brother is
not
a hillbilly!” Emma Lee had whirled around and faced the man.

“I didn’t mean anything by it.” The man laughed and looked at his wife, then back at Emma Lee. “I think your brother is one hell of a dancer.”

“Don’t call him a hillbilly,” Emma Lee said, her jaw working.

“I really don’t see the problem …”

“You heard the girl!” Another man stepped up to the well-dressed man. Grover had noticed him standing behind them, listening to the music with his wife and two little blonde-haired girls. He had long hair, wore a ball cap and a hunting jacket.

“I didn’t mean anything by it.” The well-dressed man wasn’t laughing now and his face had turned pale. “Tell him, Gertrude.” He turned to his wife but she pressed her lips together as if this wasn’t the first time her husband’s mouth had gotten him in trouble.

“I wouldn’t call nobody a hillbilly,” the man in the ball cap said, leveling his eyes at the well-dressed man, “not if you expect to live a long and healthy life.”

“Is that a threat?!”

“It’s one of them health advisories.”

The well-dressed man started to say something but seemed to think better of it. He took his wife’s hand, and they disappeared through the crowd.

“ ’Preciate it,” Emma Lee said to the man in the ball cap.

He gave her a wink and nodded toward the band. “The fella’s right. Your brother’s good.” He stepped back and joined
his family. Grover saw the sad look flicker across Emma Lee’s face as she watched the man’s little girls take their father’s hands and lean back against him.

The band shifted into a faster song, and as the fiddle sped up, so did Clay’s footwork. More people gathered to listen to the music and watch him dance. Emma Lee shrugged off her backpack and joined her brother. Other people stepped out of the crowd, joining Clay and Emma Lee, and pretty soon it seemed as if half the people in the Grove Arcade were dancing.

“Come on.” Emma Lee waved Grover up.

He thought about going up, but his feet wouldn’t move. He knew good and well that if his mother had been there, she’d have been dancing right in the middle of them.

Grover watched Emma Lee drink her hot chocolate. He didn’t know if it was the cold or the dancing, but her cheeks had reddened and her eyes glistened. They had stopped in at Bean Streets long enough for Sudie to beat Clay in checkers.

“Oh, gross,” Emma Lee was muttering under her breath.

A dreadlocked couple kissed and stuck their tongues into each other’s mouths right in front of their table, where Mr. Critt had hung a sprig of mistletoe on the tip of the mannequin arm coming out of the ceiling.

“Make me gag,” Emma Lee said louder.

Grover laughed, nearly spraying hot chocolate everywhere.

“Don’t knock what you haven’t tried, sister,” the dreadlock girl said to Emma Lee. She nodded toward the mistletoe. “Why don’t you and your boyfriend give it a whirl?”

“I’m
not
her boyfriend!” Grover said.

“Never too early to start,” the dreadlock guy said, then, as if he was demonstrating, kissed the dreadlock girl another long kiss. The couple sauntered off toward their table in the back, his hand in her back pocket.

Grover couldn’t bring himself to look at Emma Lee. He kept his eyes on the checkerboard as Sudie quickly finished off Clay. When he finally did look up, the expression on Emma Lee’s face wasn’t at all what he’d expected. He couldn’t be sure but he thought she looked a little hurt.

“In case you hadn’t noticed, my sister has a thing for Thomas Wolfe,” Clay said as Emma Lee ran ahead and disappeared into the Old Kentucky Home. Clay looked at the rocking chairs lined up on the long porch.

“The guests used to sit out here in the summers,” Sudie said. “A long time ago, people stayed in boardinghouses like this when they visited Asheville. Now they stay in hotels.” She pointed to the Renaissance Hotel, a huge, ten-story hotel across from the Wolfe house. “Daddy says the Wolfe house has been in the hotel’s shadow since the day it was built.”

Shading his eyes with his hands, Clay frowned up into the
sky, looking over at the hotel and then back at the Wolfe house. “Now I may be wrong. Wouldn’t be the first time. But unless I’m sorely mistaken, the path of the sun over these two buildings is such that the Wolfe house would never find itself in that big old hotel’s shadow.”

Inside, the first thing Grover noticed was the bright smell of pine and fir. Along the edges of the main exhibit room lay wreaths, a small stack of cut fir trees and another neat pile of garlands made from pine branches. Emma Lee was already at the exhibits, stopping to read every word, something Grover hadn’t done in all the years he’d come here. Little Bit and several of the tour guides were draping garlands around the main room.

“He’s in his office,” Little Bit said, handing a garland to a tour guide on a ladder.

“You really are having a Thomas Wolfe Christmas,” Sudie said.

Little Bit glanced off toward their father’s office. “I thought your daddy would have a fit when he saw the bill. Instead, he said to make sure I got whatever I needed.” She lowered her voice. “His mood has improved lately.”

Grover walked to his father’s half-open office door and found him standing at his desk with Leila beside him. They were looking at an open book on the desk. The way they leaned together, almost touching, gave Grover an odd feeling. He knocked.

Leila and their father stepped back from each other.

“Come on in!” his father said. A tinge of red crept across his father’s face. “I was showing Leila a first edition
Look Homeward, Angel
.”

When Leila Roundtree looked up from the book, it hit Grover how pretty she was and how she wasn’t just somebody’s mother. He thought about how his father had accepted rides from the Roundtrees in the mornings, how he and Leila had started going on walks after supper, how he came back from those walks in a good mood.

His father led the Roundtrees through the house, starting downstairs, taking them through the dining room, the kitchen, the piano parlor, the sunroom parlor and then upstairs to the bedrooms. He showed them the room where Wolfe’s brother Ben had died. Even without reading the book, Grover’d heard his father’s spiel enough to know that Ben, Wolfe’s older brother, was the angel in
Look Homeward, Angel
.