I nod. “Juniors.”
“Wait,” Nell says to me, “you knew about Sebastian?”
“I knew Sebastian.”
The girls all begin to speak at once but Joe ignores them, shaking his head at the memory. “To see how good Sebastian was and to know he didn’t make the pros, it always made me think how good the pros must have been. The only person who could ever make Sebastian break a sweat was Duke, and Duke could never beat him. Never. Do you remember that?” my husband asks me. “How hard the two of them went at it?”
I nod. What I hadn’t remembered was that Joe came to watch them play. Everybody came to watch them, which was one of the countless reasons Duke hated to lose.
“Duke had a great game, but he wasn’t good enough to beat his brother, and Sebastian wasn’t good enough to beat, oh, I don’t know, whoever beat him. We all take our place in the food chain.”
“So what did Sebastian do if he wasn’t a tennis player?” Nell asks, though whether the question is meant for me or Joe or Emily isn’t clear.
“He was a schoolteacher, wasn’t he?” Joe asks.
“History,” I say. Saint Sebastian.
Joe nods again, smiles. He has redirected the topic of conversation so deftly that the girls have no idea he’s done it. He crumples his napkin, picks up his silverware and plate. “Good man,” he says. “Good men. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a minute, I have a few things left to do in the barn while it’s still light.”
We don’t remind him that he says this every night. We don’t tell him that he’s too tired already and that whatever it is he thinks he needs to do can wait. We don’t tell him because he doesn’t listen to us.
Emily pushes back from the table. “I’ll go with you.”
“Don’t be crazy. I know how to check on goats.” He puts his dishes in the sink. “You’ve got your story to listen to.”
There was only one table read on the schedule, and even that, I think, was for my benefit. They’d been cooling their heels in Michigan waiting for the new Emily and now that I was there they were ready to work. Duke was out of his chair the minute I came into the rehearsal room, guiding me around the table like it was a cocktail party. “Emily,” he said, “this is your mother, Mrs. Webb, and your brother Wally.” He leaned over and gave the woman who would play his wife a fleeting kiss on the temple. Mrs. Webb was faded and soft, old enough to be my mother had my mother started young, which she would have in Grover’s Corners.
“How do,” Wally Webb said, and offered his hand. He was an actual child, maybe ten or eleven, with straight brown hair and freckles, though the girl playing Rebecca Gibbs was probably sixteen and got the part for being small. I met Doc Gibbs and Mrs. Gibbs and George. Georges were bound to disappoint me, and this one was no exception. He was a good--looking guy with a string of Pizza Hut commercials and a Saturday morning Disney show that was about to be cancelled. Instead of trying to hold my eye, he lifted himself halfway from his chair and halfway shook my hand.
Uncle Wallace though, he was another story. He leapt to his feet and planted both hands on my shoulders. “Look at you!” he cried. “Look at our Emily! Thank god you’re here. I’m going to have to hug you.”
Hugged by Uncle Wallace! Oh, but I had loved him as a child. The gruff and tender caregiver of his sister’s orphaned brood. The carefree bachelor, dashing in middle age, had risen to the challenge, leaving children all across America to wonder how much better their lives might be if only their parents were dead.
Uncle Wallace put a rinse on his hair to keep it in the neighborhood of red, and his face had the slightly pulled--back quality I’d come to accept in women when I was in California but still found disconcerting in men. He pressed me to him a beat too long.
“This is Uncle Wallace’s eleventh production as the Stage Manager,” Duke said. “He’s hot off a smash success at a dinner theater in Tempe.”
“I can do it in my sleep,” Uncle Wallace said, giving me a wink. I would have laughed had Duke not squeezed my upper arm, moving me along to meet Constable Warren and Howie Newsome and Mrs. Soames. The smaller parts went to people in the community, a strategy that resulted in good will and unexpected fund--raising opportunities. I liked Duke for taking every bit as long introducing me to one cast member as another. Apart from Uncle Wallace, none of us were famous, after all. We were on the way up or on the way out. Our audience for the table read was a collection of swings and understudies who sat at the far end of the room with their pens and scripts. The actual stage manager, as opposed to the actor playing the Stage Manager, sat with the assistant stage manager. I waved to them collectively and they waved back.
“We should get going,” one of the men at the table said patiently.
“Andthis is our esteemed director, Mr. Nelson,” Duke said, holding out his hand. “Our fearless leader. He’s the one who has no business being here.”
“But here I am,” Mr. Nelson said.
“I can’t remember when I last worked with a real director,” Uncle Wallace said, pitching to the room. “There’s always a director, of course, or someone claiming to be a director even though they have no interest in your performance. But not this one! Nelson is a man of ideas, of insight. I thought I knew everything about the part, but he’s opened it up for me again, invited me into the very soul of the Stage Manager.” Uncle Wallace turned to me. “Makes it feel like my first time.”
George picked up his script and tapped it on the edge of the table like maybe he was thinking about leaving.
“Drinking,” Duke whispered as we took our places at the table.
“I’m afraid I already gave my terrific introductory speech last week,” Nelson said to me. “Went over the themes we were highlighting. I don’t want to make the rest of the company listen to it twice.”
“We loved it!” Uncle Wallace said. “We’d be happy to hear it again.”
Nelson shook his head. “Let’s go ahead and read through. Lara, I’d be more than happy to catch you up later if you’d like. I’ve been told you know what you’re doing.”
I looked at the director and smiled. I was ready.
I was sixteen when I installed Our Town into my brain, back when my brain was spongy and fresh and capable of holding on to things forever. Thanks to all those nights in Jimmy--George’s car, I could recite George’s lines as easily as Emily’s, and if I didn’t think about it too much I probably could do the other parts as well. Maybe not all of the Stage Manager, but most of it. Three years have gone by. Yes, the sun’s come up over a thousand times. At not quite twenty--five, this would be my third production of the play. I kept the script on my nightstand to read when I woke up in the middle of the night. I’d spoken the lines over traffic while driving Ripley’s MG down the Santa Monica freeway to spend the day at the beach with friends. I ran scenes in my head on the plane going out to New York, on the plane coming to Michigan. I repeated the words like Catholic girls with their rosary beads, clicking through Hail Marys until they were muscle memory. So it was easy for me to be there in Tom Lake, to be Emily again, to be myself. I had enough room in my brain to think about work and wonder about Duke at the same time.