Tumble & Fall by Alexandra Coutts Page A

Center board since Zan was in preschool, organizing fund-raisers, art shows, and live music. This is the first time more than a small, devoted group of gallery coworkers and local divorcees, lonely and bored on a Saturday night, have shown up. Zan can tell that her mother is pleased, though she hasn’t stopped moving around long enough to really show it.
    The second band of the night is playing on the makeshift Center stage, a group of stoner guys Zan knows from school. One of them sporadically strums a heavily stickered mandolin, another sits behind half a set of drums, and a third is doing some kind of unidentifiable yell-rapping. It’s like an afterlife drum circle with Jerry Garcia and that guy from Sublime. On weed.
    “What is this?” Daniel, Zan’s father, asks, rearranging the tray of organic cupcakes that Miranda and Zan spent all morning baking. He points at the stage with frosting on his finger. “Not bad.”
    Zan smiles. Her father tries very hard to be hip, open-minded, slow to judge. He considers himself one of the “cool” teachers at school, the kind that kids actually want to hang out with. His shaggy gray hair is always tousled in a sort of old-man mullet, and he wears the same leather jacket every day, even in the middle of summer. Zan pretends he annoys her, but they both know they’re a team.
    “It’s not bad ,” Zan allows, filling paper cups with glugs of homemade hibiscus iced tea. “It’s a disgrace. My eardrums are crying.”
    Daniel taps his foot defiantly, his hard, weathered face a scrambled mix of phony enjoyment and fear. Out of nowhere, Miranda pops between them, her sunken cheeks flushed from walking in tight circles around the room. “How’s it going here?” she asks, quickly surveying the spread. “Do you need more napkins? There’s another box in the kitchen. Are people reusing their cups?”
    Miranda reaches forward to rearrange the trays and Zan stares at the swinging tail of her mother’s long, graying braid. “What does it matter if people recycle anymore?” she grumbles. She doesn’t mean to say it out loud. Her father’s foot stops tapping and Miranda’s shoulders tense. Zan wishes immediately she could take it back.
    She steels herself for a lecture. A reminder that “Everything matters.” That “Nothing is certain. We’re here until we’re not.” That “Living clean is living well. And we’re all still living, aren’t we?” Lectures that started long before the announcements, the panic, the endless waiting.
    But Miranda’s shoulders relax. She passes the clipboard to Zan’s father. “Daniel, I’ve been working on getting sign-ups for help with your installation. Why don’t you see who you can nail down outside?”
    Daniel wipes a few telltale cupcake crumbs from the corner of his mouth and takes the clipboard. He gives Zan a warning glance as he passes, and Zan feels herself shrinking even smaller.
    Miranda arranges the remaining brownies and cookies in precise little rows before clapping her hands together and glancing warily at the stage. “This is awful,” she sighs. “I’m going to ask somebody to turn down the amps.”
    Zan watches her mother stalk across the crowded room. She wonders if she’s ever felt as strongly about anything as the way Miranda feels about, well, everything. Maybe Leo, but that’s it.
    Leo’s face flashes in her mind and she feels her heart swell, then stick. Vanessa . She has the Grumpy’s receipt in her pocket, hasn’t been able to stop thinking about it and what it could mean. Her mind loops in vicious circles. It’s nothing. He ran into somebody he knew before he left. A friend of Amelia’s, maybe, or his mom. Somebody who worked at a bookstore off-island, someone with access to a rare, out-of-print collector’s item. He said he’d call to pick it up.
    Nothing.
    Or maybe it was something. Something more. Something she can’t even imagine, something that rips the air from her lungs when she even begins