Breakfast Served Anytime (25 page)

And then that old theater magic kicked in and I forgot my lines. When I say I forgot them, I don’t mean the right words didn’t come out of my mouth; they did, all of them, just the way Shakespeare wrote them, just the way I’d rehearsed them in this very spot and just the way I’d spoken them opposite the chalk girl in McGrath’s tomb. When I say I forgot my lines, I mean I reached that wonderful moment of onstage levitation that you sometimes feel as an actor if you’re very, very lucky: The lines are so much a part of you that you can let them go and forget them; while your body is down there strutting and fretting its hour upon the stage, you can hover like a dust mote in the spotlight and catch a glimpse, just for a second, into what it’s all about.

Call it hyperbole, call it whatever you want, but in my split-second moment of levitation I could have sworn I caught a dust-mote glimpse into what would happen next: I would wake brokenhearted at having to leave Morlan, but by midmorning I’d be dizzy with longing for my own room, for River Road, for my CDs and books and for my dad, who would show up in the Munch (the last parent to arrive but still the first person I’d want to see; the tears that would spring to my eyes would surprise and embarrass us both). On the way out of town we’d pass the Egg Drop, and Xiu Li would be waving and Mason would be hunched in a booth, nursing a black coffee before walking the two miles home, where he would discover in his backpack the note I had hidden there, a line borrowed from Yeats:
one (wo!!)man loved the pilgrim soul in you, and loved the sorrows of your changing face . . .
First, though, he would catch sight of the Munch at the red light and he’d climb up on the table and behind the glass, behind the red-painted words
BREAKFAST SERVED ANYTIME
,
he’d take a deep bow, like he did beneath my window that first day, like he was doing now, and I was bowing with him, hand in hand, and I could see our friends out there beyond the footlights, clapping and smiling and cheering.

I could see that Jessica would follow in her sisters’ footsteps to Morlan and she would fall in love with Eric the RA and they would seal their God Match right after graduation; I’d get to be a bridesmaid and the wedding would be gorgeous, something right out of a magazine or a dream, but after that we’d drift the way friends don’t mean to do but do. There would be Christmas cards with babies on them. Twins.

Sonya’s boyfriend, Kevin Donnelly, would play ball for UK, but in the middle of a game at the newly named arena something strange would happen, his heart would stop; it would turn out to have been enlarged, his heart, or something like that. People would have caught the tragic moment on their phones; a blurry image of Kevin falling to the polished wood floor would make its way to YouTube. It would go viral, and Sonya would go ballistic. She would take her rage and grief to law school and take every bit of law that she could muster into her own hands. She would make huge bank, and she would take her first paycheck to Kevin Donnelly’s granny and would be loyal to her (and to me, to Jessica, to the mountains of Eastern Kentucky, to her family and her beautiful black Western Kentucky ancestors, six generations strong) as long as she would continue to breathe.

The seats stretching up behind Sonya and Jessica and the others were almost fully plunged in darkness, but in that dust-mote moment I scanned them still, those back-row seats, for the faces that I would seek in windows and in back rows and in mirrors for always: GoGo’s face, smiling at me all the way to graduation and then to NYU and the Tisch School of the Arts, where I would go because the scholarship really would fall out of the sky, just like Carol’s dance scholarship to Juilliard would, as if through all those years of dreaming we had willed our magic futures right into place. Alongside the light of GoGo’s face would be the darkened shade of my mother’s: Eventually I would try to stop imagining her in the windows and back rows of my life, but always she would appear there, because no matter how surely your friends can become your family, no matter how deeply you are cared for by such a lucky windfall of other people’s mothers (Carol’s, Calvin’s, Mason’s, each one a gift), the mother you always deep-down want — and you can ask Scout Finch if you don’t believe me — is nobody else’s but your own.

As for Chloe and Calvin and Mason: They would be true to their words and our Agreement. We’d meet in the fall and everybody’s hair would be longer and the leaves would be turning and the plans and applications would be falling into place: Calvin would take the scholarship, would study agriculture and be a first-generation college graduate, would do his family proud and keep the farm, keep it dutifully and lovingly, and keep Holyfield, too, who would live to a ripe old age on fresh air and corn and irreplaceable Kentucky bluegrass and Calvin’s singular, honorable brand of love, a love that each one of us would count on (and wonder at, and sometimes take for granted) over the years — and there would be many — to come.

Chloe would surprise us and take the scholarship, too: She’d go straight to the UK study abroad office, first stop Sorbonne, and later, much later, she’d come back to her alma mater and teach French, and one year she’d have this bright-eyed freshman named Juliet Goble-Xavier and the girl would look strangely familiar to Chloe, but the semester would be halfway over and Juliet’s French would be perfect before it would click and Chloe would think,
Ah, I knew you when you were a bébé; your father had a hand in changing my life.

Mason would go to Columbia, but it would be his camera that got him there, not the stage. I’d visit him sometimes in his hovel on Riverside Drive, and sometimes he would come downtown to see Carol and me in our tiny Houston Street apartment, strung with a million tiny white lights. We’d eat steaming noodles from the place downstairs and we would pine for Kentucky stars and sometimes Mason and I would stretch our bodies out — shoulders, hips, fingers barely touching — along the length of the beveled floor, which would rumble at night with the mysterious, subterranean passage of the trains and the great big huge heart of the city, beating its marvelous drum.

There’s no such place as Morlan College. It’s a figment of my imagination, but I feel it’s worth mentioning — for anyone who might be interested in this sort of thing — that I borrowed its name from the art gallery at Transylvania University. Transy also has a Kissing Tree (though it’s not a sycamore, and there’s no swing — the swing can be found on another Kentucky college campus, but I don’t want to go revealing all my secrets, do I?), as well as a tomb, secreted away beneath the storied administration building and belonging to one Constantine Rafinesque, who has been haunting the place for almost two hundred years. If when I was applying to colleges the admissions folks at Transy had mentioned the legend of Rafinesque and the annual Halloween lottery that allows a few brave students to spend the night in his tomb, I think I’d have been won over immediately.

Instead, I ended up at the University of Kentucky, where I owe sincere thanks to my unparalleled English and Classics professors who encouraged my writing and gave me an education I wouldn’t trade for anything and who in my estimation deserve paychecks equal to or greater than that of the basketball coach — which is not to say I don’t love the basketball, because oh, how devotedly I do.

Generous early readers, teacher and librarian colleagues, angels of the Morris Book Shop, the unforgettable Mr. Walsh, who in eleventh grade made us memorize Strunk and White’s
Elements of Style
and made all the difference — what if they don’t see these acknowledgments? They’re busy! There’re a thousand laudable reasons they might miss them, and anyway, they deserve so much more. Grateful arms thrown around their necks. Handwritten thank-you notes sent in the mail, brownies made with humility and love. That and more is what’s coming to them and to the following, as time and geography allow: Everyone at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning, where all the magic happens. Randi Ewing, this book’s fairy godmother from the start. Sarah and Molly and Amy, keepers of all the secrets. The YA Novel Discovery Contest and the She Writes community, who honored this book and set the adventure in motion. The ladies of the Young Women Writers Project, especially Elizabeth Kilcoyne, Annie Griggs, and Annie Bradford. The Kentucky Governor’s Scholars Program and Governor’s School for the Arts, a golden part of my — and so many other lucky people’s — story. Elizabeth Kaplan, agent extraordinaire. Nicole Raymond and her fellow wizards at the magnificent Candlewick Press, where I’m speechlessly honored that this book has found a home. Most of all, my wondrous, irreplaceable family — the cherished one I was born into, the one I was fortunate enough to marry into, the one I find in my friends, and the one I created with Huston Combs (Distinguished Eccentric and modern-day Atticus Finch if ever there was one), who is directly responsible for this book’s existence and so much else that is good in my life, especially our wonder boys, who I hope will always treasure books as much as they do right now. I love you all so fiercely, I can just barely stand it. Thank you.