“Is he clean? I mean, am I safe to check him out?”
Another shrug. “I don’t make deliveries out in that end. They send one of the tougher guys.”
I swallowed, pulled my attention away and wondered if my older Chrysler would attract any unwanted attention if I were to make a trip tomorrow during the day. And then the wind blew and stirred up a whiff of Lena’s mess on the porch.
“I should clean that up,” I half-gagged.
Veronica frowned, like she was questioning just how bad a pool of puke on the porch could be. After a moment’s thought, she nodded. “Be careful when you visit. If you’d like someone to come with you…”
I smiled, held out my right hand as if offering to shake hers, which clearly offended her. But she took my hand anyway, at which point I pulled her into a tight hug and whispered into her ear, “I don’t want to let go.”
“Then don’t,” she muttered.
After I hosed down her mess, I went inside and Lena asked me if I was “railing” the delivery lady. Dad, are you railing the delivery lady? Just like that. I walked past her into the kitchen where I washed my hands with foaming soap that made me smell like a lemon and looked in the refrigerator for something to throw on the grill.
“Dad, you’re kidding, right?”
I turned around. “We’re not discussing this.”
“She’s a kid.”
“You’re a kid.”
She rolled her eyes, no comeback. “Fine. She’s a little pretty.” And then the frown returned. “But she’s still the delivery girl. For real?”
I shook my head. “I’m making chicken, are you hungry?”
“Is the delivery girl joining us?”
“Lena, this is why I ‘forgot’ to invite her. I don’t need this right now, I’ve got enough crap going on that…” I made some wild hand motions around my head to suggest a possible mental breakdown.
Her frown deepened. “Chillax, Papa Bear. I don’t care who you’re screwing. And since I’m not getting any use out of that stupid wedge, maybe I could give it to her as a welcome gift.”
Yeah, the irony…
“Why are you grinning?” she demanded.
I shook my head, snapping the visual out of my mind. “Chicken? Hungry?”
She rolled her hands around her slightly bulging tummy. “Ravenous. I’ll cook the rice.”
I didn’t want rice, but I used her offer as an opportunity to end this conversation about Veronica. I reached into the refrigerator for the chicken and headed out the back door. The freshly cut grass reminded me of summer, new beginnings and happiness, and of course Veronica’s tattooed feet, you are my happy and my sad; you are my start and my end.
I fired up the barbecue and waited outside, listening to the breeze sifting through the leaves like the ocean.
“Um, Papa Bear?”
I stared back at the screen door where Lena had pressed her face. I gave her a nod to continue.
“Can you invite her over on Friday? I’d like to meet her. I’ll cook, I’ll do everything.”
I considered it, weighing Lena’s request with Veronica’s apparent hurt at my not calling or texting. “Okay. Sure.”
Lena smiled and turned away.
“She has a daughter,” I said, bringing her back to the screen. “So you’ll have to add a fourth place setting. She’s five.”
Lena blinked a couple of times, and I could see that she had to forcibly keep that grin on her face; it wanted to evaporate, fast. “Perfect.” And then she walked away.
The address inside Veronica’s envelope brought me to Lansing Street, which was located in Detroit, not a trendy suburb like Birmingham, Troy, or any of the others. This was big-time Detroit, rundown and tired with a dash of desperate. Definitely not the type of area where I’d stop and set up a picnic blanket in an empty lot or park. However, it also didn’t feel like I needed a gun to step out of my car. I stopped at the intersection of Lansing and Christiancy, a fire-burnt, two-story home on one side and a boarded-up place behind some temporary fencing on the other. Both looked like the kinds of places I imagined Eddie would call home, and I suddenly wished I had brought a gun.
I drove through the intersection to the other side and came to Eddie’s actual address, a raised bungalow on the right with a clean siding exterior and a cracked driveway. Chunks were missing, and the underlying gravel was exposed. I pulled in behind an old Chevrolet Lumina sedan. It had black metal rims that looked like winter tires. I believed my Chrysler had a better chance at avoiding vandalism in the driveway than on the street.
Stepping out of the car, I took note of my rapid heart rate. I heard country music somewhere—a block over, behind me?—and I studied the house across the street with foil in the windows—grow op? Martian home?—then noticed that Eddie’s windows weren’t much prettier. His blinds were angled shut, the glass needing a good cleaning.
The front door had four deadbolt locks that required keys, presumably different ones. A window on the second level had one of those cube air-conditioner units with the radiator-like slits, rattling away despite the lack of heat.
Shit. This wasn’t my idea of happy.
I climbed the wooden steps to the front door. There was no porch here, just a few steps and the door. No doorbell, no knocker. I hammered the door with the bottom of my balled fist because it felt like the right thing to do in this area, like a tight-knuckled knock from the guy who drives a fancy Chrysler might get me shot or raped.
I watched the peephole darken and then heard: “Who are you?” Deep voice, old, mature, not something I expected from a seasonal junkie.
“Karen Fitch’s husband. You’d know her as Karen Decker, your old friend from Pontiac Notre Dame.”
A pause. “She’s dead. What do you want?”
“I have some questions about her, that’s all. About her daughter.”
Another pause. Longer this time. And then I heard the deadbolts flip unlocked, one at a time before a man who was a good decade older than me opened the door and stood before me. He wore a brown business suit with a white shirt open at the slightly yellowed collar.
“Thank you,” I said, extending my hand. “I’m Elliot Fitch, Karen’s—”
“Husband,” he finished for me before stepping aside to welcome me into the small house. “Let’s talk inside.”
The place was surprisingly clean—too clean. He guided me past an eat-in kitchen with no dining table and into a living area with a leather sofa, matching love seat, and a glass coffee table with a pizza box on it. I didn’t smell any pizza, though, suggesting the box was empty or old, probably left over from earlier in the week. This living room was tiny, even with the small flat screen television installed on the wall to make space.
“Please, have a seat,” Eddie said, reaching for something on the table, next to the pizza box. He stuffed it into his pocket like he didn’t want me to see it—a needle, drugs most likely—and then sat down. He aimed a remote at the television, but he wasn’t quite quick enough; I saw that he had been watching some kind of pornographic video, the image of a woman getting fucked hard by two men frozen on the screen before it snapped to black. Maybe he hadn’t reached for a needle or drugs, maybe it was something simpler like lube.
I tried not to think about it too much, which wasn’t easy because the box of tissue at my feet suggested he had been sitting on my sofa before I hammered my fist against his door.
“I’m sorry about Karen,” he said, setting the conversation back on track and shaking his head as he looked into his palms, like she might’ve been on those palms before I arrived.
Stop it, stop it, stop it.
“I wanted to go to the funeral. Your wife was my best—no, she was my only true friend for so long.”
“Did you see her often after high school, Eddie?” I asked, my stomach gurgling like lava.
He shrugged. “Sometimes. When things were bad—you know, I’ve been in and out of rehab. I’m a junkie, a real one, but I’m clean n
ow, it’s been twenty months on Monday?” Like it was a question.
“Congratulations,” I said, wondering if his big-shot lawyer brother paid the rehab bills, paid for this house and the porn and suits and yellow-collared shirts. “How did you see my wife, exactly?”
He shrugged. “Last time I saw her, it wasn’t pretty. I was living on the streets, and she came to see me one day on her lunch. I needed money.”
“For drugs?” I asked, more to hear my own voice because Karen had never told me about these things, sneaking off from work to see junkies, so where had she found the money, our money to help him out?
“Yeah. For drugs.”
I rubbed my hands down my face. “I’m sorry she enabled—”
“No, no,” he interrupted, raising a finger to prove some kind of point. “No, don’t start that. Your wife, she came and got me. She was a real angel, that woman. Not a bad bone in her body. And yeah, she got me my fix. It was meth back then, last time I saw her, and I remember it real clear, because she was crying. Had these tears in her eyes while she watched me take my hit. Told me that was it. I smiled, my own mother didn’t even know where I was, she didn’t care, but Karen always kept tabs, you know. An angel, you see.”
“Eddie, I’m actually wondering—”
Again with the finger, still proving his now long-winded point. “Hold up, Elliot. Your wife, she really saved my life. Once I got into my soft zone, she dragged me out to her car. I saw helicopters following us, and she was real good about that,” he went on, smiling like it was the craziest thing ever, which it wasn’t because he was the junkie, not Karen. “She parked me at the Marriott. Three nights.” He sat back in the sofa, rested his head back, and stared at the ceiling as he groaned. “Ugh, she was a fucking angel. Fucking Karen.”
“Did you ever fuck my wife, Eddie?” I came right out and asked, point-blank.
He laughed, still staring at the ceiling. I watched this for a few seconds, my cheeks burning up because his laughter seemed indicative of guilt. It agonized me to think this junkie excuse for a human being could’ve not only come inside my dead wife, but could be the father to that beautiful child who had insisted on cooking a meal for Veronica and her daughter this Friday.
All Eddie had was an empty box of pizza, some lube, and adult movies.
“Eddie,” I said. Despite the rage in my gut, my voice sounded surprisingly calm.
“I’ve been clean ever since she saved me that last time, Elliot.” The laughter on his face melted away, replaced with sadness. It started with his chin, the quivering, and then his cheeks started to rattle a little, and then the tears poured down his face. I hadn’t come to play Dr. Counselor, but I sat through a short bout of cry-baby. And then it struck me, where those charges for the Renaissance Center, the $436 had come from. Eddie.
“Did she ever take you to the Ren, Eddie? Do you remember if she ever set you up with a few nights at the RenCen, something like eighteen years ago?”
He nodded, but kept crying.
“Is that a ‘yes?’” I demanded.
He raised his attention to my eyes, still nodding. “And then she’d get in touch with Terry, always Terry because he’s got the money. And he’d do it, too, he’d get me into a good program, cover the costs somehow.” Terry was obviously his brother’s name, the big-shot lawyer. “He loved her as much as I did, because without your wife, I’d be dead.”
Could Terry, the Estates and Trust attorney have impregnated Karen? I massaged my temples. Stay focused.
“Eddie, do you remember a guy, Andrew Parsons? Used to go to school with you and Karen.”
He nodded, wiped a sleeve across his face to clear away the tears and anything else that might’ve oozed onto his face. “I know him, yeah. They were close for a bit, Karen and him.”
“Do you know if my wife saw him after—”
A bit of laughter, then some definitive head-shaking. “Parsons? I might be the one that became a junkie, but he was more of a deadbeat than I ever was.” He frowned. “Why are you asking these questions, anyway?”
I deliberated telling him the full truth about Karen’s confession, her infidelity following our honeymoon. I figured telling a junkie like Eddie couldn’t hurt, especially because I doubted he was Lena’s father, but I ultimately decided against it. Instead, I told him, “Just following up on something Karen said to me once. Some boyfriend she had after college.”
“Yeah, I’ll help with that.”
I watched Eddie closely, watched his eyebrows narrow as he lost himself in thought, working so hard I thought he might actually start sweating.
“Right after college,” I coached him. “Might not have been too serious,” because she was engaged to me by then, “but serious enough. You know Karen, she wasn’t one to do anything without some element of seriousness to it.”
He half-grinned his agreement. “Wouldn’t have been Parsons. She hated him by then, he wasn’t up to her ethical standards.”
“Anyone else outside of Andrew?”
Still thinking hard, then it struck him. “There was a guy,” he admitted, then squeezed his eyes shut so he could think harder. When I started to coach him a little more, he shushed me. So I watched, painfully, as his four or five remaining brain cells hummed and bounced somewhere inside his head. And then I couldn’t take it any longer.
“What about Nathan Darien?” I asked.
His eyes shot open, wide. “Nathan,” he breathed, then started nodding. “Yeah.”
But Veronica had been insistent. Nathan had been gone during that period when Elena would’ve been conceived. “Yeah,” I allowed, my gut twisting as I fought the urge to vomit. “She was close with him, still saw him, didn’t she?”
And then Eddie’s certainty bubble popped. “Again, again, again,” he said, squeezing those eyes shut. “It wasn’t some guy, it was a new guy. Can’t think of his name, fuck sake.” He hit himself in the forehead once, hard enough to startle me. Three brain cells remained. “Fuck!” Then he bounced in the sofa as he dealt with the frustration of having lost the memory.
I reached out and stopped him from causing further damage. “Okay, it wasn’t Nathan,” I allowed. “It’s okay.”
“No,” he said. “Plus, Nathan was engaged by then. It was fucking news everywhere, some girl from out West, a fancy prep school girl. We joked about that, she had a tree-hugger name and was from Portland or something. Jannie? Jeanine?” He laughed, and then snapped his fingers. “I know now!”
The world seemed to fall into absolute silence. I watched Eddie’s over-dramatic response, the way he clutched cushion where his knees where, the muscles flexing in his jaw, and I wondered if he might be acting. Or serious.
“It was you.”
“Me?” It’s not Nathan, Nathan was engaged, Parsons was more of a deadbeat than Eddie, who was a total fucking mess, truth be told… But me? I’m confused.
“Yes! Elliot.” He clapped his hands, once. Real proud of himself. Another clap. “Ha! It’s you! You, you, you!”
“What are you saying here, Eddie?”
I pointed at me. “You, Elliot. You’re the guy she was seeing after college! The serious one! I knew I’d remember his name, because it was fucking you!”
Instead of crossing over the Fisher highway and heading back North toward Birmingham, I pulled into the Marathon on Clark. My hands trembled. Meeting Eddie had opened my eyes, forced me to realize that I had shut them over a year ago once Karen died, and then reconstructed a vision of her, an ugly one that turned out to be grossly inaccurate.
My phone vibrated in my pocket. I leaned to the side and reached down, yanked it out and saw a local number I didn’t recognize. I hadn’t left Eddie with my number, but it seemed the most logical explanation for the unnamed caller on my display. Swiping my finger across the screen, I lifted the phone to my face.
“Eddie?” I asked.
“No.” Veronica. “Just me.”
“I didn’t recognize the number.”
&
nbsp; “Work phone.”
I tried to smile, tried to find happiness for my tone because her voice made me happy, it really did, I simply couldn’t push past the shock I currently felt. “Just saw Eddie,” I told her.
It sounded like she might be searching for something nice to inject into her tone as well. “How did that go, Elliot?”
Holding up my other hand, I watched it quiver in front of my face. I sighed. “I’d really like to see you right now.”
“Of course,” she said, her response eager and compassionate at the same time. “Where are you?”
I told her.
“Alright, on the other side of the Fisher, take a left. At the Newspaper Warehouse, take a right into Riverside Park. I’ll be there in ten minutes, tops.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
Placing the phone on the passenger seat, I pulled out of the gas station, cutting in front of a cyclist riding down the wrong side of the road. He flipped me his middle finger, but I simply waved politely because cyclists are never at fault, they’re the only ones who can have complete disregard for the rules of the road, and I’d be the asshole if he ever drove into me. I crossed the Interstate, made my left on Fort and followed Veronica’s directions to the park.
Riverside was more of a parking lot than a true park. It had a relatively small patch of grass at one end, a walking (or biking) path, and the water. Over the treetops, I saw the Ambassador bridge, traffic moving with an easy fluidity into Canada, mostly transport trucks. I noticed the debris littering the grassy areas—discarded coffee cups, wrappers, all kinds of shit. It was pressed up against the fences, strewn all around the overflowing metal barrels that served as garbage bins. Yes, Detroit proper needed help.
A couple of SUVs were parked eerily close together at the other end of the parking lot in the aisle behind mine. And there was a Lincoln, its windows open and no occupants about a dozen or so spots down from me. I noticed its owner within running distance, smoking what looked like a cigar or a sausage (probably the former, let’s be realistic here). Either way, he wasn’t supposed to be doing whatever it was he was doing; he had guilty tattooed all over his chubby face.
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