Nine Letters
By
Blake Austin
Copyright © 2016 by Blake Austin
Cover art/design by: Najla Qamber
Cover photo: Lane Dorsey
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including emailing, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Acknowledgments
CHAPTER ONE
Eighteen-wheelers rolled through Kansas City on the 70 outside the window, and noon light came in through the blinds. Neither the noise nor the light did much good for my hangover, and I didn’t so much wake up as I gave up on sleeping. The day was weighing on me already.
Maggie was still asleep. I was in her bed again, in her dead-end apartment, again, on her dead-end street. Again. I said the previous time was going to be the last time. Bad habits were like that.
Even with her makeup smeared by sleep and sex, Maggie was hot in that way that bartenders knew how to be in order to bring in tips. I eyed the black ink of the tattoos that climbed the curve of her back, then looked away, looked down at the floor in shame. My wife had been gone for a year already. I told myself there was nothing to be ashamed of, the same as I did every time I woke up next to my co-worker with a hangover and the vague hope we’d remembered to use protection. Telling myself it was fine didn’t work most days, least of all on the anniversary of Emily’s death. She deserved better.
Maggie’s arm was over my chest, and I lifted it just enough to slide out of bed. Standing, the headache came on worse. Physical pain was good. A headache was good. Anything that kept me from thinking was good. I could handle physical pain.
She rolled away, her long hair black against her black sheets, her skin freckled and tan. Her mouth was open just the slightest bit. It wasn’t her fault we didn’t get along. We scarcely liked working together, and she didn’t care about much besides nightlife and computers and meaningless things like that. But there was a sort of vicious chemistry between the two of us in bed. I hated everything about the whole situation. If only I could quit coming back.
I found my jeans, shoes, shirt, flannel, and hat, all scattered on the floor, but I couldn’t find my belt. My pants would stay up without it, but I didn’t want to give myself a reason to come over after work again, so I didn’t stop looking.
The place was a mess, even worse than my house. Stacks of takeout boxes and checkout-line magazines sat atop mismatched furniture, and after a few minutes I gave up and went to use her bathroom. My belt was on the worn linoleum floor, next to her bra. I ran the leather through the loops on my jeans, clasped the Royals buckle into place, and looked in the mirror. I could use a shave, but I was doing alright. Even with a soft job like tending bar, my arms still had definition. I adjusted my cap, then went out and crossed the room as quiet as I could, hoping to get outside before she woke.
“Luke,” Maggie mumbled, her eyes barely open. “Sneaking out like you always do?”
“Just didn’t want to wake you,” I said. It was the truth, at least.
Maggie rolled her eyes. “You gonna call me?”
“Sure,” I said.
“No you’re not,” she said. “You’re just going to ignore me at work and then turn around and hit on me when you get drunk after your shift. Like you always do.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Like I care,” she mumbled, rolling back over and pulling a pillow over her head. “Get out of here.”
She fell back asleep, and I slipped out the door.
Emily died in the springtime. Nobody should die in the springtime, but least of all someone so alive. Now I dreaded the warmer days, the green of the season. The memories were too strong.
I pulled on my flannel as I walked to my truck, the brim of my cap almost working to keep the sun from doing its best to ruin my life. Still, it felt good to step up into my Chevy and turn the engine over. I let it shake to life, got my left foot off the clutch and my right foot on the gas, and took off out of that dead-end street.
You’ve got this, I told myself. You’re tough. You’ve been through worse.
I pulled out onto the 70, cranked down the window, turned up the heat against the chill still hanging on despite it being midway through April. Cold wind poured into the cab, clearing my head a bit and knocking Granddad Cawley’s dog tags where they hung from the rearview.
I wanted a cigarette, maybe a can of Skoal, more than I wanted to deal with the day. But I’d quit tobacco for Emily. I’d promised her I’d quit, even though she was the one who’d died of cancer and she’d never even smoked. She was dead, but my word meant something to me. My word was all I had. I wouldn’t disappoint her. Not anymore than I already had.
I drove faster, instead. I ignored my phone as it went off in my pocket, I ignored the speed limit, and I let myself be grateful for my truck and the wind and the Sunday lack of traffic. Maybe I’d get out of town sometime soon. Get my boots in the dirt, get mud on my tires. Go fishing. Call my brother, maybe even my dad. Maybe.
Kansas City is alright for a city, anyway. I’d be alright. I was tough.
You could still get a pretty good house in Kansas City on a truck driver’s take, and my granddad had given me a house, a fixer-upper two-bedroom place with enough yard for kids and enough garage to keep a man happy. I pulled into the drive and tried not to think about the look on that man’s face when he’d handed me the deed at the wedding.
“The hell do I need the money for anyway,” Granddad Cawley had said, like he didn’t care. “Was going to leave it to you in my will, but I don’t want no grandson of mine plotting against me. Was going to give it to you sooner, but I didn’t want you thinking things in life came much for free, either.” That man had been proud, so proud, that all of his years and miles behind the wheel were enough to provide for his family.
It was a small miracle that Granddad went to his grave before Emily did. He’d never had to know that there weren’t going to be kids in that house, that I was never going to get to build a swing set in that yard. What sort of world is it, where your Granddad’s death is a small miracle.
As soon as I cut the engine, the hangover came on, and worse. I made it into the house, turned on the heat. A house should have an engine block, should just warm up from use like a truck. But it doesn’t work that way.
Inside, I scanned the fridge, but there weren’t any eggs. I still had a half a deer in the deep freeze in the garage, but nothing hot I could make fast enough to be worth the effort. No breakfast today, then. Guess I’d drag myself to Price Chopper sooner or later.
A shower would do me better than cold cereal anyway, and I made it to the bathroom off from the master bedroom. The one I’d been working on when we’d found
out Emily was sick, the one I’d never finished remodeling. I stripped, stepped into the hot water. The first half of the shower, I decided I needed a better way to keep Emily off my mind than sleeping with Maggie, because sleeping with Maggie didn’t work anyway. The second half, I didn’t care that it didn’t work, because I didn’t care about much anything at all.
From the time I was seventeen to twenty-three, I’d lived with Emily at my side, in a bliss I didn’t know the world had to offer. Now that she was gone, I wasn’t prepared to face the world without her. Hell if I knew why I kept on going in the first place. I guess because Emily would hate it if I quit. And if I was honest with myself, I was afraid she might not be waiting for me on the other side if I took my own life. Whether or not I was right with God, no matter how shaken my faith, it just wasn’t a risk I was willing to take.
The water ran cold all too soon.
Drying off in the bedroom, I found myself flipping through the stack of proof prints from our wedding, like I did most days.
I’d memorized every one of them.
Emily on horseback in her wedding veil, head thrown back in a laugh, me holding the reins from the ground and staring up at her like I’d never seen anything so fine. Another with Emily in her white gown, smirking, leaned against my chipped beige Chevy pretending to aim a slingshot at me while I held back a grin. The two of us sitting on the tailgate, hand in hand, the skyline of our western city silhouetted against the setting sun, mud on both our boots.
The photographer had charged too much, I used to think. Emily and I’d argued over it, even, in that halting, loving way that was the worst the two of us had ever really argued. She’d been right, of course. She’d always been right.
It was too overwhelming. I set down the stack of photos, but I could feel her blue eyes follow me across the room. April 15th, when those eyes had shut forever, was a date burned into my brain deeper than September 7th, our wedding, or September 28th, her birthday.
I threw my clothes back on and left the bedroom.
My cell phone sat on the butcher block counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. The house was a minefield of memories—I’d built her the countertop as soon as we moved in. I unlocked my phone and saw two missed calls, two voicemails. One from my brother Mike at 10am, the other from my work, at 1pm.
“Luke,” Mike’s voice said, impatient. “Wake your ass up. Am I going to see you at church? Ever again? You even alive?”
I deleted the voicemail before it even finished playing.
“Hey, so I don’t know if you’re really into having a job,” Warren, my boss, said in his familiar drawl, “but if you are, you can’t keep pulling this shit. I got in this morning and the place was a mess. You didn’t do the dishes, you didn’t close out the register, you didn’t wash the mats or take out the trash. I feel like I’m lucky you even remembered to lock up on your way out. I’m sick of cleaning up after you, and I know we’re friends but I’m going to find a new guy if you do this to me again. See you at three.”
I had to be at work by three.
I looked at my phone. Two-thirty, and a thirty-minute drive.
Without another thought, I went out the door. There was a package on the stoop, about the size of a book from Amazon, but there was no return address. Just my name, Luke Cawley. No postage, no address, just my name.
I picked it up, tossed it inside the house before I locked up, and ran to my truck.
CHAPTER TWO
“Jesus, Luke, you look like shit.”
I didn’t doubt it, but I didn’t care, either. I was out on the street with a keg on the hand truck, trying to hump it up over the curb. The place didn’t have a soft curb, so I got one boot back behind the wheel of the hand truck to keep it from rolling back—love wearing steel-toed—and pulled the thing up onto the sidewalk. Everyone else rolled theirs halfway down the block to the nearest drive.
“You go home with a girl as hot as Maggie and then you come in here looking like you hate yourself,” Jake kept going. “I hate to say it but sometimes I think you’re an idiot.”
“I’m trying not to think about Maggie right now,” I said, half a note of menace beneath my voice without me even meaning it.
Jake was the bar back, nineteen. Just a kid. He was alright. The worst parts about him were that he didn’t realize how dull he could be and that he cared about microbrews from Oregon. The best parts about him were that he was always down to watch the game at work and that he didn’t pry about my personal life. Usually.
“Come on,” Jake said, as we both wheeled kegs into the brightly-lit, not-yet-open bar. “You’ve got to give us something. She shave? I bet she shaves.”
Again: he didn’t usually pry.
“Leave him alone,” John Lawson said. John Lawson was a huge man, the kind of man who was too big to be known by just his first name. A hundred and fifty years back, he would have been a frontiersman, the kind of man who could have picked up an axe and scared off bears and bandits both. He still carried that air about him, and it kept even the worst drunks in line.
“I didn’t mean nothing by it,” Jake said.
“His wife died I think a year ago today,” John Lawson said. He turned to me. “That right?”
“Must have got her mixed up with some other Emily Cawley,” I said. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.” I turned away. I really didn’t want to think about it, and I really, really didn’t want to talk about it.
Jake whistled. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You doing alright?”
I got the keg down, hooked it up to the tap. It was some kind of IPA. Half our damn beers were IPAs.
“What’s the point of 9.2% beer?” I asked. “I mean, seriously. If I want whiskey I’ll drink whiskey. If I want to drink a beer, that’s why God gave us lagers.”
Warren’s was an alright bar. It was still blue-collar enough for Warren to have just named the place after himself, but sometimes I was convinced that was just to hide how upscale we were. I didn’t love the kind of crowd we catered to. The slumming white collar, the people who wanted to feel like they were drinking in a place with a name like ‘Warren’s’ but still get their microbrews on tap. Which meant a bartender like me, I was part of the draw. Shit, I’d sold out without the cash to back it up. At least Warren was a good guy, a straight-shooting kind of guy.
I poured myself a Miller Lite and got half of it down, then slammed the glass on the bar and headed out the door, back to the truck. Work to do, no time to waste talking.
I was maybe moving some boxes of limes a little too hard, because one of the boxes busted open on the pavement and a few of the limes started rolling off down the sidewalk, fell off the curb and landed in the gutter. Like me, I guess—in the gutter. John Lawson and Jake were just watching me from the door.
Emily loved lime on everything. She loved lime in Mexican food and Blue Moon and margaritas. Pretty much anything you could feasibly justify putting lime on, she put lime on. She said she got it from growing up in the rodeo. Seeing those limes in the street broke something in me.
I pulled back my foot to kick the hell out of that box, just to shake the rest of the fruit free, just to let it spill out all over the street. I’d never been an angry man. I’d never been like my dad or my brother. I didn’t want to become an angry man, either. But I had an awful lot to be angry about.
I kicked the ground instead. Looked up at the bright blue sky that definitely did not in any way remind me of Emily’s bright blue eyes, and I counted my breaths, up to ten, which was definitely not a technique Emily had taught me—another thing she learned from the rodeo, actually. I cleared my throat a few times and put the limes back in the box. Because it’s what you do when you’re a grown-ass man. You put the limes back in the box.
John Lawson came over and took the box from me once I was done, and he had that box under one gigantic arm and he put the other one affectionately on my shoulder.
“It’s alright,” he said.
“The hell it is,” I said, and I snapped, and I pushed him. The biggest man I know, the bouncer at my bar, and I got both my palms up against his chest and planted my feet into the ground and shoved him with all my strength. He fell to the ground and the limes went rolling back off into the gutter. For a moment we all just waited. I didn’t even know what I’d do next.
Finally I let out the breath I’d been holding and held out my hand to help him up, but John Lawson just looked at me like he’d never seen me before in his life, which is fair enough I guess. Jake ran inside, came back out with Warren, my boss.
“I’m going to call Maggie in instead, Luke,” he said. Despite the drawl, Warren had a voice that didn’t mess around—steel underneath, all the way. He always had that voice, but he had it especially just then. “Go home. Take a couple days. I know you need more than that, but a couple days is what I can give you. I’ll see you Wednesday and we’ll go from there, alright?”
“Yeah,” I said, or maybe I mumbled it, or maybe I just thought it.
If I lost my job, I wouldn’t lose my house. I owned the house. But I needed to eat. I needed something to do. And I needed to know that, maybe, someday, I could start contracting again. Which meant I couldn’t be broke. Even if, yeah, maybe sometimes I wanted to get myself fired.
John Lawson was picking up the limes, because he was a grown-ass man, and I just stormed off in the after effects of a black fit of rage. There was a little storm cloud over just my head and it was pissing rain and thunder and I knew to the bottom of my soul that there was only one woman who could save me. But that woman was buried at Mount Moriah Cemetery South, and I couldn’t quite say why I was alive and she wasn’t.
Even stepping up into my truck did nothing for my mood, and I went home miserable.
The worst part about living alone is how nothing ever changes when you’re away. Well, that’s not the worst part about living alone, but it’s a strange thing about it nonetheless. Everything was exactly how I’d left it, because my house was lifeless and dead, because my wife wasn’t around to make messes or tidy them up, to leave her shoes in the doorway or her sweater draped over a chair...sometimes I think I’d give anything to come home to one of those messes again.
9 Letters Page 1