the teenagers started to inch forward. Behind the counter, Nancy looked like thunder, but Sam grinned. Vivy relaxed. This was going to be fine.
“Sorry I was late. I’ll make it up to you by giving an extra good show,” Fredd said, working his toe underneath the knives at his feet and flicking them up; he was juggling five, then six, then seven—big blades, real chef’s knives. Vivy wondered whether she could get him to give her one. She could use a good knife.
In a nice segue, he switched from knives to clubs, tossing and catching the big wooden bats behind his back with an easy grace that she’d always found sexy. Sam chafed her from time to time about the hungry way she watched Fredd, and his lengthy, smelly, muscle-bound hugs.
“Okay, we’re moving into the audience participation part of today’s show,” Fredd said, the clubs circling around his head like a menacing halo. “What do you want to see me juggle? I’ll take anything you give me.” A kid threw a napkin that Fredd used to dab at his neck before he tossed it up. The paper’s slight weight sailed slowly, out of sync with the bright red and blue clubs. Another kid lobbed one of the store’s beige coffee mugs at him, and a woman, looking daring and embarrassed, ducked up to the stage and handed Fredd her wristwatch. Vivy couldn’t imagine how he kept all the oddly weighted objects in rotation, much less how he could do so while he showboated, catching the wristwatch under his leg, strolling around the stage, whistling. Spontaneous bursts of applause bubbled up, and Vivy glanced back at Nancy, who was transfixed like everybody else.
He finished by setting the clubs upright, one at a time, in a circle around his feet, and throwing the other items back out to the audience members who’d given them to him, even the napkin. People were laughing, a few kids over by the window whistled, and Vivy looked at Sam, who mimed wiping sweat from his forehead in relief. Vivy mimed the same gesture back at him, wiping off real sweat. Despite the fans whirring away from every side, the room was a slow-bake convection oven.
“Okay, now let’s try a real challenge,” Fredd was saying. “Hey Vivy—do you think I could have some ice cream cones?”
“Depends.” She grinned. She liked being part of the act. “Depends on what you want. Carob is heavier than vanilla, you know. We weigh.”
“Let me have two of each in the little squat cones. Press the ice cream down hard.” Nancy slowly reached for a scoop. She lacked Vivy’s pleasure in the unexpected, but she was the one who brought the cones up to the stage, the ice cream already starting to glisten. Kids were pounding on the tables.
The pounding turned rhythmic as Fredd carefully got the cones moving in a tall arc, circling with a preposterous dignity. For once, Fredd looked as if he were actually concentrating, which made the image even sillier—this gorilla of a man in his loud shirt and baggy pants frowning, chewing on his lip, gravely keeping four ice cream cones in midair. Kindergartners jumped on their chairs and screamed with joy, and Fredd finished wonderfully by giving each cone to one of the kids in the front row. Their parents led the applause.
Noise ricocheted around the uncarpeted store and pulled folks in from the street; every chair was taken. Parents with children wedged themselves next to the windows. Teenagers jostled and elbowed until the front row was pushed forward, right under Fredd’s feet. Vivy did a quick head count: sixty-eight. Eighteen more than Nancy had projected in the planning meeting.
Fredd waited until the latest wave settled in, then shot a foxy look at Vivy. “My finale is a very special act, a little gesture to my old friends. Could I have some water?” Looking solemn, Sam filled a pitcher and handed it over the counter to be passed up. By now the crowd was too tight for him to make a path. Fredd, meanwhile, turned his back and pulled some items out of his satchel. Vivy heard the light clink of glass. When the pitcher made it to the stage he poured the water into what seemed to be a series of glass tubes, and not until he turned around, the tubes already circling between his hands, did she realize he was juggling bongs, three of them: purple, blue, and green.
The bark of laughter was out of her mouth before she could stop it, but that seemed all right; the kids were cheering. Fredd could have juggled twenty flaming torches and not have delighted them so. Vivy held her thumbs up high so he could see them, and he wiggled his eyebrows back at her and started singing something in his reedy little voice—maybe “Take It Easy,” but the words were hard to make out over the din.
This was the kind of joke Sam loved more than anything, and Vivy glanced back at the counter to catch his expression. Instead she caught Nancy’s, unhappy and determined, as she tried to force her way from behind the counter. But the crowd kept her penned. She managed only to push aside one boy, who looked back at her and said something Vivy wished she could hear. It was enough to get Nancy talking, and from the set of her back Vivy guessed the topic was the importance of community over the individual, a beloved riff. More kids turned around. One of them made an irritated shushing motion. They weren’t creating much of a commotion in all the room’s uproar, but they created enough. Fredd, glancing over to see what was going on, slipped a little, and water splashed on the kids sitting directly in front of him. “Hey!” a girl bellowed. “Hey! This vest is suede, you asshole!”
Fredd bellowed back, “It’s two million degrees in here. You should thank me for cooling you off.”
“I should thank you for third-rate juggling?”
The bongs sailed right to the ceiling. “This is not third rate,” Fredd said.
“You’re right.” The girl looked bitterly at her vest and pointed to the water stain. “It’s tenth rate.”
That did it. Fredd’s arrogant, strong-man smile turned sullen, and his hands turned into blocks. One of the bongs flew a little to the left, and he grabbed for it, then for the other two as they sailed the other way. He managed to recover them, but the bongs tipped, throwing water in every direction, splashing customers within five rows. For a moment, the air sparkled with water, and the teenagers whooped and dived into one another—trying to get into the spraying water? Away from it? Impossible to tell.
Fredd himself jumped back, a dainty, skipping motion, and a tardy one. His pants and shirt were soaked. But then, so were the teenagers around him, who rose to their feet and cheered, lifting their wet arms to catch more breeze. Fredd looked at them sourly and then bowed, holding the dripping bongs. Everyone in the room except Nancy and the girl with the suede vest was standing and applauding, arms pumping despite the heat. Smile, Vivy muttered urgently at Fredd. They loved you. But he wouldn’t look at her, or at the people pressing toward the stage. He frowned at the floor like an immense, sulky child. Smile! she mouthed fruitlessly, stretching her mouth.
In a moment his crowd, which she had worked so hard to maintain, would start to break apart. She watched three couples hurry out onto the sidewalk. Two kids whipped out cell phones. The bright tension that had rippled through the audience gave out between one breath and the next, leaving disappointment, headaches, too many people in a hot, messy room.
Vivy could already hear the lecture gathering in the back of her brain, the one from creditors and her parents that she carried around, pointing out how she and Sam had gone bankrupt on acts like Fredd. The lecture never acknowledged the incandescent reviews their acts had gotten, how the waltzing dogs had appeared on television in St. Louis and Mobile. Instead, and frequently, the hectoring voice reminded Vivy that by the time their old college friend Nancy proposed a partnership in an ice cream company, Sam and Vivy didn’t have the money for stamps to mail out their bills.
Vivy was moving down the track of her old disappointment now, stopping at every station while she automatically bent down to pick up two napkins, then straighten a chair. Just seeing Fredd made her long for the raucous, hell-raising energy of her old friends. She and Sam could have dug themselves out.
