partnership, money they borrowed upon convincing the loan officer of Natural High’s excellent long-term prospects. Vivy couldn’t put her hand on a nickel that hadn’t been spoken for first by Natural High. “I guess he’s done,” said a customer at the door.
Vivy snapped her head up and marched onto the stage. She grabbed Fredd by the arm, which felt like grabbing a pillar. “Hey there, handsome,” she said above the customers’ chatter and the scrape of chairs. “How’s about you teach me to juggle?”
“You’ve got some timing,” Fredd said.
“Famous for it,” Vivy announced. For the moment, at least, people had paused to watch. “Come on. I don’t know the first thing about juggling. How do you begin?”
“Most people don’t learn in front of an audience.”
“We’ll start a new trend. Don’t you have a beanbag in that satchel?”
After a moment, his body stiff, Fredd stooped to rummage through his bag, and Vivy faced the roomful of mildly curious faces. They were tidying themselves, pulling up purses and wallets. She leaned out to them. “I’ve always wanted to juggle. Now, I’m not all that good with my hands, so I’m counting on you all to stay and lend me moral support. After I learn, Fredd’ll teach some of you, and whoever juggles the best will win a free cone. In the meantime, though, you should go ahead and order. It isn’t getting any cooler in here.”
How many years had passed since she’d huckstered? She’d been good at it, coaxing people into auditoriums to hear the Peruvian flute player or see King Cool pour molten tin in his mouth and spit out little metal pebbles, amazingly regular. Now she was scrabbling for words, repeating herself just to keep sound coming out. But she had stopped the migration for the door. One couple, already standing, perched on the edge of their table to see what would come next.
Like a wrathful ghost, Fredd materialized before Vivy holding a handful of tangerines. “Do this,” he said, zipping the fruit back and forth, a blur of orange between his hands.
“Well gosh, what’s the big deal? Anybody could do that,” she said, and customers laughed. “Come on, Fredd. Show me at a speed a mere mortal can imitate.”
“I’m not a teacher,” he said.
“No kidding,” she said, and got another laugh. He handed her the tangerines, and she made deliberately bloopy, impossible tosses. When one of the tangerines rolled off the stage a young father nudged his son to fetch it. “Thank you,” Vivy said, and added, “I’ll bet your daddy would buy you an ice cream cone if you asked him.” The man saluted her and headed for the counter. Vivy made her next toss a little sharper, her next catch a little more deft. As a matter of fact, she was a decent juggler. She’d taught herself during long nights backstage, but she didn’t think Fredd remembered that.
Slowly she improved her tosses and catches, and slowly Fredd nosed back out of his sulk, smiling as he tossed more tangerines at her and adding some fancy catches of his own. Vivy glanced at the counter where Sam and Nancy were scooping Strawberry Swirl and Triple Vanilla and Mocha Crunch for a father with two small boys, a pod of middle school kids, and one dreamy teenage girl with acne. “This is easy!” she accused Fredd. “You never told me it was easy.”
He shrugged and wiggled his eyebrows. “Here,” he said, and fired a tangerine at her so hard that she ducked and scattered her fruit all over the stage. One of the tangerines split, its sharp-sweet smell tingling in the air like a shock. The kids yipped with laughter, and Fredd turned to face them. “Who’s next?” he said, and three girls jumped up.
Vivy retired to a corner and rubbed her hands, stinging with tangerine oil, on her shorts. At the counter, Nancy was busy with an uneasy-looking middle-aged couple. They stood a careful twelve inches apart, the space between them snapping with tension. First date, Vivy guessed. Nancy would be dredging up some weightless small talk to help them out, and Vivy’s heart went out to the man and woman. However hard she tried to keep it light, Nancy’s small talk weighed pounds.
“There you go!” Fredd said when the giggling girl with blue eyeliner managed a single pretty catch. Under the weight of his approval, she dropped the next three tosses and stood pointing her finger at her head like a gun. From the floor, people called up encouragements, and the two who had perched on their table slid back into their chairs. The store felt like a big living room. “‘A Community Business Serving Its Community,’” Vivy said, one of the napkin slogans she found particularly obnoxious.
After the girl fled the stage, Fredd picked out a college couple wearing matching running shorts. In five minutes he had them tossing Indian clubs at each other, precise as a metronome. Watching them reminded Vivy that real jugglers didn’t strive for unhesitating ease, which was boring. Real jugglers took pleasure in the unbalanced, the nearly missed, the little accidents that brought life to an act. Only the amateurs wanted perfection.
While the couple perfected their feed, Fredd strolled to the other side of the stage and hoisted a little girl in a pink T-shirt onto the stage. The girl craned and pulled away from him, her eyes wary and her mouth loose, and Vivy, watching, dug her fingernails into her damp palms. But Fredd sat down on the stage, glanced at her parents for their okay before settling her on his lap, and very gently started to juggle ping-pong balls he pulled, one at a time, from his pocket. The balls bobbed an inch in front of the girl’s nose, light as butterflies, and she dimpled as Fredd added a fourth ball, and a fifth, and a sixth. When he started to bounce them off the top of her head she pealed with laughter, and when Fredd handed her back to her beaming mother, the woman promptly bought ice cream for her whole table.
Fredd looked over at Vivy, who nodded. Calculating fast, she guessed the store had done break-even business for the day, and there was still the afternoon walk-in business, the late night rush. Fredd stood to take a final bow, but as he straightened, protests broke out from the tables closest to the stage. “I wanted to be next,” groused a skinny boy whose Led Zeppelin T-shirt draped over him like a curtain. “I wanted to juggle the bongs. When are you coming back?”
Fredd shrugged and looked over at Vivy. “When am I coming back?”
“You’re our favorite juggler. How’s next week?” she said, a rash offer, and just what the audience wanted to hear.
“Good to go. Next week,” he grinned at the boy in the T-shirt. “We’ll do my Jimmy Page special. I’ll juggle seven lead balls while I play ‘Stairway to Heaven’ on the harmonica.” Vivy grinned while the boy pumped his fist and cried, “Yes!” She felt as proud of Fredd as if he’d been her son, especially as he paused on his way to the back of the store to autograph ping-pong balls for the kids who shouted and tugged at his baggy pant legs.
It took another fifteen minutes to give him his check, to jaw a while, and finally to watch him drive off. By then the kids around the store had quieted; several of them had fallen asleep under the tables where their mothers chuckled and sipped iced tea. A dense stillness spread over the store—thick, succulent as mud. The air wrapping around her like a pelt, Vivy slipped behind the counter and into the back room, where Sam was setting out a fresh tray of nuts from the freezer. “Shh,” she whispered. She wrapped her hands around the icy metal tray, then ran her cool fingers under his shirt, pressing the spots where sweat had soaked the cotton through.
“Nice,” Sam said.
“A little break provided for the management.”
“Nancy’s going to walk in,” he whispered, leaning back against her hands. “Then won’t we be embarrassed.”
“I’ll
