A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Read online

  Her mother said, “I don’t believe in heaven. Not the goopy one they talk about in Sunday school, and not some homemade version with psychedelic angels. When you’re dead, you’re dead.”

  “I haven’t thought much about it,” Grace said, which was true. It hadn’t been any kind of urgent question. “I guess we’ll all find out.” Then she wished she hadn’t said it. It sounded flippant.

  Her mother didn’t seem to have registered Grace’s remark. “Remembering is all you can do for anybody.”

  “I won’t forget Grandma,” Grace said. She meant it as consolation, though again, her mother wasn’t paying any particular attention. She was watching the fountain’s column of spray and seemed content to keep watching it. Back inside, people would be heading out, wanting to say their good-byes and last condolences. Mark would have to handle it.

  They sat for a time longer. Her mother roused herself, looked away from the water, and sighed. She hadn’t worn black, none of the family had, except for Grace’s black skirt, and that was only because she had a lot of black clothes. Her mother wore one of her good summer dresses, a blue-green paisley that Grace thought, unkindly, made her look as if she was wearing a shower curtain.

  “What was your father doing when you came out?”

  Grace considered how she might best respond. “Nothing. He was still at the table.”

  “I should probably go back in and help out,” her mother said, although she made no move to do so.

  “Michael left. Him and Dad kicked up some kind of fuss between them.”

  Her mother sighed but didn’t respond. Same old same old.

  “Why is it always so hard for them to get along.”

  Grace hadn’t meant it as a question, or at least she hadn’t expected an answer, but her mother had one ready. “Well, fathers expect sons to go on and represent them in the world. Validate them. My father was so pleased when Mark went to law school.”

  “Oh, so, standard patriarchal dynastic crap,” Grace said, forgetting that she was making an effort to be supportive and understanding. “I guess Michael’s not enough of a success for Dad. They’re too different.”

  “No, honey, I always thought they were too much the same.”

  Grace saw a man and woman coming around the corner from the restaurant’s entrance. Based on nothing but intuition, and their well-tailored good looks, she knew they were the owners of the Lexus. She slid down from the hood and held out her hand to her mother. “Come on, let’s go find Dad and Uncle Mark and Aunt Brenda.”

  Her mother got down also, wobbling a little. On the way back they passed the Lexus couple, who looked at them uncertainly. Grace avoided their eyes. She heard the electronic chirp as the Lexus unlocked its doors. Just as they reached the restaurant, her mother laughed, a breezy half laugh. “Care to say what’s so funny?” Grace asked her.

  “Not funny, exactly. Your grandmother never thought I was smart enough, or ambitious enough to suit her. Because those were things she prided herself on. But don’t you worry, dear. It’s just fine if you don’t turn out one bit like me.”

  * * *

  Grace was scheduled to work later that afternoon. She could have asked for the whole day off, but it had seemed prudent to have somewhere else to be if the day dragged on. As it was, people didn’t linger after lunch. Her aunt and uncle and cousins were going straight to the airport, and her parents were visibly ready for naps. Michael wasn’t answering her texts. Grace left the restaurant, drove to work, changed into her green apron, and clocked in early.

  In the restroom she washed her hands and faced the unfriendly mirror. She certainly looked like she’d just been to a funeral, or perhaps as if she were getting ready for her own. Her skin was as pallid and puffy as bread dough. She’d left her hair down and it was so lank and defeated, it might have belonged to a drowned woman. Now she pulled it back with a rubber band and pinned it up. She didn’t fuss much with her looks, on general principle, but there were times she could have gone for some really, really expensive makeup.

  She would have liked to find Michael and, well, he couldn’t have a drink, not these days, but they could sit down over whatever the clean-and-sober equivalent was, coffee, probably, and kick around the whole exhausting day and end up feeling better about it all. Raise a mug to their grandmother, who had been nobody’s fool, even if she wasn’t like other people’s cuddly grandmas.

  They could have talked about whatever bludgeoning Michael had received from their father, and the rest of the bumps and bruises. It was family life as they knew it, and there was even a sort of familiar comfort to it. Because at other times she stood outside their circle. Had chosen to remove herself from it, perhaps. But she was also unclaimed, somehow, extraneous. A daughter, an afterthought, left to her own devices. They made her lonely.

  It was some relief to get to work, to take her place behind a register and ring up heirloom tomatoes and squares of plastic-wrapped corn bread and jars of immune-boosting supplements. Her work friends asked how the funeral was and Grace said it had all been fine, thanks. The store and the people who worked and shopped there made up a world of its own where people cared about fair trade and the treatment of animals and the genetic manipulation of crops and the loss of honeybee populations and everything else that was made to seem quaint, an amusing affectation, by people who ate fast food and spent their weekends at shopping malls. Grace’s coworkers were rasta white boys, aspiring ecoterrorists, crafters of natural fibers. Dispossessed oddballs, the kind of unprosperous young adults who were making up their lives as they went along. She fit right in.

  For the next two hours she worked the register, or took breaks to help stock shelves. Back at the register, she looked up to see Ray in her line, holding a container of soup and shifting his weight impatiently. She both did and did not want to see him. Things had reached that point between them.

  “Hey,” he said once he reached the front of the line. “So how was it?”

  Grace weighed out his soup. “Three sixty-eight.” He paid and she counted out his change. “Did you need a bag?”

  “I just got off work. This was the soonest I could get here.”

  She put the soup in a brown paper bag and folded the bag’s top. “Did you want your receipt?”

  “Come on, can we talk?”

  There were people in line behind him, waiting. “I’m working,” Grace said.

  “Well how was it?”

  “It was a funeral. How do you think it was?”

  Ray made an impatient face. She was being difficult. Why was she always so difficult? The customer behind him was unloading a shopping basket and lining up groceries on the belt. “I’m sorry, OK? I really couldn’t get off.”

  “Thank you for shopping at Nature’s Market.”

  He stalked off, soup in hand. Grace watched him push through the glass doors and outside, his shoulders tense, long legs in a hurry to get gone. Why was she always watching him leave? She was tired of feeling bad about him.

  She turned to the man next in line. “Sorry for the wait.”

  “No problem.”

  She’d seen him before. Black, or more probably mixed. Coffee with cream skin, curly hair. Cute. He kept his eyes down so as to maintain some pretense of not having overheard her and Ray. She rang up his sandwich and the rest of his ordinary groceries—really, you got so you didn’t even notice what people bought—then she forgot to offer him a bag and a receipt and the rest of the routine. “Sorry,” she said again.

  “It’s OK.” He smiled. Grace smiled too, another kind of apology, told herself to get with the program, and moved on to the next person in line.

  She worked until nine, when the store closed, and when she checked her phone she saw that Michael had texted her back:

  HEY COME OUT TO THE WAGON WHEEL WE ARE PLAYING

  and she texted back

  SURE.

  First she called her parents and got the answering machine. “Hi,” she said. “Just checking in.” She had w
anted to say something encouraging about the funeral, wanted to glide over any of the weirdness at lunch and offer what comfort she could. “It was a good way to say good-bye to Grandma.” She hung up, feeling dumb, that she’d made a dumb sort of effort, but at least she’d tried.

  The Wagon Wheel was a downtown bar that started out country western and now booked all comers, especially for weeknights. It was a relief to have somewhere to go besides home. For all she knew, Ray was boycotting the apartment too. Dueling tantrums.

  When she got to the bar it was early and Michael’s band hadn’t set up yet. She didn’t see him, although she recognized some of his friends. Most of them she’d known all her life, had watched them grow up from bratty little kids to whatever the older version of brat was. Any effort Michael had made to avoid them had been abandoned. He was either going to use or not use, he said, and it wasn’t anybody else’s job to keep him out of trouble.

  “Have you seen my brother?” she asked one of them, a tall kid named Benny. He wore one of those yarn caps with earflaps, knit by Bolivian villagers. Honestly, she was all for self-expression and individuality, but it made him look simple-minded.

  “Yeah, I think he’s bringing stuff in from the van. Are you staying for the show? Cool.”

  Grace went back to the restrooms and followed a passage beyond them to what she guessed was an exit. Pushing the heavy door open, she found herself in the sudden dark of an alley. At the far end, a streetlight. Nearby, a group of dark figures next to a van. She couldn’t make them out. “Michael?”

  One of the figures detached itself. “Gracie?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting ready to get ready to play.”

  She smelled pot. She thought she recognized one or two of the others. She still thought of them as high school kids, though they had to be older than that now. “Great.” She turned and went back inside, shutting the door behind her and walking away fast.

  Michael opened the door and followed her. “Wait up.”

  She stopped. “It’s only weed,” he said.

  “I’m not your probation officer.”

  “Don’t get upset.”

  “If Mom and Dad—”

  “How about just for once, it’s not about them. Because it’s not, OK?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Grace said, but her brother was only getting started.

  “They’ve been so deep in my shit all this time, you have no idea, all the stupid meetings and stupid conversations and everybody sharing their feelings, well fuck, excuse me, I have a few I don’t care to share. Mom blubbers and Dad gets mad. That’s something new? That’s supposed to help?”

  “All right, take it easy.”

  “Look, I don’t want to go back to using and being wiped out and sick. This isn’t the same.”

  “All right,” Grace said again. It didn’t much matter what she thought about it, or whether she believed him or not. She knew that much about addiction by now.

  “Music’s the one thing that’s mine.”

  She guessed that getting a headful of pot was part of music for him, either as some brain-opening creative process, or else it was just what you did if you were a guy in a band. “I’m not going to tell them,” she said.

  “Well I know that.” Michael was relaxing now, as if he really had not known.

  “But make an effort to be extra nice to Mom. She’s really worn-out and sad about Grandma.”

  “I’m always nice to her. OK, you’re right. Extra nice.”

  “What went on with you and Dad?”

  “What do you think? I’m not perfect enough. I have a rotten attitude. He was in a bad mood and it must be my fault. You going to stay and hear us?”

  “Sure.”

  “Great! You don’t think, I mean, is it disrespectful? Playing a show the same day as Grandma’s funeral? We already had it booked, nobody knew.”

  “I think she’d probably get a kick out of it.”

  He brightened, looking once more like his best, most lighthearted self, the kid who could charm and entertain at will, the little brother who had gloried in finding creative ways to aggravate her, the one who had gotten away with everything, or almost everything except of course using, and for God’s sake she hoped he wasn’t going down that road again. “I’ll make sure you get a really good seat. The crowd’s gonna be huge tonight.”

  Huge was a stretch, but the bar began to fill up with the kids Grace recognized as being part of Michael’s set. His longtime friends, plus those college students who went in for scruffy fashion and offbeat music, plus people Grace’s age and older who might have come just to drink or play darts, but who didn’t mind a little background noise. Michael and his band were busy with the equipment and the sound checks. This went on for a while, long enough for Grace to wonder what Ray was doing, if he’d gone home or if he was doing the same thing she was, ostentatiously not going home. Oh screw it, she was allowed to have a life that didn’t involve him, revolve around him or against him. She drank a glass of wine and then another, and by the time the band drifted onstage and played a few tuning chords, she was determined to have some sort of a good time.

  The house lights went down and the stage lit up with blue and red. The first song hit with a wallop, an exploding riff from Michael’s guitar on lead, and the bass backing him. A sax player added some high notes. The keyboard doubled the melody and the drummer crashed the party with his own beat, and somehow it all came together. The crowd whooped and cheered. The lights blinked and changed color, blue blue and red red, crisscrossing in beams of lurid crimson violet. Michael and the rest of the band bent over their instruments, leaning into the music. No vocals, only the amplified sting of guitars and the driving rhythm, on and on, then a show-off solo from the sax, a final eruption of something that by now was less music than pure noise. Michael swung his guitar around, dipped, and strutted. It had been a long time since she’d seen him in any kind of performance, and those had been more casual, garage or basement shows. This show was like a brand-new and hungry animal.

  The sound hammered on for a time, then stopped, leaving a shocked emptiness in the ears.

  “All right!” somebody yelled from the audience, and Michael stepped to the front of the stage.

  “Thank you! Thank you very much! We are The Useful Idiots. And if you don’t believe us, just stick around.” Whatever that meant, the room laughed along, ready for more. “We’re so very very very glad to be here tonight. We’re going for a ride. You wanna come along?”

  They did. More cheering. Michael played a couple of chords, bright and loud. Teasing the crowd, not yet ready to play. “You know what’s great? This is a town where people come out to hear music. People support us, you support us, we want to thank you. For telling us that what we do is . . .”

  More chords. He walked along the stage. “Because there’s times it sure seems like nobody’s listening. You know what I mean? Them deep dark, stinkin’ . . . And the hell of it is . . .”

  The crowd uncertain now what he was up to, if he’d lost his train of thought. Michael played a scattered line of melody. Behind him the stage was dark and quiet, the rest of the band waiting too. “The hell of it is, we got the best thing in the world going on right here, right this minute! Live music! The power of a hundred hundred superheroes!”

  Right then the band swung into the next song, something low-down and bluesy, played with cool energy and polish. The crowd went nuts. He’d pushed them up to some brink and then yanked them back, and they were grateful. The music was in charge now, and what was it about music, or music and drinking alcohol, that pulled you out of yourself and into some place of pure feeling. Michael was front and center, and if the band had any stage presence it came from him, with his swagger and theatrics. His voice was hoarse and sweet, singing about the lonesome sad bad times, the no-good women and the no-good nights, and Grace guessed if anybody knew about that, he did. If music was the only thing that was his, then it was a damn fine thing
. She felt loose and light and glad, at the same time it was like being dragged under the surface of a deep river when you really, really wanted to drown. Drunk? A little. It felt good. Someone sat down at her table. The cute guy from the checkout line.

  She laughed. He laughed. The song ended. He leaned toward her. “Where’s the boyfriend?” Grace lifted her hands and made a fluttering gesture, intended to mean who knows, who cares. The blues song was still going strong. “Dance?” he asked. She had to think about it. Other people were dancing in the narrow space that was the open floor. She guessed it was all right, even if she couldn’t remember the last time she’d danced in a bar.

  He offered his hand. She liked that. They found a spot to one side of the stage. “Cedric,” he said.

  “What?”

  “My name. Cedric.”

  “Oh. Grace. Hi.”

  “Yeah, it was on your name tag.”

  “Oh. Sure,” she said articulately. Had he followed her from the store to the club? Or maybe this was just a random encounter. With some random guy. Well why not and who cared, random fun in a random world. “That’s my brother,” she said, pointing. “We went to my grandmother’s funeral today.”

  She didn’t think he’d heard her. That was just as well. She was so out of it, she was babbling. He was a graceful dancer and she tried to copy the easy way he moved his hips, though she felt like the Great White Klutz, like she was wearing wooden clogs. He didn’t seem to mind and after a while, neither did she.

  She had to turn half around to see Michael from here. He wasn’t looking her way. He’d put his guitar down and had both hands around the microphone, singing in the voice that was his and yet not his, recognizable to her but also made strange and strong. They must have been playing a song they’d written themselves, she didn’t know it. Cedric—was that his real name? She didn’t know anybody named Cedric—put both hands around her waist and drew her in closer, so that if she had forgotten about sex, she was now reminded. It was one more strange, random happening.