House of Dance by Beth Kephart Read Free Book Online

coming?”
    “When I need her, which will be often, Rosie. And those are just the facts.”
    “You still need me, though, right?” I asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Do you know if your stereo works?”
    “My stereo?”
    “That thing. I mean, all the pieces of that thing. On the floor beside you. Here.” I pointed to the mess.
    He didn’t lean over the couch to look. He didn’t even open his eyes. He just nodded, slowly. “That’s an antique, Rosie. They don’t even make those anymore.”
    “Yeah. But does it work?”
    “Well, I can’t say that it’s broken.”
    “When’s the last time you used it?”
    “When I put a song on for Aideen.”
    “So I can mess with it? You don’t mind?”
    “Whatever’s mine,” he said, “is yours.”
     
    He slept then, and I sat on the floor near him, pulled the turntable and the amps and thespeakers and the cables out to where I could get a better look. The clear plastic lid on the turntable had a thick, snowy layer of dust that I half blew off, half rubbed away with the bottom of my old Dippy Don’s T-shirt. Beneath the lid was the round, flat part that you put the records on, also some knobs, a long silver arm with a needle that I could only hope still had sufficient scratch, and a name: Sansui Automatic Return/Shut-off. The speakers were the size and shape of a Cheez-It cracker box. The cables had yellow ends, red ends, white ends, prongs. The amp was pretty much just a black box with holes in the back that had been shaped to fit the cables.
    The first thing that I had to figure out was what connected to what, which wasn’t going to be easy. I tried every combination I could think of until I found the working one, until the speakers seemed to hum when I held them to my ear and all the dust there hadbeen had been blown off the silver needle. I didn’t know what time it was or whether Granddad was still sleeping. I didn’t know whether the records in those sleeves could still give up their songs.
    “Here goes nothing,” I said to myself. I made my way to the album pile, chose the one with the cover that had lots of brightly colored squares and a name that seemed right for the day: What Kind of Fool Am I. I tipped that record out of its sleeve, fitted it onto the turntable, and dialed the turntable to on. Like a dinosaur bird waking up from sleep, the arm with the needle lifted and, slowly, slowly, shook toward the spinning record, hung above it creakily, and then dropped. There were a couple of seconds of absolute fuzz, the sound ginger ale makes after it’s poured over ice, as the needle slid from the slippery black edge in toward the grooves. And then there was music and a man singing, little pops and crackles, but mostly a song andthe record still spinning and the needle still riding the grooves. I fell back against the side of Granddad’s couch, 100 percent amazed by what I’d done.
    “Sammy Davis Jr.,” I heard Granddad say after a while. “Voice of an angel.”
    “Brought to you,” I said, still on the floor below him, “by Rosie, the one and only.”
    “I guess that’s right.”
    “No shit, Sherlock,” I said. “That is right. It wasn’t going to play all by itself.”
    “You watch your language, Rosie,” he said, but hardly meant it.
    Granddad didn’t say anything more until the first song was through. “Pick up the needle, will you, Rosie?” he told me then. “The next song has a scratch straight through it. Used to drive your grandmother crazy. ‘Once in a Lifetime,’ one of Sammy’s best, and we always had to skip it.”
    “Fine,” I said. “But how do I find the next song?”
    “Smooth bands between grooved ones. Shows the spaces in between.”
    I lifted the needle arm and pushed it sideways, to where the bands were smooth again. As carefully as I could, I lowered the needle back in. “‘A Lot of Livin’ to Do,’” Granddad said, giving the next song its title. “Another classic.”
    The song was crackly and soupy but had a nice