Never Let You Go

by Erin Healy

  “Actually, I’m looking for someone.” He said this to Simone but was looking at Lexi. She was annoyed to sense herself blush. She heard coffee grounds hit the linoleum at her feet and realized she was filling the filter without watching. She turned back to her task.

  “There he is,” she heard him say. “Thanks.”

  Lexi shoved the coffee basket into its compartment, punched the illuminated red switch, and turned to rescue the Reuben sandwich from the heat lamps.

  “Hubba hubba,” Simone crooned under her breath as she passed Lexi and entered the kitchen.

  The blond giant had taken a seat opposite Mr. Tabor but was too tall to fit his knees under the table. He’d wedged his body into the vinyl booth and left his feet in the aisle. Lexi stepped over them.

  “Sorry about those,” the man said to her.

  She found his apology unnecessary but accepted it with a smile and set the hot plate in front of Mr. Tabor, then put his packaged slaw on the end of the table.

  “My dear, you are a doll like my sweet Beulah, God rest her soul.” His slipped three ones under his unused spoon and she pretended, as always, not to notice. “This here is my friend Michael.”

  “Everyone else calls me Angelo,” the stranger said to her.

  Lexi chuckled and thought of the custom-colored Chevy. “Are you a self-named artist, or does someone in your family have a sense of humor?”

  “My father,” Angelo said. “And you are?”

  The fear that gripped Lexi when he extended his hand couldn’t have been more irrational or unexpected. The sight of that palm, as large as a salad plate, shot an indecipherable warning through her stomach. Her throat filled with regret that she had remarked on his name. Even if a good sense of humor did run in his family, her laughter felt woefully inappropriate.

  She wiped her hands on her apron and let him wrap his fingers around hers. He pumped her arm once in a firm greeting.

  “Lexi.” She jerked her hand away, blushing again. “Get you anything?”

  “How about some coffee and hot apple pie?”

  “A la mode?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Mr. Tabor laughed and slapped the table. “You’d better bring him the whole pie plate and a bucket of ice cream. One slice won’t even whet his whistle.” Angelo grinned.

  In the awkwardness of not knowing whether the old man was serious, Lexi hesitated. When Angelo turned his eyes on her, still beaming, she realized he was going to leave her to guess, if she didn’t dare to ask.

  “You take your coffee black?” she asked.

  “Never.”

  “Maybe you’d like a scoop of ice cream in it too?”

  Angelo looked at Mr. Tabor, who was lifting the corned beef and sauerkraut to his lips. “Now how come I’ve never thought of that?”

  “Because she’s the brains in this trio, isn’t she?” Mr. Tabor bit into the sandwich.

  “Apparently so.”

  Lexi turned away, high stepping over Angelo’s feet and considering how to deliver his order.

  When she returned minutes later with a mug, a carafe, a slice of pie, a scoop of ice cream on the pie and another in the coffee, and a whole pie (minus one slice) in a box, Mr. Tabor and Angelo had a good laugh.

  “Now that’s what I call service,” Angelo said, eyeing the spread.

  “She earns her keep, she does.”

  Angelo ate four slices of the pie over the three hours that he and Mr. Tabor sat there, talking, and though she couldn’t say why, his appetite pleased her. She refilled his carafe twice and wondered at how calm he seemed after what must have been eight cups of coffee.

  When the men departed around seven, Angelo pressed the pie box into Mr. Tabor’s hands, then left her a tip that was the same amount as his bill. She watched him climb into the pickup and drive out of the lot as she cleared the table.

  “Bug’s gonna fly into your mouth if you don’t close it,” Simone said to her as she passed by with a full load of steaming plates.

  Lexi snapped out of her stare, embarrassed to have been noticed. She rolled her eyes at Simone.

  From the corner of her eye, she caught sight of a patron at booth eleven in the far corner, head bowed into his open menu. How long had he been waiting? Couldn’t have been long, or else Chuck would have kicked her in the behind. She’d get to him next if Simone hadn’t already helped her out.

  The metal-framed glass doors of the restaurant swung open as Lexi stacked the plates, and the cold draft that was the lion’s tongue of March licked Lexi’s ankles. Two people entered the dining room.

  At the sight of them, she walked straight into the back of a chair that protruded from its table and almost lost her load. The collision made furniture and flatware rattle. She caught her balance and prevented a mess. The pair looked in her direction.

  Her mother, Alice Grüggen, stood in front of the door, flanked by red vinyl booths and overshadowed by a grim figure tailing her. Grant Solomon, Lexi’s estranged husband.

  { chapter 9 }

  Lexi and Grant had met in high school, become pregnant with Molly as soon as they graduated, and did the shotgun thing. But those drugs got in the way of their happily ever after. There were Grant’s drugs and then her sister’s murder, and misery came at Lexi like an unavoidable, slow-motion car wreck. Two years after the wedding, she followed Grant out of their little one-room bungalow, clutching a wailing toddler while her meth-cooking husband tried to explain why he couldn’t stick around any more.

  To this day she couldn’t recall what he said.

  What she did remember was how quickly it became clear that she was the only sane Grüggen living and breathing in their little town. Her father’s descent into mental illness was more like a freefall, and her mother created a tidy little fantasy world of her own to deny what was happening to their picture-perfect family. Alice ran away, taking up life as a traveling food critic.

  Lexi had not forgiven her mother for abandoning her father, no more than she had forgiven Grant for abandoning Molly. If either departure had been about her, Lexi would have put it all behind her. She would have handled it, or at least turned her back on the offense. But her father, Barrett Grüggen, didn’t deserve his wife’s neglect. And Molly . . . Grant might have thought the little girl would forget him. Lexi knew the truth firsthand, though: no daughter ever, ever forgot her need for her daddy, even if she couldn’t remember his face.

  Because Lexi was such a daughter, she believed Alice should never have turned her back on Barrett, no matter how much it hurt to see him change. He’d never done anything to deserve that. Alice’s pain wasn’t his fault.

  Lexi tried to hold them all together, for a few months. She told herself repeatedly that her failure was not worth revisiting. Eventually she gave up. There was only so much a daughter—a wife, a mother—could do or be. So she put all her eggs into a basket called Molly and faithfully visited her father down in Riverbend.

  That she had coped at all, even in this unremarkable, my-life-is-still-limping-along kind of way, was due in large part to Gina. And Jesus. Gina and Jesus. Lexi thought the two went together like Ben and Jerry, like Fred and Ginger.

  “Lexi and Jesus” didn’t roll off the tongue as nicely, but at the time, she figured that was to be expected. Gina introduced Jesus to her the day Barrett was given permanent residency status at the mental hospital, the day Alice listed the home Lexi grew up in, the day Lexi had to admit she’d failed. At everything. Jesus didn’t mind that, Gina said. He was all about second and third and fourth and fifth chances.

  Lexi needed another chance. Because she loved Molly and her father so much.

  It was this same love—Lexi was convinced of it—that today spun her away from Alice and Grant and propelled her into the kitchen, where she dumped her load of dirty dishes into the bus bin so carelessly that one of the plates chipped. She took a deep breath, almost not caring if Chuck noticed.

  How dare they come here? Here, where she worked, on the busie
st night of the week, where enough witnesses would recognize Grant to keep the gossip mills churning out stories for months?

  How dare they?

  She decided to let Simone seat them. Lexi headed back to take care of the customer who’d been waiting.

  It was impossible not to see them from the corner of her eye when she reentered the dining room. Lexi felt the skin of her neck warm up. Those faces, eyeing her like a specimen in a jar, were the portrait of gall.

  “Get you something to drink?” she muttered to the man in booth eleven, fishing in her pocket for the notepad. She glanced back to Alice and Grant, who seemed to be deciding whether to seat themselves. Simone was headed in their direction.

  “I’ll have me a Blue Devil,” the man said.

  The voice. The drink. Lexi’s gaze snapped to him.

  “Ward. Warden.” It was a toss-up as to whether facing her mother and her ex would have been more enjoyable than this.

  “Hey there, Sexy Lexi.”

  “You know I hate that.”

  “Deep down, you don’t. Good seeing you again.”

  Lexi huffed. “What do you want?”

  “All I ever wanted is you, you know that.” He leaned in, neck long, chin up, then laughed low at his joke that wasn’t exactly a joke.

  “I mean to eat.”

  “Your little girl cooked up some mighty fine spaghetti last night. Got any more of that?”

  Lexi leaned forward and placed her palms on Ward’s table, more to hold herself up than to appear intimidating, which was impossible. “You stay out of my house.”

  Warden grinned so big that his eyebrows disappeared under his knit cap. He threw one arm across the back of the booth.

  She backed away from the table and escaped through a pair of swinging doors into the bar, trying to make sense of the storm that was brewing out in the dining room. Her palms were sweaty. After seven years of routine, how was it possible that everything could be reduced to chaos in a matter of hours? Next thing she knew, Norman Von Ruden would barge in and order a basket of French fries.

  She gave the bartender Ward’s drink order, then leaned on the bar and pretended to watch the TV, wondering how love could disintegrate into resentment. There was a time when she’d cared for all of them deeply: her mom, Grant, Norman, even Ward, whom she never loved but found to be a decent fellow once upon a time. How could she feel such extreme opposite emotions toward the same people?

  The answer to that came easy: Because they failed. Spectacularly. They failed me. They failed Molly.

  Of course, she’d failed many times in her life. She’d even failed people, but this is what set her apart from the adults out in that dining room: she had never failed someone and then abandoned them. She had never failed them and then tried to meddle in their lives as if she knew what was best for them.

  As Lexi stood at the counter and watched the bartender mix a strange brew, the arrival of her mother and husband took on new clarity. If she had any hope of extracting this wedge that had come between her and Molly, she would have to put her mom and Grant, these failures, in their place. Which was not here.

  Ward was a different kind of animal, though. She didn’t know what to expect of his reappearance. Would he stalk her until she agreed to testify? She wondered if Grant had noticed Ward.

  She wondered if they had stayed in touch all these years.

  Lexi set the highball glass full of swirling blue alcohol on a round tray and swooped it up, heading back for the dining room.

  She pushed through the double doors with one hand and saw that Simone had seated Alice and Grant in the nearest booth, to the right. Something told Lexi they’d requested this seat, maybe the fact that their eyes were on her as she returned. Grant, sitting with his back to the bar, had to twist his head nearly off his neck to get a look, but he was as focused on Lexi as her mom was.

  He slipped out of the booth, gripping a pair of gloves with both hands, and placed himself right in her path.

  “Lexi,” he said. He looked at his feet, and she was glad he had the decency to look ashamed.

  She matched him toe to toe. “What are you doing here? You have no right.” Lexi’s fury contained itself at a low, discreet volume. The restaurant was busy, though not packed, and she wouldn’t make a scene. Not here. She looked at her mother. “You had no right, sending Molly a letter like that behind my back.”

  Grant said, “I tried to explain—”

  “Did you even read it, Mom? You’re supposed to protect her, protect us, from that kind of poison. And you”—she turned back to Grant—“you don’t have any idea how to handle the heart of a nine-year-old girl. What were you thinking? How could you do that to Molly? What did you expect would happen?”

  Grant blinked. His eyes darted to Alice, then back to Lexi. She saw Molly’s profile in the shape of his jaw line. Her anger roiled, but her memory traced his attractive features, his light blue eyes that contrasted with his dark brown hair. She used to tell him that his slight build and intense expressions reminded her of a young Sean Penn.

  Grant used to stand straighter. His shoulders were square once upon a time; now, everything stooped. He looked older, and thinner.

  “A letter ‘like that’?” Mom asked, then sighed. “I worried this would happen.”

  Why did she insist on these games?

  “You’re right,” Grant said. “I shouldn’t have put Molly in that position. I called this morning to try to sort that out. I’m sorry, Lexi.”

  Her mouth fell open at this. It took a long moment for Lexi to give words to her shock.

  “You’ve been gone for seven years, and you’re apologizing for that letter?”

  “I owe you more apologies than I can count,” he said.

  She dropped her voice to a whisper.

  “You left us, stoned out of your mind, with five dollars in the checking account and a brick of cheese in the refrigerator, and you think—”

  “I’m so sorry. Please. Forgive me.”

  Forgive him? Forgive him? Just like that? No explanation, no excuse, no can-I-make-it-up-to-you?

  “Is this a joke? Showing up here, and now? As if you can trap me under some fluorescent lights and brainwash me into forgiving you for . . . for . . . a slanderous letter?”

  Grant looked confused. “Slanderous?”

  Alice spoke up. “It seemed wise to have our first meeting in a public place.”

  “Yes, I see how that might prevent a murder.”

  Her mother flinched. Alice recovered with, “Like I said.”

  “I can suggest a dozen other public places in this small town where I’m not employed.”

  “And I don’t suppose you would have actually shown up at any of those places, would you?”

  “No.”

  Alice put her hand over her heart and picked up a menu. “Do they still make that rosemary meatloaf here?”

  Lexi scowled and bit her lip, because she could feel tears rising in her eyes. Grant’s eyes glistened too, and she couldn’t fathom why. “Please, just go,” she said.

  “When can I talk to you?” Grant asked.

  “You’ve said all I need to hear.” Lexi leaned in toward her mother. “And you’ll be lucky if I ever let you near Molly again.”

  Alice waved off the threat as if she didn’t have time for the drama anymore. Having been reduced to the status of an immature child, Lexi chose to act like one, making her exit in the form of a sharp turn away from the table.

  “Lexi, please.” Grant reached out to stop her.

  His fingers touched Lexi’s elbow and she jerked it away from him. He was faster than she was, though, more desperate. He seized her wrist before she retracted it too.

  Grant had never been a violent man. Even when his mind was completely clouded over by the meth, he’d never raised anything more than his voice against Lexi or Molly. So she couldn’t have said why his touch made her cower as if he was going to hit her. She wasn’t consciously afraid of him. But when his fin
gers closed like a handcuff around her wrist, her body reacted.

  She felt the cold puff of March wind on her legs again, as if the front door had been reopened. She smelled a hint of that sweet smoke. She turned her eyes away, sank into a crouch, and raised her opposite arm to cover her face.

  The tray carrying the Blue Devil tilted, and the glass hit the chrome corner of a table before bouncing off and shattering on the floor. The gin and Blue Curacao and who knew what else splattered everything on the aisle. The little round tray took off like a downhill snowball, rolling on its side the full length of the dining room, until it clattered to a stop against the rear wall. The whole restaurant turned to look.

  Lexi straightened, not daring to catch anyone’s eye.

  Grant was bent, picking up glass.

  Simone, who never moved anywhere slowly, was already using bar towels to wipe the mess into a contained disaster area.

  “Thanks, Simone,” Lexi muttered, taking over her towels.

  “What was it?” she asked.

  “A Blue Devil.”

  “I’ll get you another one. Where was it supposed to go?”

  “Booth eleven.”

  Simone missed a beat, and Lexi thought she’d gone. But her feet were still planted.

  “You sure?” she asked.

  “Yeah I’m sure.” The cold floor hurt Lexi’s knees. Her mom was still looking at a menu as if none of them existed. Grant had stepped aside for Chuck, who appeared with a mop in a wheeled yellow bucket.

  “Well, take a look around, hon, and tell me who ordered it. There hasn’t been anyone in booth eleven since last weekend.”

  “Simone . . .” Lexi craned her neck and gestured toward the booth in the corner of the room. It was empty.

  She sighed, stood, and glanced around the dining room.

  “Forget it,” she told Simone. “He must’ve left.”

  “Lucky you. Chuck’ll be sticking you with the tab, you know.”