The Love Song of Jonny Valentine (16 page)

“I used to come home from school every day and have a snack before starting my homework,” I said.

“What did you eat?” Robin asked.

“Peanut butter and jelly with the crusts cut off. Jane would make it.” That was another clue for my father, since she’s afraid to go
near
peanut butter because of her allergy. She actually made tuna sandwiches with a ton of mayo and the crusts on and left them in the fridge for me, but she doesn’t even let Peter buy mayo anymore since it’s so fatty.

Robin looked over at Jane, who was staring at the stove like she was watching something boiling. “Were you as involved in Jonny’s life back then as you are now?”

Jane turned back to her quickly. “Well, obviously. I’m his mother.”

“But now you’re his mother
and
his manager. Before, you were just his mother.”

“I consider it a blessing that we get to spend so much time together.”

“Does it ever feel like it might be too
much
time?” Robin asked.

Jane looked ready to kill her, but she adjusted and smiled huge. Never lose control.

“Of course, you have to give your child room to breathe,” she said, totally composed in a cheery talk-show voice. “But I do fear that parents aren’t spending enough time with their children these days and are just scheduling them for activities without them or letting them entertain themselves.”

“And was it a hard decision to bring Jonny into show business?”

“The hardest decision I’ve ever made.” She shook her head and made a small frown like it still tore her apart.
Jane
could star in a dramatic vehicle. “But it was really Jonny’s decision. He wanted it so badly.”

“It was always my dream,” I said, to help her out.

“Since he was old enough to sing,” Jane said. We were like a veteran shortstop and second baseman on joint interviews, me flipping the ball to her to turn the inning-ending double play. “So we prayed on it, and we felt it was the right time to share Jonny with the world.”

That was really smart brand strategy, because it was just enough religious stuff to make her look good after she’d snapped at Robin, and also coastal media never probes when you bring up religion, because the risk of controversy is too high.

Sure enough, Kevin said the family was gouging them on each ten-minute
block and we had to leave. I was kind of surprised they hadn’t set up a museum, like “Jonny Valentine’s Childhood Home.”

When we left, we passed by the TV, which used to be on the other side of the living room, because they’d switched where the TV and couch were, since it was better to sleep in the other position but better for people to sit in now, but
before
even that, when my father lived there with us, I had a bed in the living room and Jane and my father slept in the bedroom. And it brought back another memory.

It must have been right before my father left or I couldn’t have remembered it. It was rainy and gray and cold out, and Jane had been staying with Grandma Pat for like a week. She must have been sick or something. The Cardinals were on TV, on the road because they couldn’t have played in the rain, and I guess my father decided I was old enough for him to explain the game to me. I bet I didn’t get much of it since I was so young, but he talked nearly the whole game, in this really fast way, and he was sweating even though he was only lying on my bed and getting worked up every time the Cardinals got a hit or something. But one reason it stands out is that the Cardinals got into a brawl with the other team, both benches clearing out, and my father called someone on the phone and asked if they were watching this shit. That must be nice, to have a friend you could just call up like that and know they were watching the same thing as you. Me and Walter don’t follow the same teams, so I don’t call him in his bungalow when I’m watching a game.

The Cardinals scored a few runs off the other team’s errors, and I kept asking what an error was because the announcers kept bringing it up. My father tried to explain. He was like, “It’s when you make a mistake, and it screws everything up for your team.” Then the Cardinals gave up a few runs after
they
made a bunch of errors, and the announcer said, “The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” and his color man said that was always true in baseball, and it was the first time I’d heard that saying so I asked my father what it meant, even though he was pissed the Cardinals had let the game get tied.

He said something like, “It means right when you get something good, you lose it.”

“Like the toy car?” I asked. They’d gotten me a remote-control car for my birthday, and I’d been all excited to use it, but it broke right away.

“No,” he said. “We returned that to the store when it broke, and we got a new one that worked.” He didn’t say anything for a minute as we watched the Cardinals lose, then he spoke real slowly so I can still mostly remember it. He was like, “What it means is what our neighbor Mrs. Warfield said to me the other day, which is that God has a plan for everyone and it’s not our place to question him.”

He turned the TV off. “So if anyone ever tells you that in the future, you’ll know they’re as big a moron as Mrs. Warfield.” Up till then Mrs. Warfield had just been this nice older lady who gave me candy, but after that I knew she was a moron.

Just as we went out the door to the apartment, I got this empty feeling in my chest, like this would be the last time I’d ever see it. I turned back to look inside, but the final crew guy had already closed the door. Maybe if I reconnected with my father we could visit it again together, without a TV show.

Outside, the camera crew walked with me and Michael to the park down the block. “Should we be talking?” I asked Kevin.

“If you want,” he said. “Or we can cut footage with music over.”

But I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to ask Michael if he ever thought about our sleepovers, how we’d stay up late and sneak out of his room to watch the TV on low and raid the kitchen for cookies and chips and soda when his parents were asleep. His house always had a million snacks. I didn’t feel like it, though.

I used to lie in bed at night sometimes before sleep and I’d think about what if Michael died, and I’d imagine me being at his funeral and staring into his coffin like they do in the movies and seeing him in a suit even though he should’ve been in his Champion sweats, and knowing no one else knew the jokes we had together, like when we’d crack each other up by saying, “There was a weasel in here?” after Elinor Burt once asked that in the middle of science class when Mrs. Potts said the word
weasel,
and I’d make myself cry even. I wondered if I could even do that anymore. I could make myself tear up onstage when I sang “Heart Torn
Apart,” but I didn’t have to think of anything to do it, I only had to tell myself to cry and the tears were waiting for me, like the song brought it on, not anything from real life.

It would sound pretty gay if I told Michael about that, or asked if he ever thought about anything like that for me.

No one else was at the park. It looked empty, just a swing set and a small field I also remembered being bigger that was all dirt now from the winter. Michael was always the QB and I was the receiver, so I tossed him the ball.

“Do you still play a lot?” I asked.

“I’m on the intramural flag-football team,” Michael said.

“I just play with Walter.”

“Who’s Walter?”

“My bodyguard.” I shouldn’t have brought him up. “He’s not here today, because it wouldn’t play good on camera.” Michael just picked at the grip on the ball, so I asked, “What was the name of that play we made up?”

“ ‘Oh Baby,’ ” he said.

“Right. Why’d we call it that again?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.” But it looked like he did. I couldn’t ask him on camera, though. I couldn’t even really ask him off-camera.

I ran deep. Like I’d practiced it every day the last two years, I thought, “Oh baby oh baby oh baby
cut
.” You cut left after the third “Oh baby.” I still couldn’t remember why we called it that. Michael’s pass sailed behind me.

“You’re supposed to cut right,” he said.

It was true. There used to be a seesaw to the left, the one with me and Jane in the photo in my bedroom, and I had to cut right. It wasn’t there anymore, so I forgot.

I said, “Sorry.”

We ran it a few more times until we completed a pass for the camera crew. I spiked the ball and did my trademark spin move when Kevin asked me. He said they had enough tape, and told me and Michael to say our good-byes before they drove him home. “Bye, Michael,” I said.

“Bye.”

“Stay in touch.”

He smiled. He needed braces soon. “Yeah,” he said. “Like when you left the first time.” He didn’t sound sad when he said it. It was like his eyes were seeing through me and through the seesaw that wasn’t there anymore.

I thought he was done, but he kept going. “My parents wanted to fly me out to visit. We couldn’t get through to you.”

“I never knew that.” I really didn’t. “The label doesn’t tell me a lot. They probably thought you were a fan. There are a lot of impostors who pretend to know me.”

He would’ve loved going into the locker rooms of any team and backstage at any concert we wanted. Maybe I could still invite him out to L.A. He could sleep in one of the extra rooms and we could finally try staying up all night, now that I knew how to make coffee.

“I know.” He shuffled into a car without looking back at me. “You’re busy with your label. And getting free clothes. And going on fake dates. Like all the other celebs.”

He shut the door. I stared at the tinted window he was behind. I wanted to knock on it, open it up and tell him I was sorry, I didn’t mean to talk to him like that, this is how people talk in L.A., I’m still the same kid who played football with you for hours after school and ate Doritos till three a.m. while we watched infomercials and used to cry imagining your funeral, and there was a weasel in here?

Except I wasn’t the same kid, and neither was he, and if he visited we wouldn’t have a fun time together and I wouldn’t be able to stay up all night because it would throw off my schedule for the next day and I wasn’t allowed junk food and he probably didn’t even remember the weasel joke.

Jane came over and asked how it all went as his car took off. “I think they’ll edit it good,” I said.

“Was it nice seeing your school?”

“I guess.”

“And Michael?”

I traced the pass route for “Oh Baby” on the ground with my red Nikes. “He was fine.”

“Just fine?”

“I don’t know. It was sort of weird. He said he tried to visit but couldn’t get through to me. I told him the label doesn’t pass on personal messages.”

She nodded. “I’ve explained to you before how it’s hard for people from your past to adjust to you. They can get jealous, or resentful, or try to use you. You know that’s why I cut everyone from St. Louis off.”

“Michael wasn’t like that, though.”

She stroked my hair out of my eyes and gave me a kiss on my forehead as if I’d fainted again. “I know, baby. I’m so sorry.”

“It wasn’t you who was acting weird, it was Michael.”

“Yeah, but—” She straightened up and got into her business mode and said, “They’re taking us somewhere else. It’s a surprise, so we have to be blindfolded. We’ll ride together.”

They had a limo for us, and Robin and a camera guy sat inside with us and made us put on blindfolds. In the dark, I imagined it was like a hostage situation. Me and Jane were being kidnapped, and the kidnappers told Jane they would only let one of us live, so she told them, “Fuck you, let my baby go,” and they let me out of the car, but then I found my way back to them because the car left a trail of gasoline, and I killed them all even though it was too late to rescue Jane, since they’d slashed her neck and blood was oozing everywhere.

They took our blindfolds off, Jane’s first, and I heard her say, “No way. Absolutely not.” I wriggled out of mine. We were in the parking lot of Schnucks. “Turn the camera off.
Now
.”

Robin said, “Phil, turn it off.”

“First, how did you know I worked here?” Jane asked.

“It’s not exactly classified information.”

“Well, I’m not going in, if that’s your plan.”

Robin sighed and said she’d talk to Kevin. The camera guy left with her. “This is ridiculous,” Jane said to me. “They’re deliberately trying to belittle me.”

“Won’t this help the heartland ID with us?” I asked.

“I don’t care.”

Kevin came inside. “Jane? You have a problem with this?”

“I’m not doing it.”

“Listen,” he said. “We made a lot of concessions already, namely not interviewing any family members or friends. We need more footage. So I’m afraid this is a deal breaker.”

“Me not agreeing to humiliate myself is a deal breaker?”

“What’s humiliating about this? It’s a job you used to have. I used to work at a hardware store. This is what people do. If you don’t want to do it, we won’t run the profile.”

I almost said out loud what I knew Jane was thinking, that this guy didn’t know what it was like to be a celebrity, even a backstage celebrity like Jane, that he might run a TV show but no one cared what dumb job he had before, but Jane had image maintenance to worry about.

She looked out at the Schnucks again, the big red letters over the brown front. “B-roll footage only. Robin doesn’t come in. If anyone I know works there, we’re not talking to them. Deal?”

He agreed. Jane’s good at bargaining. She always reminds me how the label tried to screw us on our first deal and her business advisers were pressuring her to sign but she knew she had leverage and used it when less sophisticated people would’ve just buckled. You extend a fair offer to the other party but make it clear you’re not giving them anything beyond that. People respect that you’re not conning them and you’re also not a pushover.

She put on her sunglasses as she got out of the car. “No sunglasses, please,” Kevin said. She took a sharp breath in through her nose and placed them on top of her head and walked fast to the entrance. The camera guy raced to catch up.