Amalee (11 page)

Joyce cleared her junk from the seats in her car, laughing nervously as she picked up the gum wrappers, notebooks, and junk mail.

“I have a very … cluttered life, but an interesting one,” she explained, doing a last arm brush of the seat for Sarah.

She tried to help Dad into the car, but he shook his head and slowly let himself in.

We drove toward town, with Joyce asking all sorts of questions. How was the play? How did we feel? Scared? Happy? We could have asked Joyce the same thing. She was all aflutter.

Dad was staring out at the town he hadn't seen for months. There were flowers around the mailboxes where
he'd last seen snowbanks. Clearly, he didn't know where we were going, and he didn't care. But I did.

“Hey, I have a question,” I butted in. “Where are we going?”

“To a restaurant,” Joyce answered.

“The one where John works?” I asked.

“See for yourself. We're here.” She stopped the car, and we all stared at the awning. It said, simply,
JOHN AND FRIENDS
. It was a restaurant. It was John's restaurant. It was John's restaurant that
belonged
to him! Under the awning was a big sign that said,
GRAND OPENING
!

“It can't be …” Dad began.

“I'm not going to cry,” Joyce assured us, but her hands were shaking as she opened the door.

Silently, excitedly, we made our way into the building, which had been boarded up for a while. But not anymore. It was crowded! Crowded with people, plants, candles, and walls painted with vines.

The first thing we saw, though, was a simple waiting area, next to the coatroom, with a light-blue tiled floor, white walls, and a light-gray stone fountain — just a stone bowl on a small pillar, with water spouting in three silver sprays.

“Do you like it?” Joyce asked. “I put it together. I worked with someone at Carolyn's gardening store.”

“It's really nice, Joyce,” Sarah spoke up.

“You see, Sarah, this is a little embarrassing, but whenever I see something beautiful, I want to cry. There's nothing wrong with it, except sometimes I realize I think I
have
to cry or else nobody in the room will feel anything. So the fountain is there to remind me that I don't have to do all the crying, as it were,” Joyce explained in a rush of words. “Everyone's a fountain, right?” She gave me and Dad a knowing look.

“Yes, everyone has the right to be lachrymose,” I noted. They all looked at me.

“Well, while John was secretly opening this place, I was secretly learning new words in school!” I exclaimed, and then I looked at the fountain and said, “I love it, Joyce. You are very talented!”

“You think
I'm
talented.” She laughed. “Hey, Phyllis, come be our tour guide!”

Phyllis appeared at a small podium in the corner. She was wearing a long black dress. Her hair was swooped up in a silver clip, and she was wearing a long silver necklace.

“Look at you!” Dad exclaimed.

“No, David,” she protested, “look at
you
!” Then she cleared her throat and said, “Come right this way, everyone.”

I saw how the painted vines climbed up and wound their way all around the bottom half of the walls. Very dramatic.

I looked over as a camera flashed. The local paper was taking a picture of Carolyn signing her masterpiece in a corner under a bunch of grapes. So this was the project she had been doing with John!

Sarah and I swung around as we heard another sound. John himself came bursting through the doors that swung out from the kitchen. “Goodness! Look at the crowd!” he exclaimed, addressing us as if he were an emperor in a chef's hat.

“I put ads in all the papers and on the radio,” Phyllis whispered to us. “The ads said, ‘Come to our new restaurant, and for five dollars you can try everything on the menu.' Cheap food and a chance to sample everything. It seemed like good marketing.”

So Phyllis had organized this whole thing. I hadn't even thought to notice all the files, folders, and envelopes she had added to her usual pile. She was always busy working on a few ideas. Now the plan was to make a big splash with the opening for John's restaurant, and she had obviously succeeded!

“If I can make parents' night sound like fun, why not
a new restaurant?” she added modestly, but I could tell she was very proud.

I saw that the menu had been blown up to poster size, standing on an easel, and I realized all of the dishes were being served in miniature on trays that were being passed around.

John was being very good at being John, making his way through the crowd, saying things like, “You're sure? You are positively sure the pie crust is flaky and delicious?” and “Well, I could give you the recipe, but then I'd have to kill you,” and “Well, if you love it, then have another one!”

“That's John,” I said, pointing him out to Sarah. She was eating a little spinach quiche. “Uh-oh. John said we wouldn't like that until we were fourteen,” I warned her.

“I like it now!” she said with her mouth full, picking another one off the tray. “Can we call my dad and stepmom?”

“Sure!” I said, and Phyllis appeared out of thin air with a phone. Sarah disappeared to call her house.

Everyone was gaping at the beautiful walls.

I snuck up next to Carolyn and said, “That's some
trompe l'oeil
.”

Carolyn put her arm around me, bony but strong. Her
red hair was extra spiky tonight. Very fancy. “Thank you,” she said. “I know. But what about the plants? The living ones. Do they look healthy? I raised them myself.”

I looked around at the potted trees and the planters on the low walls.

“Hm …” I said. Carolyn watched me nervously. “I'd say they look so good, people will come here just for the beauty of the place.”

Carolyn exhaled. “I thought so myself, but I didn't want to say it. I'm very modest. Hey, look at that dessert table!”

Sarah had returned, and she and I looked over at a long table covered with desserts. Cakes, custards, linzer torte … everything John and I had made in the kitchen that night and more.

Carolyn had handwritten the labels:
BROOKLYN BLACK-OUT CAKE
,
WOODSTOCK CARROT CAKE
,
HUDSON RIVER BLUE-BERRY PIE
,
SAVANNAH LEMON MERINGUE PIE
, and, of course,
RASPBERRY LINZER TORTE
.

“Amalee, look,” said Carolyn, nodding toward the door. Dr. Nurstrom walked in. I saw him laugh as he shook my dad's hand. I was glad to see that Dad was sitting. Joyce had been standing close by — protecting him, I think. Dad looked happy. Dr. Nurstrom looked happy. He put his arm around Joyce.

“Dr. Nurstrom is dating Joyce,” Carolyn said. “Didn't you notice?”

“I only knew about the one date!” I said. Carolyn didn't have a chance to answer.

“Hey!” came a voice from behind me. “How is my little girl?”

I turned around and saw John. His voice did not match the look on his face. He looked almost bashful, as if he were waiting for my approval.

I remembered what Dad said, about adults wanting kids to like them.

I decided to come clean, right then and there. “John, when I said you'd never open a restaurant I felt terrible! I felt terrible for days! I felt like a jerk. And I'm so glad I was wrong.”

“Oh, Honey, I have to thank you for that!” John assured me cheerfully. “I was so freaked out when you said that, I thought,
Have I really been saying this over and over?
I decided to get the God's honest truth about it, so guess who I called?”

“Carolyn?” I guessed.

“That's right,” he said. “She said whenever I started talking about my job, she felt like she was stuck on an elevator with bad music from her prom.”

He went on to explain that after our night in the
kitchen, he'd marched himself into the bank, gotten a loan approved, and made an offer on this very building that afternoon.

“Even after that Friday night when I cursed you by opening my big mouth?” I asked.

“Big and beautiful, Sweetheart, and don't you go changing!”

I found out that when John bought the building, all his friends jumped in to help. Carolyn painted the inside and some of the outside, designed the menus, and printed all the signs. After painting all those incredibly detailed, beautiful plants, she decided she wanted to grow real plants, and to grow some for the restaurant.

Joyce, as it turned out, didn't just build the fountain. She had helped Carolyn paint and had picked out the tables and chairs. She also insisted on buying some fancy kitchen things for John, like a giant stove! She said she'd been saving up money for a rainy day, and one stormy Tuesday she decided
this rainy day is as good as any
.

Phyllis had not only planned this opening night. She had also hired the waitstaff, created a schedule for them, and made contacts with all the local farmers so that John could work with them. She was going to work at the restaurant at night, taking care of all the money issues,
making sure that everything was “in the black,” as she put it.

For his part, John had been dreaming about his restaurant for so long, he merely had to walk in, crack an egg, and start cooking, just like he had at our house.

Phyllis snuck up behind me and put a hand on my shoulder.

“Not bad for a bunch of misfits, huh?”

I felt my body get tense. She knew that's how
I
had seen them. Suddenly I was right back there on a Friday night, rolling my eyes in my dad's small car, waiting for his friends to do something, anything, about their problems. And Phyllis knew that's how I'd felt.

But then I looked up and saw her face. She was beaming with pride. “Isn't this beautiful?” she asked.

We both looked all the way around the restaurant, at John smiling and eating his own tiny quiches, Carolyn showing a detail of her painting to my art teacher, Joyce laughing, Dr. Nurstrom smiling, Dad picking out a shrimp dumpling from a tray, and all the other people who had shown up tonight, thanks to Phyllis.

“You aren't misfits,” I mumbled, completely embarrassed.

“Oh, yeah? Well, guess what?” Phyllis asked. “Nei
ther are you. By the way, those girls I saw you with at the beginning of the year, what were their names again?”

“Hally and Ellen?”

“Hally and Ellen, that's it. I could tell you felt uncomfortable around them.”

“They like to make fun of people.” I was finally understanding how unhappy I had felt, trying to win their favor.

I thought Phyllis didn't hear me. “I always felt bad for them,” she said. Really? “They'll never learn about their own lives if they keep on criticizing the way other people walk and talk and dress.” She paused and thought and said, “Ugh. I think I was like them when I was your age.”

REALLY?

“We all want to impress people, you know,” she went on. “And when we find people we don't have to impress, you know what we call them? We call them friends.”

I thought of John telling his friends, including my dad, that he felt like a depressed cow. What a field day Hally and Ellen would have with that!

“And you know what the truly magical thing is?” Phyllis continued. “A real friendship doesn't ask you to impress anyone, and yet it helps you do all sorts of impressive things you never thought you could do!”

Then Phyllis sounded a little like a teacher as she
asked, “And what do you think is the key to that magic door?”

“I don't know, Phyllis,” I said. “I'm not so good at finding this magic door yet. I'm a work in progress on this topic.”

She countered, “Well, why do you think you invited Sarah here tonight?”

I thought of the day I met Sarah. We probably hit it off because I didn't make her feel like a “misfit,” as Phyllis would say, for wandering around backstage, and she didn't make fun of me for eating lunch alone in the dark. That's when we knew we could be friends.

I looked over at Sarah now, talking with John. She must have said something nice about his cooking, because suddenly he was hugging her in his enormous way. I was relieved to see she didn't give him a you're-so-weird look. She just laughed.

I turned to Phyllis and said, “I know the answer. If the door you're talking about is friendship, there is no key. If you want to open the magic door, you have to knock, and you have to keep knocking until someone opens it up from the other side. Right? Is that what you were thinking?”

Phyllis beamed. “Bright, bright, bright as a star. I love the way that mind of yours works, Amalee Everly.” I
guess it was better than the answer she was looking for. I took that as a good sign.

Across the room, Dad held something up. It looked like a dumpling, “Have you had one of these?” he called. “It's amazing! You have to try it!”

I made my way across the room to where Dad was sitting with Joyce and Dr. Nurstrom. “I will!” I answered.

Tonight, I would try anything.