She withdrew her hands and her eyes searched out every appearance of that name on every container, her eyes arcing over the stack as if she were in awe of a rainbow.
This would be enough. He could feel his soul, his insides warning him to move on. “I guess we’d better …”
She snapped out of it. “Oh, absolutely, yes. Didn’t mean to … It’s personal, I understand.”
“No problem.” He had to do a little acting, had to push them onward. “Now what I want to do is re-create a stage such as you would find in a small to medium venue, something with more geography. I’d like to build it in the shop and use some of this stuff to create a setting, just give you some things to work around, handle, bump into, use if it fits your style. Going from close-up to stage means everything has to be bigger, wider. Here’s a Zigzag. You know what that is?”
“The optical illusion. The lady stands in the box and then it looks like you remove the middle part of her.”
“Right. I … I don’t see you doing this as part of your act, but working with some larger props might be a good exercise to help you think in bigger, wider concepts.”
“I’d love the experience.”
“Here’s a sub trunk—uh, substitution trunk.”
“Metamorphosis!”
“Okay, you’ve seen this one.”
“The magician’s assistant gets tied inside a bag and locked inside the trunk. The magician raises a shroud around the trunk and then bammo! The magician trades places with her, just like that.”
“It uses a lot of basic principles: timing, misdirection, creating an expectation, and then defying it—and just plain physical ability. We could try that out to hone the basics. It’s easy in principle, not so easy to perform convincingly. Once again …”
“The magic is in the magician.”
“You get an A.” Now he had to laugh. “And this one … this is our old levitation. It’s a dinosaur. There are so many better designs out there now—which I guess you’re aware of.”
“I guess.”
“Mandy and I worked it into a gag routine and put a whole new life into it. That’s another lesson right there: even an old trick that everybody’s seen before can be fresh if you give it a little twist—which brings us to another little idea of mine. Considering how good you are with tennis balls and quarters, this might be just the thing.”
Just the thing?This was more than “just the thing,” this was a God thing, a reunion, an awakening of an old happiness she remembered but hadn’t thought was hers. She muffled a squeal behind her hand, laughed through her tears, and gave Mr. Collins a hug.
Four little pairs of dark eyes looked warily at her through the wire cage; four heads bobbed as the snowy white birds ruffled and sidestepped on their perch, checking her out. Newbies, she could tell. Everything was unfamiliar to them.
“I remember you told me you raised doves,” said Mr. Collins. “Well, I just got these in and they’re going to need taming and training. I thought you might be interested.”
She leaned close to the cage and the timid faces just inside the wire. She cooed at them, spoke gently, and they watched her, not afraid but not so sure either. They were four little angels, a visitation from that beloved dream—the return, in their own way, of her first loss.
“Two girls, two boys,” she said. Just like Mandy’s prizewinners.
“They’ll need names,” said Mr. Collins.
“Names …” Looking into those attentive little eyes, she didn’t care if Mandy Whitacre’s life was delusional, it was still hers. She reached into the memory, grabbed this one small corner of it, and hauled it into this room, where it could be real. She studied each dove and got to know its markings, the shape of its head, the curve of its beak, and then announced its name. “This little fella, his name is Bonkers. And this little girl, she’s Lily. And you—yeah, cutie, I’m talking to you!—you’re Maybelle, aren’t you? And that means youmust be Carson. Glad to meet you.” She added only in her thoughts, again,then looked away to dab her eyes.
She heard, then saw Mr. Collins sink into an old plastic patio chair, his hand over his mouth as if he’d seen the Red Sea part down the middle. He looked as if hewould cry.
“Mr. Collins?”
He smiled away the emotion and wagged his head at a thought he didn’t share. “Call me Dane,” he said.
chapter
28
Eloise dubbed them the Gleesome Threesome—herself, Shirley, and Dane—a crew bent on a goal and getting a good old feeling getting there. Lifting, rolling, dragging, and hand-trucking tires, wheels, a ringer-washer, a couch, an old desk, and other rusted, mouse-chewed, bent, and seized-up junk out of the barn and carting it all to the dump was dusty, dirty, and difficult, but it was a pleasant kind of misery. Daddy always said hard work was good for the soul, and each evening, as Eloise zonked out on her bed, her soul felt better.
Working alongside Dane—and being able to call him that—sure added a shiny side to it. Handing to, getting from, struggling, lifting, hauling, cracking jokes, and having laughs with that man were healing, as if a big, lost chunk of her life was finding its way back. Sitting on a stool beside him at his drafting table, studying his drawings of the stage he had in mind, and making out a materials list for the lumber store was a sweet flashback. She’d done the very same thing with Daddy when they built the aviary for her doves, the raised bed garden behind the house, the coop for the chickens. That day, not only did her soul feel better, she also went home feeling special, and that night she fell asleep with little movies of her second daddy playing through her head.
Wednesday morning they moved the tiller, box scraper, tank sprayer, brush hog, and backhoe out of the shop and into the barn, which cleared floor space in the shop for a stage. By midmorning, the materials arrived. Eloise wore Dane’s nail apron and wielded his hammer, Dane did the cutting and layout, Shirley ran the power nailer and drill, and by quitting time on Thursday the Gleesome Threesome had completed a rough, unpainted stage, fourteen by fourteen, in portable sections bolted together. No lights, no curtain or backdrop, just a big frame and plywood box about three feet high with steps at either end.
“That’ll do for the immediate future,” Dane said, snapping a picture. He’d snapped a lot of pictures during the process. Eloise was always smiling for the camera. “We’ll dress it up as we go along, but tomorrow we have to get you up there and start filling out a show.”
The thought made her tingle. She climbed the steps and pranced onto the stage, imagining the shop as a theater, Dane, Shirley, and the Kubota tractor as her audience. She did a pirouette into a ta-da pose, arms outstretched.
“How’s it feel?” Dane asked, looking up at her.
She said, “Real good,” but that didn’t come near the feeling. She wasn’t just on this stage; she was also on this stage in this shop on this ranch with that man sitting down there in front of her, watching and caring about her. She added, “Like where I belong,” and that was more like it.
Joy bubbled up and burst out in a squeal as she did another spin, flinging out her hand as if materializing something.
A microphone flew from her hand across the stage. There was a gasp from the audience of at least five hundred—especially from the sound crew. The mike slowed, then stopped in midair. Eloise flashed a bedazzled look at the audience, stared at the mike as if she hadn’t a clue how it did that, and then, as if getting an idea, struck a dancing pose and drew it back toward herself with a beckoning wave of her hand. It floated toward her then, obeying her fluid gestures, halted just beyond her reach, tumbled end over end, then spun laterally like a bottle. Eloise was loving it and so was the audience.
She was dressed in her best, a silk blouse and gold cravat, black slacks, black vest with gold embroidery, hair done perfect and shining in the lights. Her audience was dressed in jeans, sweatpants, sweatshirts, snow boots, camouflage pants and shirts, beer logo T-shirts, and billed caps. It was the annual Community Christmas Show at the Wallace High School auditorium in Wallace, Idaho.