House of Dance Read Online Free Page B

of heat that had been spilled against the floor was now spilled across the couch where Granddad sat, turning the tallest fuzz of Riot’s fur gold and pouring a splash of almost orange across Granddad’s chest and chin. He had hardly moved since he’d fallen asleep. The whistler was gone, and now there were so many different sounds outside that I couldn’t tell one from another. It wasn’t silence, but it felt like silence. It felt like being alone.
    I needed a chair to reach the shelves that held the highest stuff. I grabbed the nearest one, stood up there, and collected my balance, and now I shook the past out of the books up high, until I got to the stash of old black vinyls—records inside cardboard sleeves that spelled the names of artists. I’d heard of some. Frank Sinatra. Charlie Parker. Sammy Davis Jr. Benny Goodman. Duke Ellington. The Count Basie Orchestra. Ella Fitzgerald. Johnny Mercer. Irving Berlin.
    The cardboard sleeves were beat up, and the pictures were faded, and if I was ever to free the songs on them, I’d have to fix the old record player. Still, I knew that these were In Trust treasures. That music was part of my granddad’s mystery. That this music could bring back parts of his past. I pulled the records from the shelves, three and four at a time. I piled them beside the coffee table. I felt sweat roll down my neck, saw Riot give me one of her most suspicious looks.
    Granddad never woke back up that day; he was still sleeping when I left. I poured a tall glass of water over lots of chunks of ice and put it right where he would find it. I set a bowl of pretzels beside the water, in case he changed his mind about food. I wrote him a note that said, “Coming back tomorrow.” Then I kissed the tallest two fingers of my right hand and pressed them to his forehead.
    “Mom?” I called when I got home.
    But there wasn’t any answer.

SEVEN
    O NCE I FOUND MYSELF SPYING on Mr. Paul and my mother. It wasn’t done on purpose. I’d gone to Leisha’s house, seven blocks and a better neighborhood away from mine, to work on some social studies project called Seeing. This was in our ninth-grade year, and Leisha and I were project partners. The purpose of the exercise was to gather evidence about the so-called human condition, to come up with a list of things that make us one connected species. Leisha and I sat around for a while, eating extra-hotDoritos, and then we set off for a walk up and down the streets of Leisha’s neighborhood. Being tall and model thin, Leisha’s not afraid of strutting. She has a spray of freckles over milky chocolate skin, wears hats to keep her color fast. When you go walking with Leisha, you walk with style. You know she’ll tell you what she sees from where she sees it, which is up high.
    So we’d gone out that day, for the sake of Mr. Marinari’s class. We’d gone through streets of old houses scrubbed up to look like new and down a short, squat strip of beigeugly condos, and we had a lot of things on our list that we’d seen: gardens, little Do Not signs, fences, rocking chairs on porches, and big TVs, all of which said something or other about people’s needs.
    It was a good-enough list, but not a great one. By then we’d gone maybe five blocks north of Leisha’s house to a street of mismatched architecture: turrets on somehouses; cinder blocks for some garages; a brand-new mini McMansion faced with stucco between two old-time ugly ranches. Leisha was doing her reporting from up high, tattling out random sights, as if she were peering in through so many frosty snow globes: Woven doilies over couches. Posters in thin frames. Cat on sill. All-alone boy playing with toy. Old man and even older woman in total-vomit red-plaid room. Empty flower vase. All of which I was taking down in the notebook we’d brought along for that purpose, until Leisha said, “Oh, my God,” then nothing.
    “What?” I said, but Leisha was stuck on the sidewalk, saying nothing else,