“But . . . you’ve been with me from the beginning. I know it’s my name, but this is our show.”
“I know,” Jeremy said. “And if the show was here . . . well, I’d keep working on Everett’s Place until I die. You’d have to bury me in the studio.”
“Seems like your family might have some objections to that,” Everett muttered.
“But if the show ends up leaving, I don’t think I could come with it. I’m sorry. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a job on another show at the station,” Jeremy said, concern flickering across his face for just a moment.
Everett’s eyes widened. “You think I could leave you here without a job? No way. I can’t imagine doing the show without you. Without you to give him his sassy personality, Larry the Llama would be a shell of himself. What, am I supposed to work with some other puppeteer? Am I supposed to have a conversation with someone else’s hand shoved up Larry? It’s not right.”
Jeremy shook his head. “You don’t need to worry about me, Ev. Do I wish things could go on the way they are forever? Sure. But you have to think about what’s best for the show. Maybe it’s just the end of an era.”
“No.” Everett pointed at him. “Not yet. We don’t know what the Imagination Network is gonna say. Maybe they’ll meet us and decide to pass.”
“Nah,” Jeremy said with a smile that looked more sad than happy. “They’re not gonna pass. No one ever passes on your ideas.”
“But I don’t want to do this show without you!” Everett said, starting to feel a little frantic. “Maybe you could convince your entire family to move. There’s gotta be a safe way to move that fish tank. Money is no object. We could do that thing where we lift up your house and put it on a truck and move it, like in The Little House. That sounds feasible, right?”
“Ev.” Jeremy shook his head, smiling. “See? You are a good friend. Really. And I know that however things end up, you’ll make a good show. You always do.”
Jeremy patted him on the head before he left, which made Everett feel a little like a confused and petulant baby. Was it really so wrong to want his friends to make the show their number one priority, too?
Well, okay, so he knew it was. He knew he was being unreasonable, but that didn’t change the way he felt. That was the annoying thing about feelings: just because you accepted them, it didn’t mean they went away. They were still there, clouding his judgment and making him feel irrational.
He put his hand back in the new puppet and held it up. “What should I do?” he asked, but the puppet didn’t answer, because she wasn’t anybody yet.
He knew that other people didn’t understand what he was waiting on. They didn’t get why he couldn’t glue some eyes on a piece of felt and consider the job done. But it wasn’t like that; he’d never worked like that, and he didn’t want to. He needed the puppet to feel real, to seem like it was a creature outside of himself, to look like a foreign object, not something that came from his own mind and hands. He couldn’t fake the element of surprise when he talked to the puppets on camera; he needed to be genuinely surprised, as if he were talking to someone who might say something he didn’t expect, not just himself or Jeremy saying the lines he’d already written.
“Half-assing it” simply wasn’t part of his vocabulary. Kids would spend their entire lives encountering adults who were half-assing jobs that deserved their full attention. He wasn’t going to be another one. After all, didn’t he always tell kids that all they had to do was try their best and be kind? What sort of an example would he be if he wasn’t giving it his all?
He sighed. Maybe the puppet needed a new nose. Or maybe he’d move the eyes again. Something had to work.
But for the first time he could remember, Everett didn’t want to keep working until the middle of the night until he figured it out. He didn’t want to sit here by himself and stare at a soulless puppet. He wanted to see another person.
He wanted to see Teddy.
47
The opening notes of “Christmas Wrapping” by the Waitresses started to play, and Teddy looked toward the speakers in confusion.
“Josie?” she called over the sound of jingle bells. “Have we time traveled?”
“What?” Josie asked, poking her head around an aisle, where she was organizing some action figures.
Teddy pointed to the speaker. “The Christmas music. You never start this early. It’s not Thanksgiving yet.”
Josie walked to the counter and sighed. “Teddy. Darling. I made the mistake of turning on the news today. Have you ever watched cable news?”
Teddy shook her head. “That’s what the Internet is for. I get notifications on my phone if something important happens.”
“Well, don’t start watching it now. Because five minutes of twenty-four-seven news coverage will convince even an optimist like me that the world is in the shitter. It’s a mess out there, apparently,” Josie said, pointing toward the street as if danger lurked right outside the shop door. “And now I can’t think about anything other than the fact that the world is full of sad, heartbroken, and lonely people. It’s enough to really bring a person down. I had to turn to Christmas music to make myself feel better, because Christmas music makes everyone feel better.”
Teddy tilted her head. “I mean, it certainly makes me feel better. I love this song. But that can’t be true for everyone. What about people who don’t celebrate Christmas? Or people who get mad about Christmas music being played too early? Carlos?”
He looked up from his comic.
“Your thoughts on Christmas music?” Teddy asked.
“I listen to it on December twenty-fifth,” he said, then returned his gaze to his comic.
Teddy and Josie looked at each other, mouths agape. “There’s a wealth of beautiful, joyous, jingle-bell-filled music out there and you restrict your listening to one day?” Josie asked, incredulous.
Carlos nodded without looking up.
Teddy shook her head. “That feels like a personal insult to Mariah Carey.”
“Sorry, sugar, but I’m gonna keep playing it in the store whenever the spirit moves me,” Josie said to Carlos.
He shrugged, seeming genuinely unbothered. “Your store, your rules.”
Teddy’s phone buzzed just as a customer walked in, and she checked it as Josie greeted them.
I know text messages are a callous, unromantic, and frankly just plain boring medium. But I didn’t want to risk you not seeing an email in time. When do you get off work? Want to take a walk?