you.” She pressed her hands flat against his hips. “‘Know Your Vision. Embrace Your Vision. Make Your Vision.’“
“With a store full of customers?”
“Call this a promise for later.”
“Vivy?” Nancy called from the counter. “Can you help me here?”
After pressing her cool fingers one last time against the small of Sam’s back, Vivy edged back out front, where a line of kids giggled and cut their eyes at one another. They propped themselves against the counter and ordered stupendous amounts of ice cream—triple dips with mix-ins, four-fruit smoothies. The boy who won a free cone ate that, then returned to the counter to buy a second. From his bloodshot eyes Vivy had a pretty good idea what he’d spent the last hour doing. She gave him an extra half scoop.
While Vivy took an order for Brown Sugar Butterscotch over Vanilla Crunch from a kid with blonde, halfhearted-looking dreadlocks, Nancy said, “Things got bad for a while there with Fredd. Good thing you were able to set everything straight.”
“It was fun. Reminded me of the old days.”
“That girl in the vest will probably send us her dry-cleaning bill.”
“The rest of the audience loved Fredd. They were standing up and cheering. When is the air-conditioning guy supposed to get here?” Vivy said. Even in the freezer case, the Roasted Almond Carob was as loose as pudding. “Anyway, that girl was a pill. And I kept people here. I hustled.”
“You did,” Nancy said. “You also promised Fredd a berth for next week. The company may not be able to afford it.”
Vivy studied Nancy’s thick auburn ponytail, her long, vanilla-white forearms. She wore a beige and brown Natural High T-shirt, as always—Nancy and Paul had one for every day of the week. Presently, Nancy’s was sweat-glued to her high, round breasts. “We’ll be fine,” Vivy said. “Customers will come back to see Fredd again. They want to hear him play that harmonica.”
“If they remember,” Nancy said.
“If you provide first-line talent, people remember.” Vivy took her time, watching Nancy’s flushed profile. “As a matter of fact, I think we should start hiring more acts. Real ones, not flunked-out banjo players.”
“Hank didn’t get any customers wet. And he was good value.”
Vivy picked a walnut from the tray of mix-ins. Then she picked out two more. Lunch. “I know tap dancers. I know comedians. I know a woman who makes blown-glass fruit and then eats it.”
“That’s horrible.”
“I’m just telling you that I could bring in acts other than jugglers. I’ve still got connections. I’m an underused commodity.”
“That’s one way of looking at things.” Nancy turned to look down at her. Sam’s very first name for Nancy was The Seven Foot Tall Humorless Woman. “I don’t want to point out the obvious here, but we’re trying to be an example of effective partnership, not a venue for sideshow acts.”
“Maybe we should expand our vision,” Vivy said, holding out against the anger that licked at her, even though she felt as if Nancy had just attacked her children. She spread her feet for balance and picked her words. “I think it’s time.”
“We have a partnership,” Nancy said. “Better get your hand out of the nuts. The health inspector warned us about that.”
“I haven’t forgotten about the partnership. I’m very big on the partnership,” Vivy said. “All I’m suggesting is that you let me contribute a little more to the common good.”
Nancy turned away, but not before Vivy saw the tight fold to her lips, the hard lines on either side of her mouth. “I’ll meditate on it,” she said. “I’ll spend some time thinking.”
“And you’ll tell the others to think, too? We could bring this up at the next meeting.”
“There’s nothing for them to think about yet,” Nancy said. “If you’re looking for something to do, you could scrub out the far bin. It’s got leftover water in it. The health inspector warned us about that, too.”
Vivy smiled. Taking great care to use only her fingertips, she plucked one more walnut from the tray. Then she turned to the plump boy goggling at the Cherry-Berry Swirl and asked him whether he would like two scoops or three, adding that Cherry-Berry was on sale, a sale she had just made up, all by herself.
Two
Cecilia
In the front corner of David and Cecilia’s living room, Sandy McGee, the most diligent of Cecilia’s violin students, sawed at a G major étude. Cecilia tapped out the time on her thigh and shaped her mouth into an encouraging smile. Talent didn’t always show at once; sometimes it needed time to be lured, to reveal itself like a slow miracle. Cecilia often found herself thinking about miracles when she was with Sandy, who shot her bow like a pool cue and whose red, bitten fingers displayed an embedded instinct for the wrong note.
After their first month of classes Cecilia had given the girl sheet music for easy fiddle tunes, “Old Joe Clark” and “Bile Them Cabbage Down,” songs that would make the most of her good ear and sense of rhythm. But when Sandy looked at the illustration of a man sitting on a stump beside a happy pig, tears came to her eyes. “You don’t think I can play real music, do you?”
“This is real. People study for years to play this. It’s more popular than Mozart.” Cecilia had picked up her own violin and played a few bars of “Old Joe Clark.” Usually kids liked the bouncy melody, but Sandy bit her lip. When Cecilia put her violin down, the girl started again with her honking rendition of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”
In the two months since then she had barely improved. Her vertiginous notes wobbled around the tiny apartment—every week Cecilia imagined paint peeling, light bulbs rattling. Now she pressed her hands together, trying to catch her last flake of patience before Sandy’s playing scoured it away.
“Lightly,” she said, pointing to the bow the girl clutched as if it were a steak knife. “Easy. Listen to the sound you’re making.”
Sandy drew the bow across the strings, losing control partway through so that the bow rode right up on top of the bridge and produced a yowl. She scrubbed a furious hand across her eyes. “I practice. I know it doesn’t sound like it. Every day. My mom makes me go out to the garage.”
“Think of your bow as a feather on the strings,” Cecilia said.
“I try. It doesn’t help.”
“And relax your shoulder. Move your arm from your elbow.”
Chewing her ragged lower lip, Sandy confronted the sheet music, its single line of fat quarter notes stairstepping up the staff, and resettled her face against the chin pad. When she finally brushed at the strings, the bow landed so lightly she hardly made a noise. “Better,” Cecilia said.
She listened, she nodded, she discreetly rubbed her arm. Very BlueBerry ice cream, on special this week and selling like nobody’s business, always left her arm sore. David theorized the high sugar content in Very
