Byrd Page 15

  Roland didn’t go. He stayed home with her. He chose her.

  Her car is still idling; she’s forgotten to turn it off. Her window is open. The blue letter is in her lap. She has that feeling again, of being under water, coming up. She’s near the surface. There’s light above. If she closes her eyes, she can see it.

  Statute of Limitations

  Addie had been certain he would call the minute he got her letter, or the next day, or the next.

  It’s been a month now, and still no word.

  She can’t sleep. At night she paces. During the day she is curt with customers. She argues with Peale, badgers the mailman. She fires Vivian—twice—and rehires her.

  Everyone is afraid of her. Everyone avoids her.

  Sometimes when she is alone in the store, she throws books—cheap paperbacks. Sometimes she screams. The screaming, finally, is what scares her into calling the lawyer again.

  “What’s he thinking?” she says. “What can he do?”

  “You understand I bill for phone consultations at my regular hourly rate,” the lawyer says.

  “Of course.” She is on the edge of screaming again.

  “So let’s start with, what do you want him to do? What do you want from him?”

  “Nothing. Just to talk—I want him to call me. Talk to me.”

  “But legally, what do you want? I’m a lawyer; what advice do you want from me?”

  “Here’s what I want. I want him not to do anything that could hurt our son. I read about a case where a birth parent was able to undo an adoption.”

  “You’re thinking of the Clausen case from Michigan. It made all the papers. Different jurisdiction, and a completely different situation. That child was much younger; her adoptive parents basically kidnapped her. Your son—Burt?—is ten. His adoptive parents came by their rights legitimately. They’re the only family your son has ever known. Unless they’ve been bad parents, no sane judge would uproot the child now, even if the father did challenge the adoption. Which in my opinion is extremely unlikely.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes. Any lawyer is going to tell him the same thing I’m telling you. He can’t win. He’d just be throwing away money—a lot of money—and possibly disrupting the life of his child.”

  Addie pictures the lawyer in her red power suit, her wall of diplomas and plaques—was there a trophy on her credenza? But no family pictures anywhere. A family lawyer with no family.

  “What about me?” Addie asks her. “Can he do anything to me?”

  “You mean sue you?” The lawyer laughs. Her laugh, like everything else about her, is quick and sharp. “Only if by not telling him earlier, you somehow damaged him. If he’s like most men, you probably did more damage by telling him the truth.”

  “I didn’t mean to.”

  “I know, I know.” The lawyer softens. “Ms. Lockwood, there are a thousand possible reasons you haven’t heard from your child’s father, most of them innocent. Maybe he just doesn’t know what to say. The important thing is, you did what you needed to. Did you send the letter certified?”

  “I couldn’t. That’s not the kind of relationship we have.”

  “So you don’t know for sure that he got it.”

  “No.”

  “Can you at least call him? Ask if he got your letter. Ask what he’s thinking. Make notes.”

  “I’m worried,” Addie says.

  “I’m telling you: don’t be.”

  “If he did want to sue me, how long would he have?”

  “Three years. Three years from when he first learned about the child.”

  “Three years is a long time.”

  “Not so long,” the lawyer says. “You’ve waited a lot longer than that to tell him.”

  Words

  Dusty’s suit is too small. It makes him itch. His collar pinches his neck. In his right hand he’s clutching a fistful of ashes, not soft ashes like from a cigarette, but gritty. They cut like sand. When his father nudges him, he holds up his hand and lets go and a gust of wind comes along and blows most of the ashes away. A few stick in the sweaty creases of his palm.

  His mother. The last of her.

  She had pale yellow hair and partly chewed-off pink fingernail polish and a tiny blue ladybird tattoo on her neck. She fell asleep in her car. Now she is ashes in the desert.

  He and his family are standing in a big scrubby field next to a road that has no traffic. He has been on this road before, when his parents took him fishing at the lake. The road where his mother’s parents died. The sun is a giant white ball.

  “Don’t stare,” his father says. “You’ll go blind.”

  His mother had swimmy eyes. Sometimes she sang.

  His grandmother from North Carolina pulls him aside. She is tall and old and thin and her nose looks like a beak. He has always been afraid of her. She squeezes his hand so hard he can feel his finger bones rubbing together. “I want you to remember something,” she says, bending down so that her face is close to his. “What happened was not your fault.”

  Which is when it first occurs to him that it might have been.

  He remembers the day his mother left their groceries in the store. How she marched him out to the parking lot, holding his hand as hard as his grandmother is holding it now, and talked to him in a low, scared voice. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said. “You hear me? Especially not your father.”

  He wonders if he was supposed to tell anyway. Sometimes grownups mean the opposite of what they say.

  Things can happen so fucking fast. In an afternoon. You can come home from work and turn on the TV and fix your kid a snack because your wife hasn’t made dinner yet. You go looking for her. She isn’t in bed like she sometimes is. She isn’t in the shower. She isn’t in the yard. She isn’t anywhere. It occurs to you—who knows why?—to check the garage. And that’s where you find her, along with the mail, in the front seat of her car, which has run itself out of gas.

  Dear Roland, you have another son and you owe money everywhere.

  She didn’t leave a note. Just the letter in her lap and the bills in her purse. Her face was tilted to one side. Her cheeks were red; she looked sunburned. His first thought was to lean in and touch her, but he was afraid of hurting her somehow. Even though she was already dead.

  He kept Addie’s letter to himself. No reason Elle’s aunt and uncle should know about it.

  Pet decides not to place an obituary in the local paper. This is one small thing she can do to protect her grandson. If anyone asks, she will say Dusty’s mother died in a car accident.

  She calls Roland every night and tries to talk him into moving back to Carswell. “A good place to raise Dusty,” she tells him. “It would be good for you, too. You need your family.”

  “We’re with family,” Roland says. He and Dusty have moved in with Elle’s aunt and uncle. People with, as far as Pet can tell, no background.

  “At least get out of Reno,” she insists. “Try someplace new.”

  “I’m tired of new places,” Roland says. “Besides, Dusty likes it here, and I’m letting him call the shots.”

  “He’s nine.”

  “Yeah, well. He can’t fuck up any worse than I have.”

  “Roland. Language, please.”

  It’s late. Roland is lying on the bed with his clothes on so that he can get up whenever he feels like checking on Dusty, two doors down. Dusty has stopped talking again. He sleeps curled up in a ball.

  Across the hall, Elle’s aunt and uncle are watching TV. This is how they spend their nights, propped in front of the tube with the sound turned up. Roland can hear thick, dull laughter from some late-night show.

  He leans back on his pillow, arms crossed behind his head, and stares at the wallpaper. This is Elle’s old room, her bed, her slippery chenille spread. He thinks maybe he will feel closer to close to her here.

  “Write me a song,” she used to ask him.

  “I’m no good at rhymes,” he would say.

&
nbsp; “The words don’t have to rhyme.”

  “I’m no good at words.”

  After a while she stopped asking.

  Now he has words—rhymes, even—but no guitar and no money to unpawn it.

  Little flowers on the wall

  Dusty sleeping down the hall

  In the night I heard him call

  I never knew you at all

  He imagines a backbeat. A low, breaking, Waylon-like voice.

  “Country?” Elle would say. She wouldn’t believe it. Him, the bluesman, writing her a country song.

  The words in Dusty’s head are so loud he’s afraid to say them, he’s afraid his voice will explode. He writes in his memo pad instead: I’m sorry.

  Some things they will never know about Elle:

  As a child she was slow to talk. She learned by watching the Patty Duke show. She called her father Pop-o, like Patty, and said bah-ee for bye like Patty’s British cousin.

  As a teenager, after she’d moved in with her aunt and uncle, she often went exploring in neighbors’ houses while the neighbors were at work. In those days, in that neighborhood, no one locked their doors. She never took anything, only looked—in closets and dresser drawers, under beds, in medicine cabinets, laundry hampers, kitchen pantries, refrigerators. It was a game, to figure people out by the contents of their houses. She learned more about those people than anyone would ever know about her.

  Some things she never knew:

  She was right about Roland. He’d chosen not to go to his reunion, though he sometimes missed Carswell, those people.

  She was right about Pet offering to fly him back to North Carolina, and Dusty, and Elle, too, if she wanted to come.

  “Too expensive,” Roland had told his mother. “If you’re going to spend that kind of money, give us cash. We’re saving for a house.”

  Roland has not been able to call Addie. He’s afraid of what he might say. Still, he can’t keep ignoring her. They have a kid—how did that happen? And why did she wait so long to tell him?

  Bigger question: After ten years, why fucking bother?

  He’s in the car, leaving work. He stops for gas and a six-pack. While the clerk is ringing him up, he pulls a postcard out of the rack by the register, a picture of the Reno arch. “Biggest Little City in the World.” Twenty-five cents.

  Driving home, he imagines what he’d like to write. Dear Addie, my wife read your letter and killed herself, and now my son, the one I’m raising, the one I’ve known since he was born, doesn’t have a mother. Thanks for getting in touch.

  Almost

  On the day her store is robbed, Addie is away at an estate sale, buying a rare set of Sandburg Lincolns. She also picks up a grab-box for William. She doesn’t open it. She wants to be surprised along with him.

  She remembers the grab-box John Dunn gave her when she came home from the hospital without the baby. It had a set of shrimp forks, three crocheted doilies, a dead chrysanthemum, and—the treasure—a pair of worn-out bedroom slippers, an old woman’s dirty terry-cloth mules, fastened together with a plastic thread, no doubt by the tagger at the sale, but John Dunn pretended the fastener was the original, that the old woman had never bothered separating her slippers. “It was the shoes that killed her,” he said, and slid his big feet into them and imitated the old woman shuffling around her house, her tiny steps unable to keep up with the rest of her body. He pitched forward, flailed his hairy arms, and landed in a heap.

  Addie laughed, a loud, raw, ragged, awful laugh.

  She wouldn’t laugh now. The older she gets, the less funny the thought of falling, especially falling alone.

  Peale is evangelical about “spreading the words,” as he calls it. He thinks of bookselling as a helping profession, like therapy or ministry or law or medicine or matchmaking. To be good at it, you have to know your customers.

  His first customer this morning is Mr. Olivetti, a small, stooped man who never shops but simply asks Peale to pick something out, buys it, takes it home and reads it. He records the title in a small memo pad he carries in his shirt pocket like a birdwatcher’s life list, then comes back in asking for new recommendations, never commenting on what he’s just read. Some people just don’t know how to talk about books, or think they don’t, or that they’re not supposed to. That doesn’t mean they aren’t changed by them. Today Peale sends Mr. Olivetti home with three Vonnegut novels that just came in, old paperbacks in excellent condition: Slaughterhouse-Five, Breakfast of Champions, and Cat’s Cradle. Who better than Vonnegut to change an old man?

  Next it’s Bunny Miller with her weekly donation—a stack of historical novels and inspirational memoirs, all new titles, the books immaculate.

  “Did you actually read these?” Peale asks her, as always. It’s hard to believe she could go through so many books and not leave a trace of herself in any of them. A mark or a dog-eared page or a cookie crumb.

  Bunny answers, as always, “Why else would I give them to you?”

  She always takes payment in store credit, which she never redeems. She could donate her books to the library for a tax deduction; Peale has pointed this out. Apparently she prefers the role of private benefactress.

  Peale holds up one of the memoirs from this morning’s stack, a critically acclaimed bestseller. “What’d you think?”

  “Hmp,” she says. “It’s okay. Nothing I couldn’t have written myself.”

  “You should write a book, Mrs. M.”

  “What on earth would I write about?”

  “Write about everything you’ve read since Mr. M died.”

  Bunny is a widow whose worst fear is having time on her hands and nothing to read. She purses her wrinkled old mouth, looks pensive. “Not a bad idea,” she says. “I could call it After Albert. Alliterative titles do quite well, I’ve noticed.”

  As she wobbles out of the shop, a tattooed girl charges past her in a hurry, demanding “anything by Jane Austen.” (“A Jane Austen emergency,” Peale will say during his police interview.) Then a middle-aged mother comes in with her young son. The woman is looking for a book she read as a child, an autobiography, Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals. Peale checks the shelf. “Sorry,” he says. The woman’s son has dark hair and dark eyes and wears a backwards baseball cap that mashes his ears out to the sides. He isn’t one of those glazed-over video-game kids you see. He studies the shop as if it’s a foreign country. When he handles books he’s delicate, touching them with his fingertips. He slides a volume from the rare book shelf. The Happy Hollisters.

  “That’s a great series,” Peale says, “if you like mysteries. Something happens on every page. I read them when I was your age, when everybody else was reading the Hardy Boys. How old are you? Nine, ten?”

  The boy doesn’t answer. He is already reading.

  “How much for the set?” the mother asks.

  Peale is surprised. She doesn’t strike him as an impulse buyer or the kind of mother who routinely lavishes expensive gifts on her kid.

  “It isn’t the complete series,” Peale says, “just the first ten. But it’s pretty rare to find them in sequence like this.” He tells her the price and she pays in cash: one hundred and sixty dollars, his biggest single sale of the month. “If you want to leave your phone number,” he says, handing her the pencil from behind his ear, “I’ll call you if we run across the Durrell.”

  At eleven-thirty, Vivian tells Peale, “I’m taking my break.”

  Vivian is in a dark mood. Selling books was supposed to be a temporary job, a phase—part of her young, hip, underpaid, intellectual single life. Now she’s thirty-two and doesn’t even like to read any more. Reading reminds her of everything she doesn’t have and probably never will.

  She uses her morning break to meditate. Even a few minutes of silent chanting can help. “May I be happy, may I be satisfied.” She sits cross-legged on a small padded bench in the children’s section. Once or twice she is interrupted by customers; each time she returns to her cha
nt. “May I have everything I need and want.”

  She hears the bells on the front door when the robber enters, but she can’t see him.

  “May all beings have everything they need and want.”

  He is wearing a torn Hawaiian shirt over a turtleneck, khaki pants, scuffed boots. His gray hair is pulled back in a thin, greasy ponytail. He has a cell phone pouch clipped to his belt.

  “Where’s your Ayn Rand section?” he asks Peale.

  “I wouldn’t call it a section.” Peale motions toward a shelf on the far wall.

  The man walks to the shelf without stopping to browse. He pulls down Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and carries them to the counter. While Peale is ringing them up, the man reaches for his pouch.

  “Sorry, sir,” Peale says, and points out the sign on the counter, “you can’t use your cell phone in the store.”

  The man smiles. He has a capped tooth (a detail Peale will recall for the police). Without taking his eyes off Peale, he opens his pouch anyway and pulls out not a cell phone but a knife. With one arm, he sweeps the counter clean. The Ayn Rands, the store newsletters go flying. The scrap of paper with the Durrell woman’s phone number flutters to the floor. Peale yells to Vivian and reaches for the alarm button, but the man is already behind the counter, flicking his knife across Peale’s throat, a quick slice. He growls something Peale can’t understand, shoves his hand into the open register, cleans out the cash and runs. The bell on the front door clatters in his wake. Peale, too angry to realize he’s been hurt, chases the man, but the man is too fast. He disappears into traffic, leaving Peale in the middle of Hillsborough Street, bleeding furiously.

  The emergency room doctor says the cut on Peale’s throat is superficial. A nurse cleans it and tapes it with Steri-Strips while Vivian talks to a police officer.

  “We’re a stupid place to rob,” Vivian says, trying to keep calm. She’s glad she was able to get in a few minutes of meditation before the robbery. “We hardly ever have cash. Nothing we sell has any street value.”