As Wide as the Sky

by Jessica Pack

  His voice had a rich timbre to it and she imagined that when he laughed, you could feel it through the walls and floors. She didn’t think, however, that he laughed very often. When she didn’t answer his question right away, he lifted his eyebrows, which weren’t as thick as they had been when he was in high school. She reviewed half a dozen explanations and introductions in the space of a breath. When none of them seemed quite right, she simply lifted her hand and opened her fingers to reveal the ring resting in her palm. She watched a look of confusion pull those eyebrows together. They both stared at the ring, then dawning recognition smoothed the lines of his forehead.

  Steve reached toward the ring, but then paused and met her eyes, his hand hovering a few inches above her own. A gust of wind sprang around the side of the house, sending Amanda’s hair whipping around her face. “Is that . . . my high school ring?”

  “Are you Steve Mathis?” Amanda asked in return. She used the hand not holding the ring to push her hair from her face. His hand continued to hover; his eyes were locked on hers, though. Kind eyes. Confused eyes. Wary eyes?

  “Yes, I’m Steve Mathis.”

  She lifted her hand higher, toward him, urging him to take the ring. “Then this is your ring.”

  He held her eyes for a moment longer, then looked back at the ring and carefully picked it up. He held the band between the thumb and forefinger of both hands as he turned it back and forth, inspecting every detail. He tried to put it on the ring finger of his right hand, but it only went to the first knuckle. “Damn,” he said under his breath, then moved it to his pinkie and slid it on. “Fits that one.” He looked up at her and smiled.

  Amanda smiled back and the butterflies began to settle until she remembered the next part of why she was here at the same moment he did the same thing.

  “Where did you get this?”

  Did his question mean that he hadn’t known what had happened to the ring? Butterfly spasms. “Um, I found it in my son’s things.”

  Another gust of frigid wind that took her breath away seemed to remind him of his manners. “I’m so sorry—would you like to come in?” He stepped to the side, ushering her in.

  She didn’t move, and shook her head while pushing the hair out of her face again. Her nose was numb. “No, thank you,” Amanda said, needing the space and the close proximity to her car to keep her courage. Besides, it wasn’t fair to go into his house without his having full knowledge of her identity. The mother of a murderer. Even as she thought this she realized she’d gone into Coach Miller’s house without revealing herself. But that was different. Yet it wasn’t.

  “Are you sure?” he asked, pushing the door open a bit wider. “I’ve got some coffee on.”

  For an instant, she imagined accepting his offer. Walking into his condo, looking around. Commenting on the décor. She would follow him into the kitchen as though she went into other people’s kitchens all the time. Not counting Coach Miller’s, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in any other kitchen but her own. What if they sat down across from each other? What if she could talk like a normal person? What if he found her engaging and interesting?

  She shut down the fantasy that had broadsided her, embarrassed to have thought it. Coach Miller was to blame; he’d planted the seed that Steve Mathis might be more than the owner of a class ring. She would not allow such a thought. She couldn’t. “I can’t go in.” The honesty of her answer was sad. She truly could not go inside. Nothing could make her accept his invitation.

  He cocked his head to the side slightly, and concern entered his eyes. He had very telling eyes. She looked away from them and pretended to straighten the hem of her coat around her hips. “I’m afraid you have the upper hand, ma’am. You know my name but haven’t told me yours.”

  “Amanda,” she said, not looking up. His hand appeared in her line of vision and she had to think a moment before realizing that he was requesting a handshake. She took it. His hand was warm and large, and folded around her smaller hand quite comfortably. She shook his hand once, then pulled away quickly and pushed her hand into her coat pocket. She didn’t touch people in this life she lived, no one except Melissa and her family twice a year. And Robbie three days before he died.

  “Thank you for returning my ring, Amanda. But you say your son had it?”

  Amanda nodded and felt her anxiety building now that she was on the cusp of learning how this man knew Robbie, or if he knew him at all. “I don’t know why he had it, though.” She eyed him carefully—waiting for him to remember. Did he already know Robbie was Robert Mallorie? If he did, wouldn’t he have said so by now?

  He looked confused. “Did you ask him?”

  “My son is dead,” Amanda said with a stoicism that she despised even though that flatness had been a close friend for some time now. “I found the ring among his things—I’d never seen it before. I wanted to return it to you, but I . . . also wanted to know why my son had it.”

  Steve looked at the ring and kept his own thoughts for several seconds. Amanda would have found it awkward if she weren’t so used to long silences of her own. Finally, he met her eyes again. “You’re Robbie’s mother?”

  Amanda blinked quickly, surprised by the effect the sound of the “before” name on someone else’s lips had on her. He doesn’t know. She nodded.

  “He . . . died?”

  She opened her mouth but was afraid of what she’d say. She closed her mouth and nodded again. Steve looked at the ring again, then at her. “He was a great kid. I’m so sorry to hear that he died. He had to be, what, only twenty-five or so?”

  “Twenty-six,” Amanda said. He’d turned twenty-six the first week of November. His execution date hadn’t been announced yet and she’d hoped they would wait until after Christmas. They did. She had put extra money in his prison account so he could buy a honey bun from the commissary on his birthday. When he called her the next week, he’d thanked her for it. He’d sounded like her son that day. Sounded like Robbie. She’d missed him so much.

  Steve tsked, a sorrowful expression on his face. “I’m so sorry,” he said again, his eyebrows pulled together in sympathy. “So sorry. What happened?”

  Amanda shook her head and looked down in hopes of communicating that she wasn’t prepared to talk about it. That wasn’t necessarily dishonest—she wasn’t ready to talk about it. She took a breath and looked up at him again. The eyes that had been too close together in that high-school yearbook picture didn’t seem that way now—he’d grown into his face. He was pleasant looking, comfortable. He was two years younger than she—in his late forties. “How did you know my son?” She’d meant the question to be a bit more casual and soft, but the words had popped out like those pressurized biscuits in a can. She was on borrowed time now. He didn’t know Robbie was Robert Mallorie. But he might figure it out. And when he did . . . would he yell at her? Would he back away slowly? Would he hedge and shift and try to give the ring back as though it were tainted? Cursed? Would he withhold what he knew? She couldn’t stand the suspense.

  She saw the embarrassment on his face, making her doubly regretful having asked the way she had. Would he allow her to make another attempt? “I’m sorry, Mr. Mathis,” she said, forcing calm into her tone. “I didn’t mean to sound accusatory or . . . I just . . . I miss my son.” Her voice caught. She cleared her throat. “I would love to know how you knew him and whether or not he touched your life in some way.” He could hurt her with the wrong answer.

  Mr. Mathis’s expression softened. “Call me Steve,” he said. “And he definitely touched my life. He was a remarkable kid.”

  Amanda knew her eyes had turned pleading—or begging really—she saw it reflected back at her in the minute shift of his expression. “Please come inside.”

  She’d already refused the invitation but was aware of how odd it was that she would ask him for something but not enter his house. She swallowed her fear—or some of it anyway—and nodded. He looked relieved and stepped to the side
, holding the door open for her. She smelled his aftershave as she passed him and wondered when she’d last been that close to a man. Other than Robbie, whom she had hugged just five days ago and would never hug again.

  She stopped in the middle of the living room. A doorway led into the kitchen—a similar layout to her condo.

  “Have a seat,” Steve said, waving her toward a chocolate brown leather sofa that faced a flat-screen TV mounted on the wall of the narrow room. She tried to smile politely and sat on the very edge of the very end of the couch. He didn’t sit; instead he shifted his weight from one foot to another. “Hang on just a sec,” he said, then turned and headed up the stairs set against the west wall. Amanda let out a breath slowly, trying not to let the panic take over. What was she doing here? Alone with a man she’d never met. She stood up and turned toward the door, thinking maybe she should go back outside after all. Mounted on the eighteen inches of wall between the door frame and the window was a photo. The young man in the picture—a father—looked a lot like the yearbook photo of Steve Mathis. He was holding an infant in one arm while his other arm was wrapped around the shoulders of a dark-haired woman who was holding a tow-headed little girl. Amanda stared at the photo. At the man who was the sort of man she’d expected Robbie would be one day. A wave of jealousy rose up inside her.

  The vibration of footsteps on the stairs broke her spell and she started as though she’d been caught doing something inappropriate. She wondered if she should hurry back to the couch so he wouldn’t know she’d nearly left; then realized she couldn’t make it in time.

  “Sorry,” he said, smiling sheepishly. “I should have told you what I was doing. I’m just . . . shocked by all this, I guess.” He held his hand out to her as though to give her whatever was clasped in his fist. After staring at his closed fingers a moment, she put her hand out to receive.

  He opened his hand and a plastic coin dropped into her palm. She didn’t pull her hand in for a few seconds. Not until Steve had dropped his arm back to his side. Then she drew it in and looked at the object more closely. He must have seen the question in her eyes when she lifted them to meet his.

  “I thought maybe you’d recognize it,” Steve said.

  Amanda shook her head.

  “Oh.” He sounded disappointed. “Well, see, Robbie and I made a trade. My ring for this token.”

  Token? Amanda looked at it a bit more closely and realized that it was the green 90-day sobriety token Dwight had given to Robbie during that summer visit. Robbie gave it to this man in exchange for a high school ring?

  Amanda looked up at him, her anxiety growing—she couldn’t stay here much longer. “How did you know Robbie?”

  “We, uh, worked on a landscape crew together a few years ago—well, I guess almost ten years ago, now.”

  “In Sioux Falls,” Amanda said.

  Steve nodded. “He . . . well, he helped me get perspective on some things going on in my life.” He ducked slightly, smiling with another kind of embarrassment tinged with regret. “I know, how is it that some teenage kid could make such a difference, right? But he was a pretty insightful kid.”

  Insightful. She pulled the word tight to her chest. Robbie had been insightful once. She remembered. “Why did he have your ring?”

  “Well, when I decided to come here—to Florence—I gave him my high school ring; it was kind of a symbol of what I was holding on to, or wishing for, or missing, or something.” He shrugged. “Sounds a little melodramatic when I say it out loud, but I asked him to hold on to that ring until I was ready to accept high school as a part of my life rather than the best part. I got so busy putting my life back together that I didn’t give much thought to the ring, which I guess proves I was able to leave high school where it belonged.” He shrugged, giving a half smile that spoke of his own vulnerability. “My son graduated a couple of years ago and got a class ring of his own, and I put some thought into getting mine back, but I . . . I couldn’t remember Robbie’s last name.” He looked down as though embarrassed by this. He pushed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. “We were all being paid under the table, ya know, so we weren’t on more than a first-name basis with one another. Not a bad job for a high school kid. Kinda pathetic for a man in his late thirties.”

  His expression became a bit more contemplative and his glance more direct. He cocked his head slightly as he continued to look at her. “Did we meet back then?”

  Amanda closed her hand around the token. She still didn’t know why Robbie had given it to Steve. “Well, I, uh, brought him his lunch a few times. Maybe we met then.” But Amanda had no recollection of Steve. If they had met back then, it wasn’t impactful enough for her to have any memory of it.

  “Robbie,” Steve repeated in a musing tone, still looking at her with a thoughtful expression. “Will you wait here for just another minute?”

  Amanda nodded nervously and clenched the token even tighter in her hand as he went into the kitchen and disappeared to one side so that she couldn’t see him from where she stood. She’d returned the ring and she’d received a nice memory in return. He’d said Robbie was insightful and she would treasure that. She should go. Avoid any potential ugliness. She looked over her shoulder at the door and was beginning to turn when she heard him coming back to the living room.

  Steve returned with an iPad he was swiping his finger across as though scrolling through information. Her anxiety began to peak, and with it a muddling of her thoughts. She should have left.

  It was good she’d stayed.

  This was risky.

  Act normal.

  After a moment, he paused and typed something in. Then he looked at the screen, looked at her, and looked at the screen again. His expression, which had been so easy to read, suddenly went neutral. She’d waited too long, and the hope of having this moment free of Robert Mallorie sputtered away.

  “Is this you?” He turned the tablet to face her and she tensed as she looked at a photo of herself wielding a sledgehammer over a corner of her driveway. It was more of a close-up than she’d expected; she could see the black hair tie she’d used for her braid that day and the way her neck strained with effort. Her expression was determined. She looked crazy and felt her cheeks heat up.

  “That’s me,” she said in the barest of whispers, taking another step back and putting her hand on the doorknob. She should go. Now. Run.

  “So Robbie is . . . Robert Mallorie?”

  She turned without looking at the censure she was sure would be on his face and pulled the door open. In two steps, she was off the porch and hurrying toward her car, the speed of her steps increasing the farther she got from the gaze she could feel on her back. With a little luck the shock of uncovering her identity would keep him in place long enough for her to get out of here before he said anything else that might ruin their meeting.

  She was walking around the front of the car and frantically digging in her purse for her keys when Steve said, “Wait.”

  She looked across the top of her car as he walked toward her. He was dressed in black jeans, a polo shirt with some logo in the corner, and house slippers—had she caught him right before he went to work? Her hand settled into her purse and she closed her fingers around the boondoggled key ring Robbie had made in Scouts. She’d found it a couple of years ago in a drawer and replaced the key ring she’d gotten from the used car dealership. No one knew Robbie had made the boondoggle. Even Melissa didn’t know.

  They held each other’s eyes; she saw the conflict rising up in his. He didn’t know how to act toward her. Did he look pale behind his beard, or was she seeing things? He opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. What could he say to the mother of Robert Mallorie, who he’d just realized was the same boy he’d known as Robbie?

  “Thank you, Mr. Mathis, and . . . and I’m sorry.” She pulled open the door and slid into the driver’s seat. He stayed where he was. The wind blew her car door shut and the slam seemed confirmation that she’d overstayed her wel
come. His hair, short as it was, hardly ruffled.

  Within seconds she had started the car, checked her mirrors, and was pulling onto the road. She risked a single glance out the passenger window. Steve held the iPad at his side, watching her, eyebrows pulled together. He raised a hand to wave goodbye. The ring she’d brought all the way from Sioux Falls was still on his pinkie finger.

  Her heart was racing, which was ridiculous, and it was a few minutes before she was breathing normally and remembered the token. She patted her pockets and looked around the car as best she could without driving off the road. Where was it? She pulled over and got out of the car. It wasn’t in any of her pockets. It wasn’t on the floor of the car or on the passenger seat. She dumped out her purse on the back seat—it wasn’t there either. A second search of every potential place she could have put it confirmed it was gone. Had she dropped it?

  Hot tears rose in her eyes while a gust of wind sent her hair into a flurry around her face. This shouldn’t be upsetting—it was Dwight’s token that Robbie had given to Steve, not a connection to her in any way. But it had been Robbie’s and was therefore a connection to him. It was part of a good memory she hadn’t had this morning and could now add to the others she’d allowed out of their hiding place. It was . . . something amid a whole lot of nothing, and she’d lost it. Steve had kept it for ten years; she hadn’t managed to hold on to it for ten minutes.

  She blinked away the tears as her awareness of being on the side of a road on a blustery day returned. Someone might notice her and pull over to see if she needed help. She got back on the freeway and reviewed the exchange over and over and over again as she crossed the Ohio River without the token and whatever it might represent. “Get over it,” she told herself out loud. She’d expected nothing, so there wasn’t anything she should be disappointed about. And Steve had said kind things about Robbie before he’d realized who he was. Remarkable. Insightful. That’s what she’d wanted. It was all that she wanted and now that she’d completed the task, she could move forward to the next phase of her life.