by Erin Healy
Every day in the residents’ common room, in front of a south-facing, two-story window, the morning light passed over a sunbleached strip of carpet. And every day before his shift started, he’d stand in the insulated sunshine for a minute, close his eyes, and hope the warmth would give new life to whatever weakened resolve kept him putting one foot in front of the other.
Most days he thought about Molly and what it was going to take to be her father again. Now that he had a face to go with her name, the possibility seemed more real.
Or less, taking into account his encounters with Lexi.
On this particular Monday, though, after a miserable Sunday holed up in a trailer that he didn’t have the courage to leave, the sun failed to resurrect anything in him.
He was a complete idiot. Less than a half-wit. What had he thought? That Lexi would welcome him back with open arms and tearful hugs? That he could overcome the sum total of his lifelong stupidity in a couple days?
His one mental snapshot of Molly—in a wheelchair at the hospital, eyes on him—fell away from his mind’s eye like a special effect in a Hitchcock film.
A cloud passed over the window and Grant’s skin rippled with goose bumps. He kept his eyes closed, expecting the image of Molly to come back.
It didn’t.
He thought about putting this era of his life behind him. He could start over clean. New job, new city, maybe a new wife if anyone would have him. Why keep going back to his own vomit?
Grant stopped himself. He’d come back to Crag’s Nest for his kid, not some fix. He would have come back for Lexi, if she’d have him. That she wouldn’t was a downer. The kind of downer that drove alcoholics back to their bars after months or years on the wagon.
His mind flashed to Ward and why he might be in town.
And what he could hook Grant up with.
He tried to snuff that thought with a technique they’d taught him in one of his rehab stints: replace bad ideas with good ones. Untrue notions with true ones. A spin on Richard’s take-every-thought-captive advice, which wasn’t quite as clear.
Where had his sight of Molly gone? He willed his mind to call her back up again. The only thing worth doing in this life was worth doing for her.
He couldn’t do it. She wasn’t there. All he could see was Ward, standing smug in the middle of this black mass of failure his life represented, palm outstretched, offering Grant a hit.
Grant jerked his eyes open and made an abrupt turn to his janitorial cart. He shoved the cart because he had to shove something, and it was there. The wheels moved half a yard and then jammed, and the mop bucket sloshed onto the dingy blue carpet.
They hadn’t jammed, really. They had plowed into someone’s shoe. One massive, humdinger, Shaquille-O’Neal-is-a-little-pixie monstrosity.
“Sorry,” Grant said. “Aw, I can’t believe I did that. Here, here, let me clean that up for you.”
“Relax, man, I’m not gonna kill you.”
The friendly words paralyzed him for half a second. This chorus kept resounding in his dreams, in a senseless but significant repetition. He looked into the man’s face.
“Holy cow, it’s you. Angelo, right? You work here?”
The big man who’d saved his daughter’s life, miraculously they said, was wearing a set of enormous green scrubs.
“Grant Solomon,” he said. “Yes, I do work here. Good to see you.”
Angelo didn’t seem at all surprised to see him. Grant handed him a clean rag out of his bin. “I bet that’s never happened to you before. You’re hard to miss.”
His laugh was low and soft, but his whole body rolled with the joke, which relieved Grant. Angelo bent over to blot up his wet pants leg.
“Hey, there was so much going on the other night, I didn’t thank you the way I should have,” Grant said, staring at the top of his head. He wondered for a split second what size hat the guy wore.
“No thanks needed.”
“You were in the right place at the right time.”
“It happens every once in a while.” Angelo handed the rag back but kept hold of the edge a second longer than necessary. Grant had to pull it out of his fingers.
“Molly’s recovering well”—Grant hesitated, unsure how much Angelo knew or needed to know about him—“I hear.”
“She is. The swelling’s going down fast.”
That simple remark pricked a jealous spot in Grant that he hadn’t known existed. Molly had been talking to Angelo? Of course she had. Why shouldn’t she have a few conversations with the man who pulled a Hollywood-worthy rescue out of his supersized magic hat? Had he been to see her since the accident? Grant hated Angelo and idolized him in the same second.
Angelo’s eyes were unreadable.
“I’m curious,” Grant said. “How the timing of all that managed to work out. How you managed to be right there, right then, going the right speed so that it all . . .”
Without warning, he was overcome by images of everything that could have happened if Angelo hadn’t passed through that scene when he had, going the precise speed that he was, in the correct lane.
Images of Molly hurtling through a dusky sky and hitting Angelo’s fender instead of his windshield . . . of Molly breaking the window of Mort’s passenger door and falling headfirst onto asphalt . . . of Molly being halved by the truck that shaved the SUV as it barreled along in the opposite direction . . .
All this came over Grant like an upended bucket of mop water, and he choked on his own question. “So that it all . . . you know.”
“Some things are too big for the mind to grapple with,” Angelo said.
Grant exhaled and managed to keep his grip. “Yeah. A miracle’s a miracle, right? No point in dissecting it.”
“I was talking about all the what-ifs.”
Grant shrugged off the awkwardness of his insight. “I don’t spend too much time worrying about things that never happened.”
Angelo nodded.
“Thanks, just the same. It’s not enough for what you did, I realize that.” Grant cleared his throat. “I don’t know if you know this, but I hadn’t seen Molly for several years before Friday. The sight of her sitting there with only her ankle injured, that was something. I can’t describe it.” He was embarrassed by his own display of gratitude. And he was sick all over again, still unable to call up that picture of her. There was only that blackness and Ward, and his offer to numb Grant’s loss.
He extended his hand, trying to put an end to the encounter. “I appreciate what you did.”
“Don’t mention it.”
Angelo enveloped his fingers in a crushing grip and pumped once. A pain shot up Grant’s arm the way it did when he whacked his crazy bone. Instead of dissipating at the shoulder, though, it wrapped around Grant’s collarbone and then zinged up his spine and straight into his head.
Then there she was, exploding into the front of his mind in such sharp clarity that Grant thought the image of her would be burned there forever: Molly, laughing, happier than he’d ever seen her. Molly, nine, laughing her heart out the way kids should spend their whole lives laughing. And he knew he’d never seen this image before in real life. It wasn’t a memory, but a hope. He didn’t know what else to call it.
Molly-Wolly, splitting her sides, busting up over something he’d said, a blazing sun in human form.
Grant thought he must have looked like one of the poor souls who were treated at the residence, standing there with a slack mouth and blank eyes. He cleared his throat and shoved his hands into his trousers’ pockets and noticed that Angelo had already moved on.
The giant walked right past the two-story window and Grant knew then that he’d never be able to tell this story to anyone: the clouds parted for Angelo and the whole room lit up. Yellow light bounced off his white-gold hair and warmed Grant where he was standing.
He heard Molly laughing aloud.
{ chapter 21 }
Warden stood behind the book stacks of the adorable elementary-sc
hool library and watched Molly, admiring her spirit. It was young and unscarred and still capable of hope. For a little longer, anyway.
She sat at a low round table working on a report, waiting out P.E. and recess, with her sausage of an ankle propped up on another chair. Except for the fuzzy stuffed bookworms wearing horn-rimmed glasses as they dangled over bookcases, she was alone. The librarian had stepped out for a smoke. She couldn’t withstand the temptation, Warden knew, because Molly was a responsible girl who needed hardly any supervision.
He was only a little surprised that Lexi hadn’t kept the poor child home, but the woman had to choose her evils, didn’t she? Go to work and risk that Grant or he might drop in for a visit on dear old mom and daughter, or push Molly off to school where unauthorized grownups weren’t supposed to have access.
She couldn’t have known that never stopped Warden.
Molly was working on the project that was due today, the one that was derailed by the unexpected events of her weekend, a report on an Indian tribe. She wasassigned the Pawnee, a piece of trivia she kindly offered Warden during his visit to her home last weekend.
He had come here to suggest a volume she might be interested in. The books she had access to didn’t go into great detail about his favorite of the Pawnee ceremonies, the Morning Star ritual, because parents and librarians who wore their underwear a size too small believed children didn’t need to know the gruesome details of a practice long forsaken. These same people preferred to whitewash history.
The tradition was so appropriate for Molly’s present circumstance, however, that Warden located an old text with captivating illustrations and captions. As he paged through the old book, he found himself wishing he knew the man who had created it. Here, a young maiden of, say, ten, was captured by the enemy Pawnee; here, she was stripped, then painted black and red; here, as the sun rose, she was shot through the heart with arrows and bludgeoned to death by warriors with sacred clubs as her blood spilled to the earth.
A riveting story for a nine-year-old girl.
He approached Molly with the load of books in his arms. “Excuse me.”
She startled, then recognized Warden and relaxed. She put her hands in her lap and lowered her eyes. Demure. Submissive.
“Hi, Mr. Ward.”
“How’s your report coming?”
The ruled notebook paper in front of her was half filled with neat penciled handwriting and a border of fine eraser dust. “Okay.”
“Found something that might help.” He took the book off the top of the stack, then placed it on the table beside her right hand. On the cover was a map of the stars, the sun and moon, the heartbeat of the Pawnee religion. In the illustration, these astrological bodies had faces. Fierce warriors and striking, strong women.
Molly only glanced at it, but Warden was unconcerned. She’d study it later. And she wouldn’t show her mother. In his experience, children were intuitive about that kind of thing. The innocence in them understood when it was being strangled. Yet it was what they wanted, a perverse desire to grow up by killing their own childhood.
Warden pulled out the seat across the table. Molly tapped the eraser end of her pencil on an open book, where a warrior hunted a buffalo.
“I didn’t know you work here,” she said.
“Just volunteering today. You ever volunteer at a library before?”
She shook her head.
“Try it sometime. You’ll learn more than you’d ever pick up in a classroom.”
She pursed her lips and looked Warden in the eye as if to gauge whether he was lying. He decided to work up to his own lies by starting with the truth.
“You’re a brave girl to be back at school so fast after an accident like the one you had.” He nodded at her elevated ankle.
“I wanted to stay home today.”
“But the parental units said no, eh? I know it doesn’t seem like it, but they do that because they love you.”
This was as unpersuasive as he’d meant it to be.
Molly frowned. “It’s just my mom.”
“Your dad said you could stay home? Wow. When I saw him I didn’t make him out to be that type.”
“That Angelo guy wasn’t my dad.”
“No kidding? Okay. Well, he seemed nice enough.”
She held the pencil horizontally with both hands, staring at the book Warden had picked out. “I don’t really know my dad.”
“Really.”
“Mom says I have his jaw line. I don’t really know what she means, but she says it sometimes.”
“So where is your dad?”
“Dunno. But he wrote me a letter.”
“Cool. What’d it say?”
“That he wants to meet me.”
“And do you want to meet him?”
“Yes, but Mom won’t let me.” Her eyes caught Warden’s again, but this time he detected they were calculating whether he could be of use to her in this desire.
Yes, my dear, I most certainly can.
“My mom doesn’t like you,” she said.
“She doesn’t know me as well as she thinks she does.”
“My mom’s usually right about people.”
“Is she right about your dad?”
Molly shrugged again. But it lacked definition this time. “She doesn’t say very much about him.”
Warden leaned in as if to whisper a secret, even though they’d been talking at a low decibel level the whole time. “She doesn’t like your grandma either, but you and I both know how wrong she is about that.”
Molly tipped the pencil eraser to the corner of her lips and applied slight pressure, giving her a lopsided, joyless grin. Her eyes hadn’t left Warden’s face. For a fleeting second he worried he’d failed to convince her.
It happened now and then, especially with children, which bothered him a little. On the other hand, he could afford a failure occasionally. The risk was worth it. When it came to the measure of his success, stripping the souls of children doubled his returns almost automatically.
“Do you know your dad?” she asked.
“I do.”
“Do you like him?”
“I do.”
“Some dads aren’t so good.”
“How do you think yours measures up?”
Molly’s uninjured foot started swinging under her chair. Her heel hit the chair’s leg in even rhythm. “His letter was real nice.”
“There you go. So tell me, Molly, why a bad guy would write such a nice letter.”
A tiny line appeared between her brows. Warden dived into her moment of doubt.
“I think I could find out where your dad lives.”
The line disappeared and her eyes widened. “You could?”
“You want me to try?”
She nodded, but then caught herself. “Mom still won’t let me see him.”
“I’ll talk with her about it. See if I can change her mind.”
“Okay, but I bet she won’t change it.”
“You leave that to me, Molly. I’ll let you know how it goes.” Warden pushed his book toward her, stoking her curiosity in the unearthly illustrations. “You take care of the important stuff, and I’ll deal with your mom.”
{ chapter 22 }
Mondays and Thursdays were always the most grueling days of Molly’s week, the days Lexi worked from nine to three at King Grocery, picked up Molly from school, rushed home to change clothes, then waited tables from four to two at the Red Rocks Bar and Grill.
She didn’t see Angelo at all Sunday after the 3:00-a.m. pep talk. She hoped he’d gotten some sleep before he went to work. She didn’t even know what shifts he kept at the Residence. By the time her ten-minute noontime break arrived Monday, she was missing his lumberjack presence and the sight of that crazy pink truck. Both put her at ease in a way she hadn’t noticed until then, when they’d been absent more than twenty-four hours.
Lexi stocked six dozen cans of Campbell’s soups in the wrong dispensers before finally decidin
g to call him. Maybe she would talk him into dinner at the restaurant, if he didn’t already have plans to be there with Mr. Tabor.
The slip of paper with his phone number on it was in her book bag in the break room, a filthy ten-by-ten Sheetrock box painted with cigarette smoke and grime. Five lockers that were shared among whoever was on duty lined one wall. Over the coat-rack, the bulletin board displayed yellowed announcements dated nearly ten years ago.
Lenny King, the owner of King Grocery, didn’t mean to be sloppy, he just had more important things to do.
The break room had an equally old and dirty phone on the wall. The receiver was connected to the base with a spiral cord so twisted that its sixfoot length had been reduced to one. But it worked for local calls, and Lenny didn’t mind his employees using it for that purpose so long as they kept an eye on the round-faced clock directly above it.
At 12:02 Lexi went into the room, washed her hands, then wiped them on the olive green apron that, worn over a white button-down shirt and khaki slacks, was her uniform. She lifted the flap of her bag and ran her hand down into the slim pocket that usually held the checkbook and several sticks of Trident. Her fingers brushed the slip of paper.
Not until she withdrew it did she remember that Angelo had taken down someone else’s number for her to call. In the wake of Molly’s Sunday outburst and ensuing silent treatment, she’d forgotten.
Lexi wavered between which number to call first. There wouldn’t be much time between jobs. She also needed to call Gina’s mom and check on her friend. Her work schedule would prevent her from getting over to the hospital today.
She decided to call Angelo, the least uncertain of her options. She pulled an antibacterial wipe from a dispenser on the counter and used it to pick up the phone receiver.
Was this his home number or his cell? Would he be at work?
Was she a fool to call him, a virtual stranger even after such a strangely intimate weekend? Lexi paused, trying to quantify how much more he knew about her than she knew about him.
She punched the number in and contemplated whether to leave a message or hang up when he didn’t answer.