My Most Excellent Year (29 page)

Dear Mama,

Kiss Me, Kate
is on its way to Broadway. It
has
to be. They had a run-through of the first act on Saturday morning and I never saw anything like it in my life. I know I’m not a theatre critic like Mom is, but I recognize a Tommy Award Winner when it’s plopped down in front of me.

BEST SCENE #1:
Lee Meyerhoff singing a song called “Tom, Dick, or Harry” when she’s trying to choose between three guys. Two of them are played by Augie and Andy, who get to have a fake fistfight onstage. But from where we were sitting, it didn’t look like Augie was faking
any
of it.

BEST SCENE #2:
Lee getting pissed of at Bill (Augie) for always gambling, so she sings “Why Can’t You Behave?” to him. Funny, I’ve been asking him that same question since we were six.

BEST SCENE #3:
Alé reminiscing with Keith about when they used to be married, but turning in the other direction so she wouldn’t smell him any more than she had to.

AWARDS:
Augie for Best New Star (like this is a surprise?)
Lee for Putting Up With Augie (Medal of Honor maybe?)
Alé for
People
Magazine’s Sexiest Woman Alive (at least)

We left for Plum Island right after the run-through ended—and since Pop and Lori hadn’t been there, Alé and Augie sang them all of the songs in the show during the forty-five minutes it took us to drive north through Massachusetts. I signed as many of the words as I could for Hucky, but they left me in their dust back in Lynn. All I remember is that while I was trying to keep up with “We Open in Venice,” I got confused between the sign for
open
and the sign for
fart
, so it came out a whole lot different than Cole Porter meant it to.

When we got to Newburyport, Pop drove us by the house you grew up in and told the story about the first time you introduced him to Grandma and Grandpa Hokenstad. (“She really had me thinking that she’d let them believe I was a gun runner for the Mob. Try meeting your future in-laws with
that
hanging over your head.”) Remember the coffee shop on Green Street with the Revolutionary War lamps on the outside and the shrimp salad on the
in
side? Because it’s still there. I even ordered a club sandwich and pretended you were giving me all of your bacon.

After lunch, we split up for the afternoon. Pop and Lori went for a walk along the waterfront with Hucky, Augie and Nehi took off to check out the old firehouse, and Alé and I strolled up High Street to find a shop where we could buy blue glass figurines. Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly
my
idea.

“What about here?” I asked, pointing to a window display. Alé was wearing a white zip-up coat with a hood that had piles of fluffy fur around her face, making a fuzzy frame for her frown.

“This is a snowblower store,” she replied, narrowing her eyes.

“Yeah, but maybe they have snowblowers in blue glass.”

“You think?” For the next three blocks of red cobblestoned side-walks, she shot down one suggestion after another: bath and body shops, pharmacies, furniture finishers, even a Ben & Jerry’s. (“Look! Blue glass Oreo cones!”) But finally we stopped in front of a jewelry store that had a teensy glass puppy in the window, sitting between two Rolexes, where it actually looked like it was about to lift up its leg and pee on the left one. So naturally my mind began racing. I mean, I had fifteen dollars in my wallet and I was feeling sporty anyway.

“Let’s go in,” I offered, holding open the door.

That
was a mistake.

Alé thought it was a riot. So did Pop and Lori. And Augie and Hucky and Nehi and the server at Tastee-Freez and the pump guy at the Shell station. Doesn’t anybody know how to keep a secret anymore??

“Tony C,” warned Pop. “Never ever play games with girls in jewelry stores. You’re already dealing with a stacked deck anyway.” Lori jabbed him in the ribs with an elbow.

“Nice tip,” she shot back. “I’ll remember that.” We were sitting on the beach at Plum Island after dinner at The Ocean View (Pop and I had the usual honey baked ham and cornbread, and we split a side of yams for you). The moon was bright enough to read those tiny-type yawny books like
Pride and Prejudice
by—and what you could see in the moonlight was Pop and Lori holding hands, Augie pretending he’d never heard of anybody named Andy Wexler, Hucky next to me with Nehi’s head in his lap, and me and Alé sitting a mile and a half apart like the
Monitor
and the
Merrimac
with North Carolina in between them. But for now it was okay, because I had promises to keep. I wrapped my right arm around Hucky and pointed to the sparkly sky—and since this was the whole reason we’d come to Plum Island anyway, everybody was watching me. What does Augie always say? “I’m dead without my audience.”

“How many stars do you think are out there?” I asked. Hucky’s head instantly turned eyes-up before he wrinkled his forehead.

“A thousand and six?”

“Right! And which one’s your favorite?” After hardly a second’s hesitation, he pointed to the brightest twinkler he could find.

“
That
one.”
It was actually the North Star, but he definitely didn’t need to know that.

“Wow!” blurted my hands. “That one doesn’t even have a name yet! Why don’t we call it ‘Hucky’?” Hucky was a little tougher to convince than I was. What I got at first was his you’re-being-spurious-again face.

“Are you allowed to do that? What about the police?”

“The police name stars too. It’s the same as calling dibs on the Slinky before Mateo does.” That seemed to do the job. Sort of. Because first we needed to agree on terms: It had to be a wishing star, it had to be named “Hucky Evan Harper and Shut-the-Door,” nobody else could wish on it but him, and he wanted to color it blue. Normally his last condition would have been the deal-breaker, but all I had to imagine is what
you
would have said.

“Okay,” I told him. “But you have to be in fourth grade before you can color it. That’s in the rules.” If he hadn’t been yawning already, it might not have gotten off the ground. Instead, he just nodded, picked up Shut-the-Door, and leaned against me with his eyes half-closed.

“
Can we stay a couple of whiles so I can show Shut-the-Door our star?”
I promised that we could stay for all the whiles he wanted—but by then he was out cold. That’s when I suddenly remembered the song you used to sing to me while I was falling asleep.

A long time ago I learned how to cry without making any noise so nobody would know when I was doing it (which is strictly a guy
thing). But Alé must have sensed a disturbance in the Force because she automatically reached for my hand. I figured she was just feeling sorry for me, but it worked anyway.

So I
know
it was a present from you.

I love you,

T.C.

P.S. The bad news? Even though Hucky slept through the night, when I woke up at 8:15 this morning, he and Shut-the-Door and Nehi were watching
Mary Poppins
again. I noticed while I was rubbing my eyes that the two little Banks kids on the screen were singing “The Perfect Nanny,” and Hucky—in his Luke Skywalker pajamas—was lost in that whole other world like he’d never been there before.

This is going to take a little time.