Tom Lake(73)

“I called the club and told them my transmission was out.” Sebastian said. “I’m in big trouble.”

“Big trouble for me? You could have sent your brother.”

“Let’s just say the rest of the team was in no condition to drive, and they very much wanted to drive. The last thing anyone needs is Peedee wrapping my car around a tree trying to bring you home from the hospital.”

“And Pallace?”

He patted the front pocket of his jeans. “I took her keys.”

So Pallace was already Mae. You’d have to take the keys away from Mae. She was drinking all day with the men. As sorry as I was to miss my last week as Emily, it was almost worth it to know that I would never be Mae. I would never again endure Cody’s disappointment or my own lousy acting or my inability to fill out the red dress. Pallace could wear the dress. “How are the rehearsals going?” Sebastian claimed to like the rehearsals more than the finished product.

“They don’t let me in.”

I was sitting on the bed, wearing the outfit Pallace had grabbed from my room in the rush of leaving: khaki shorts and my Disney T--shirt which never did fit right again. My foot was up. They had told me to keep it elevated whenever possible. “You were there when I was doing it.”

Sebastian shrugged. “The problem seems to be that my brother has to kiss my girlfriend. They say I make them self--conscious.”

I could so clearly feel Duke lying on top of me on the stage, pinning my hands to the floor. Duke as Eddie and me as Mae. Duke as Eddie, Pallace as Mae. I stopped there. “Will they let you see the play?”

“They can’t keep me from seeing the play,” he said. “I have tickets.”

Jeanne swung through the door with a wheelchair and then stopped short. She actually blushed when she saw Sebastian there. “You’re the actor,” she said to him. I’d told Jeanne all about Duke while she washed my hair.

“I’m the brother,” Sebastian said.

“He’s your brother?” she said to me.

Now we were all laughing. “Can you believe it?” I said.

Jeanne wheeled me to the elevator with my crutches and painkillers and an antibiotic and seven typed pages of instructions. Outside, she made me transfer from the wheelchair to the car just to make sure I knew what I was doing, then she stood there and waved as we drove away. I rolled the window down to wave at her.

“By the way, you’ve been upgraded,” Sebastian told me. “They moved you to the cottage.”

“To Uncle Wallace’s?”

“He isn’t coming back and you can’t go up the stairs so it all works out.”

For my troubles I got the bathtub, the kitchenette. I tried not to be excited since the whole thing was the product of disaster. “Did Duke bring my clothes down?”

He shook his head. “They sent over a couple of interns. The whole job took them two minutes.”

Even if Duke was busy he could have found two minutes, especially since his clothes had to be moved as well. He would come for the better room, for the vodka I was betting was still in the freezer. Now I had to think about unpaid interns going through my underwear drawer. “Wait, wait!” I said. “Pallace was Emily. How did she do?”

“Conflict of interest,” Sebastian said.

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning you were Emily and you were great and Pallace is my girlfriend.”

“You know I’m not the only person who’s ever played Emily, right?”

“You were the only person I’d ever seen play her until last night. You’re the gold standard.”

“Sebastian,” I said, “seriously, how did she do?”

And then he smiled, a great, toothy grin of the sort I had never seen from him. He had exactly one word and it was spectacular.

True fact: I had seen only one production of Our Town and that was when I was in seventh grade. The high school put it on and I thought it was spectacular. Every line in the play was new to me. I had no inkling that Emily would die in the third act. I cried so hard when the Stage Manager takes her back to her mother’s kitchen that I had to cover my face with my hands while my grandmother fished through her purse for Kleenex. All of which is to say you don’t see a play when you’re in it. You might see pieces, but you don’t know how it looks from a distance, the whole thing put together. Aside from the Emily I saw in seventh grade, and the Emilys I saw auditioning years later in our high school gymnasium, I didn’t know how other people played the part. That night I was going to see Pallace in Our Town.

Sebastian parked on the street and came around to give me my crutches. I crutched heroically, halfway up the drive, holding that Christmas ham of an enormous cast behind me until I had no choice but to stop. My arms were shaking.

“Come on,” he said, his steadying hand on my back. “I’ll carry you.”

It was one thing to have been carried off the tennis court or into the hospital, but something else entirely to just be carried around. I was sweating as I stared up the steep pitch of the driveway. I had done this to myself. I drank the tequila I knew not to drink, played the tennis game I didn’t want to play. It might not sound like much but it cost me everything.

Sebastian picked me up, letting the crutches clatter to the ground. He gave me a bounce to get me situated in his arms and once again I clasped my arms around his neck like a bride. “Lucky for me my brother fell in love with someone small,” he said.