The Rules of Love & Grammar (17 page)

And that's when I hear her.

“Honey, are you home? Who's here?” It's Mom, down the hall.

We pull apart. Peter smooths his shirt; I fix my hair. We walk through the room and meet my mother in the hall.

“You remember Peter Brooks, Mom.”

“Of course I do,” she says as she smiles and extends a hand. “This is a surprise.”

“It's nice to see you again,” Peter says. “It's been a long time.”

“We got takeout at Ernie's,” I tell her. “I was just giving Peter a tour of the house.”

“Yes, it's beautiful,” he says. “Brings back memories.”

“Well, don't let me stop you,” Mom says. Then she adds, “I'm going upstairs to check on Dad. We had to leave early. He's getting one of his migraines.” She turns to Peter. “Good luck with the movie. I hope it goes well.”

“Thanks,” he says, and she walks down the hall.

Peter glances at his watch. “I'd better get going, Grace. We've got an early start tomorrow.”

I don't want him to leave. “All right,” I say, trying not to sound disappointed. I follow him into the foyer, and we stand at the door. He kisses me again, briefly. Then he brushes a lock of hair from my face. “Come to the set. We'll be downtown tomorrow. Main Street.”

“Okay,” I tell him, wanting to commit to memory the feeling of his hand on my skin.

And then he's gone. I watch him get into the blue convertible and close the door. He starts the engine, and the car heads down the drive, gravel rumbling under the tires. I watch the taillights until I can't see them anymore. I listen to the engine until all I hear is a faint whine somewhere far down Salt Meadow Lane. And then that's gone.

The moths are still tapping around the lanterns when I walk to the door. Inside, I head down the hallway and into the family room, where I close the fallboard on the Steinway, sending the eighty-eight keys into exile once again.

I
hardly sleep that night, thoughts of Peter whirling in my head. We're at the kitchen table, with the fish and chips and hot fudge sundae between us. We're at the window, our faces pressed to the screen, the lights in the backyard flickering over the water. He's leading me across the family room, “Claire de Lune” playing in my head, my feet barely skimming the floor.

At seven thirty I get up, put on my white jeans, a pale-blue top, some makeup, and the good-luck necklace Mom and Dad gave me when I went to college—a gold
G
on a chain. I think I'm going to need some luck. After last night, I'm not even sure I still have a job.

There's coffee left in the pot, but my stomach is too jumpy to drink it. I pour myself a glass of water and stand at the sink. What if Mitch is right? What if I
am
in over my head? Maybe this whole thing will be a huge failure. I feel a twinge in my chest as I think about it. And then my cell phone rings.

“What are you doing?” It's Cluny, and she's using that same, animated
I've got a mystery for you!
voice I remember from our Nancy Drew days.

“I'm about to leave for work.”

“Good, I'm glad I caught you. Have you seen the paper?”

“Not yet.”

“Find page seventeen. It's your horoscope.”

“Oh, Cluny, not that again.” I glance at the table, where the pages of the
Dorset Review
lie scattered. “I can't, I've got to go.” I sling my handbag over my shoulder and, as an afterthought, grab one of Dad's new spiral notebooks from the end of the counter.

“You have to be careful,” she says.

I head down the hall, toward the front door. “What are you talking about?”

“Mercury is going retrograde. We all need to be careful.”

“What does that even mean?” I slide my car keys off the Chippendale chest.

“It means when you look at Mercury in the sky, it looks as though it's moving backward, although, of course, it really isn't.”

“So, what do I care?” I check my makeup in the hall mirror.

“You should care, because Mercury going retrograde can cause all kinds of problems, Grace. With travel, for one thing.”

“I'm only driving downtown.”

“And also with communication.”

I peek into my handbag. “I've got my Sharpies.”

“You're not taking this seriously. I'm telling you, be careful—with your new job, with Peter. Where you go, what you say.”

“Cluny, all Peter and I did last night was kiss. How could I possibly be more careful than that? And just because some planets are moving back and forth and sideways doesn't mean it's going to have any effect on me. Look, I'm going to be late. I'll talk to you tonight.”

I head down the driveway, “Claire de Lune” playing on my phone. But it takes more than twenty minutes just to get near Main Street. A few of the intersections are blocked, and traffic is at a crawl. As I cross Mason Street, I see a long line of white box trucks and tractor trailers parked by the side of the road. Standing out among them is a bright-red tractor trailer with the name Panavision emblazoned on its side. Hollywood has come to Dorset.

By the time I park in the lot behind the stores and run around to the front door of the bike shop, my blouse is fused to my skin with perspiration, and I'm pretty sure I've got sweat stains under my arms. Mitch is crouched at the back of the store, near the counter, spraying WD-40 on the chain of a white mountain bike when I walk in. He glances at me. Then he looks at the clock on the wall, above the counter. “Fifteen minutes late on your first day?”

“I know. I'm sorry.” I walk toward the counter.

He stands up and grabs a rag. “Look, I'm not in favor of this plan, but if my father wants to hire you, I won't get in the middle of it. It's his store and his decision. I'll give you a chance. But you need to be on time.”

“I will be. I'm sorry,” I say, looking around for Scooter. “It couldn't be helped, though. They have the roads blocked off for the movie, and I couldn't turn onto Main. And when I finally could, the traffic was all backed up.”

He crouches by the bike and rubs the chain with the rag. “Well, it's going to be a mess until those movie people leave, so you'd better plan your time accordingly. I don't know why the town ever agreed to it.”

I glance at a display of cycling gloves to the right of the counter and notice a pair of gray Giros in the wrong place. “Oh, I think shooting the movie here is a good thing. It's putting Dorset on the map.”

Mitch looks up. “For what? Being overcrowded and congested? I read that business has doubled in the restaurants here because people are coming in from other towns to try to get a glimpse of the actors. They're all a bunch of Hollywood phonies, anyway, with their mansions and their handmade cars. Why do you think they call it Tinseltown?”

I pull the gray Giros from the display and put them where they belong. “Dorset will be on the map for having a famous director in our midst. Peter Brooks. And he's certainly not a phony. He and I were very close friends. We still are.” Peter's blue eyes flash through my mind.

“I know,” Mitch says, sounding unimpressed. “You've told me.”

“Oh, right. I guess I have. Well, he invited me to stop by and watch some of the filming, so I'm going today. I've never been on a movie set.”

Mitch's eyebrows tick up. “Oh, hanging with the stars, are we?” He sounds a little sarcastic.

“I'm not hanging with the stars. I'm just going to visit Peter.”

“Right.” He goes back to the bike chain.

I look around. “So, what do you want me to do first?”

“Kevin's going to show you around the workroom,” he says. “Explain how we do things, where we keep everything.”

I follow Mitch into the workroom, where a guy who I'm guessing is in his mid-twenties tinkers with a green Cannondale suspended from one of the repair stands. His long, blond hair is sun-bleached in places to the color of white corn; his green Downey's Pickles T-shirt sports a drawing of a pickle jar. He's pulling a wiry cable from one of the hand brakes. I glance around the room, at the boxes and bins, the rims and frames overhead, the table of tools and parts. It feels as though the mess and clutter have grown overnight. Or maybe it's just worse than I remember.

“Kevin?” Mitch says.

The blond guy turns. “Oh, hey. What's up?”

“This is Grace. She's the girl who's going to be working here for a couple of weeks.” He pauses. “Organizing us.” He glances at me, and I feel a sudden sense of responsibility. I need to do a really good job on this.

“Oh, right,” Kevin says.

“So I told her you'd show her what's here.” He motions across the room. “Explain how things are set up. She can watch you work on some bikes, too. Then we'll go from there.”

“Yeah, okay. Sure,” Kevin says, and Mitch leaves.

Kevin looks me up and down, and I realize I'm way overdressed. I should be wearing a T-shirt and blue jeans, like the guys are. I put my notebook on the table and stash my handbag on the shelf underneath.

“So, what bike shops have you worked at?” he asks.

“Bike shops? Me? Oh, no. I haven't worked at any. I mean, this is my first.”

“Oh. Are you a racer or something, then?”

I laugh. “No, I'm not a racer.”

“But you ride a lot.” He says this in a hopeful tone, and I feel bad about disappointing him.

“Uh, not technically,” I say. And then I add, “Although I did sign up for the Dorset Challenge.” I don't need to tell him I'm probably not going to ride in it. That I must have been out of my mind when I signed up to ride fifty miles.

He peers at me. “Then how do you know about bikes?”

I start to line up the cans of spray paint on the worktable. “Well, I don't
exactly
know about bikes. But I do know about organizing things. I'm pretty good at that. And I really think I can help here, make it easier for you guys to do your work.”

“Hmm,” he says, opening one of the brakes of the Cannondale and threading the cable through it. “So why are you working here, anyway? I mean, if you're not into bikes?”

I throw an empty spray can into the trash. “Scooter and I are doing a trade.”

“What kind of trade?”

“Scooter said if I worked here for a couple of weeks, he'd have my bike restored. It's that Schwinn over there.” I point to Renny's bike, leaning with three others against the wall.

“Oh, that one. Yeah, I was checking it out yesterday. It's cool. Pretty old. What year is it?”

“'Seventy-seven.”

“Was it your dad's or something?”

I walk to the bike and run my hand over the word
Paramount
on the top tube. “No. It belonged to my sister. She died when we were young.”

Kevin looks up. “Oh man. Sorry.” He looks away. “Really sorry.”

“Thanks,” I say, staring at the deflated tires and rusty spokes.

“It's going to need a lot of work.”

“I know.”

He shifts the Cannondale's gears with one hand and uses his other hand to pedal the bike. “Just give me a minute to finish this, and I'll try to explain what's here.” He removes the pedals with a wrench, and the bike looks odd, like someone missing a pair of feet.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I'm replacing the cassette.”

From the worktable, he takes an object that looks like a shiny metal funnel with rows of tabs on the outside. “This is a cassette.” He hands it to me. “It's also called a cog set. It works with the derailleur.”

I turn the cassette over, running my fingers along its bumpy surface.

“I know what the derailleur is. It's the thing that switches the gears.”

“Uh, sort of,” he says, taking the cassette from me. “Okay, see, even though people call them gears, they're actually sprockets—these things here.” He rubs his thumb over the metal tabs. “Because they're driven by a chain.”

“Sprockets. Chains.” I need to remember this. I jot down a couple of things in the spiral notebook. Then I rub a spot of dirt off my pants.

“You know,” he says, “white pants aren't too good in a bike shop. Jeans are better.”

“Yeah, I think you're right.”

He flicks his hair from his face. “And you might want to spend a little time learning about how a bike works. It'll make it easier for you.”

“Do you have any suggestions?” I can hear Mitch and A.J. out front, talking to customers.

“Sure. There are some dynamite YouTube videos. I can forward them to you if you want.” He pulls a dog-eared paperback from the pocket of his jeans and hands it to me. “And you might want to check this out.”

“
You and Your Bike.
Catchy title,” I say as I flip through the pages, stopping at diagrams of bicycles, sketches of tools, tables of God knows what. “This looks pretty thorough.” I don't think I could ever learn all of this, and I'm hoping I won't need to, but, at the same time, I'm touched by his thoughtfulness.

“It's a little worn out,” he says. “But the pictures and drawings are decent, and it's a pretty short book.”

“Brevity is good.”

“What?”

“Um, being brief,” I say. “Being short. It's a good thing.”

“Oh, yeah. Sure.”

“Thanks, Kevin,” I say. “I really appreciate this. I'll give it back to you when I'm done.” I smile, and he starts to blush.

“Dude,” he says. “You can keep it.”

“I'm going to Eastbrook to drop off a bike,” Mitch tells me as he walks into the workroom later in the morning. “I thought you could come with me. I'll be driving over part of the route for the Dorset Challenge. You can see what it looks like.”

I don't really care about seeing the route for a ride I'm probably not going to do. On the other hand, he's being nice. I shouldn't turn him down. I look at the blue notebook, filled with my scribbles. “Are you sure you don't want me here working?”

“You will be working. We're delivering a bike.” He jingles the keys. “Come on. Let's go.” I follow him as he wheels a teal-blue beach bike out to the parking lot and loads it into the Bike Peddler's van. “Hold on,” he says, and I watch him go through the back door to the shop and return with two bottles of iced tea.

I step into the van, trying to avoid the junk on the floor—empty coffee cups, half-filled water bottles, catalogs, plastic grocery-store bags, and a baseball cap with
Falcon Sports
on the brim. I take a seat, tossing the cap into the back and nudging the cups and bottles away with my foot.

“You know,” I say, looking down, “you might want to throw away all this trash.” I realize too late that I shouldn't have said this. He'll probably have me clean the van next.

He pulls out of the parking lot. “You always seem to be concerned about the state of other people's stuff. First it's our flyers, then the workroom, now the van. What's next?” He peers at me out of the corner of his eye.

“Sorry. I just think there's a lot to be said for being neat. And organized.”

“I can see why a job correcting computer translations, or whatever you said you did, is perfect for you. You get to fix all the mistakes.”

I think he's getting back at me for insulting his van. “That's not all I did. I wrote promotional materials, product manuals, things like that.” He doesn't say anything. “I don't have the skill to be a poet or a novelist or that kind of writer,” I say, jumping in to fill the silence. “There are practical considerations, you know.” Something jabs my thigh, and I realize I'm sitting on a small pair of pliers. “Anyway, I think being organized makes it easier to get things done. If everybody was organized, the world would be a better place.”