House of Dance by Beth Kephart

Author:Beth Kephart [Kephart, Beth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2008-02-04T13:00:00+00:00

NINETEEN

A LONG TIME AGO, when I was eleven, there was a luscious maple rooted deep in my backyard. It was wider than tall, and some of its limbs were loose, but I liked that tree because I had learned from its branches how to save Nick’s lost planes. I could fish the sturdy balsa woods out from a mess of leaves and make Nick smile. I could dig out parts of planes from the maple’s squirrel-nest hollow. Whatever I’d find, I’d run it straight back to Nick’s place, hollering the news: Smash-faced propeller. Stump of a wing. Splintered fuselage. Crushed cockpit.

But Nick was even better on that tree than I. He would scuttle out to the maple’s farthest, hardest parts, up toward the sky or out toward the place where the limbs got lacy thin. “Checking out the stratosphere,” he’d say. A word that branded him smart. “Testing. Testing.” Like he was some kind of pilot. He’d shimmy up and the tree would shiver. When he stayed up there too long, I’d go get him some lunch, ziplock bags of bologna rolled up to look like logs, squares of cheese, a tall sleeve of saltines. Then I’d climb into the part of the tree that I’d nicknamed The Nest and wait for Nick to tell me something, and once in a while he would, and once in a while I’d go on about my celebrity father.

Then one warmish afternoon, when I was outside doing nothing and Nick was who knows where, Mrs. Robertson’s cat, Claw, got wild for some bird that had built its nest on a thin bough of the maple. The big lug had climbed up that tree but couldn’t get himself down; talk about sissy. “A predicament” is what Mrs. Robertson called it when she stomped over across her yard to ours and stood beneath the branches, looking up. By then Claw was mewing up a storm that the whole world could hear, and he would not stop his crying. “Come on, cat,” Mrs. Robertson stood there saying. “Nice boy, kitty, kitty.” But Claw was having none of her. He bared his teeth and stared, as if everyone and everything but him were to be blamed.

“You know, Cloris,” said my mother, who had come outside to see about the commotion, “Claw will come down on his own. Give him time.”

But Mrs. Robertson was fretting, and Claw was stubborn. That cat kept himself stuck, and he was clearly getting hungry, braying instead of mewing now, screaming, you might have said. Mrs. Robertson’s face was never very pretty. Now it was scribbled every which way with worry.

Finally there was nothing to do and Nick wasn’t home and my mother, trying to fix things, said: “Rosie, I’ve seen you. You’re a mighty fine tree climber. You can scoot on up and shake that branch and make old Claw come tumbling down.” A frame of reference and a strategy that left Mrs. Robertson staggered.

“Your plan is to shake my cat from your tree?” she said, gasping between the words, from shock.

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