Every Time We Say Goodbye (21 page)

Downstairs, he ordered a milkshake in the cafeteria and counted his money again under the table. If he took a night bus, he wouldn’t have to pay for a hotel room. He didn’t need a new jacket to ride the bus, and anyway, Italian wool would be too hot in California. His headache was only a faint thumbprint against one corner of his skull. He leaned his head back against the vinyl headrest, closed his eyes and allowed himself to come unmoored.
He was already in California sitting on a lounge chair overlooking the ocean. The sun warmed his upturned face, the breeze lifted his hair. When he looked up, he would see palm trees, and a woman would say silkily,
Excuse me, is this seat taken?
Instead, he heard Vera say, “Sit up straight.”

Dean’s eyes flew open.

In the next booth, a tall, large-chested woman with orange lipstick and a fur cape was talking to a girl with long light brown hair. The girl had her back to Dean; he could only see her hair and her shoulders in a cream blouse.

“You look like the wreck of the
Hesperus,”
the woman said.

She didn’t look so hot herself, Dean thought. Her brown pincurls looked like half-melted candies.

The girl said, “Mom, can I have french fries?”

Her mother said, “You’ll have the salad plate.”

Dean ordered another milkshake and shifted into the corner of his booth so he could see the girl’s profile. She was pretty. The woman noticed him then, or rather, her eyes stopped on him briefly and then flicked him away. He shifted back out of her sight.

“I just don’t know,” the woman was saying. “I thought he would be better today. They said he was better. But he’s exactly the same. Didn’t you think so?”

“I thought he was a little better,” the girl said. “He didn’t look so tired.”

“What are you
talking
about? He looked terrible!” the woman said. “I can’t see that they’re doing him any good in there. You know what that place does, Laura? It encourages him. They mollycoddle him.” She took a compact out of her purse and studied her face. Dean slipped farther down into his seat.
Laura
, he thought.

The waitress brought their salad plates. He listened for as long as he could. Laura was not eating properly. Why was she holding
her fork like that? She was slouching. She was picking at her food. When he couldn’t stand it anymore, he went to the men’s room. When he got back to his seat, the woman was fastening the buttons on her cape. “I mean it,” she hissed.

The girl was shaking her head. “I can’t help it,” she said, and hiccupped.

“I have had it up to here with you,” the woman said.

“All right, okay. Just a minute,” the girl said, but she didn’t move. It sounded like she was crying.

The woman snapped her purse shut and marched to the front cash. Dean waited until she had disappeared out the door, then got up and slid into the seat across from the girl. She had a round face, ivory skin, delicately arched eyebrows over closed eyes. Her cheeks were wet. Her mouth was the pale pink and the texture of a rose petal. Her eyes opened; they were very dark.

“Hi,” Dean said.

She wiped one side of her face and left the other side wet. “Hi,” she said back.

They looked at each other. Dean raised his hand and waved at the waitress. “One order of french fries,” he said, and the girl looked wonderstruck. Her eyes were still leaking, so he said, “You wanna hear something crazy?”

She nodded.

He told her a story. A boy found out he was adopted. There was a photograph and a birth certificate in a box. There were clues. He followed the trail, but when he got to the end, to Baldwin Street, he found nothing. He had knocked, and the door hadn’t been opened. He had sought, but he hadn’t found. She didn’t move the entire time, but her eyes radiated, as if she were listening through them. They warmed him and steadied him. “Is this a true story?” she asked when he was finished. He tapped his chest just above his heart. “True story,” he said. “Now you tell me one.”

Her story wandered all over the place but ended with her father in a mental institution with a nervous breakdown. Her face flushed darkly when she said it, and her eyes were skittish.

He was a welter of wants: he wanted to reach over and take her hand, he wanted to kiss her rose petal mouth, he wanted to slide into the seat beside her and put his arm around her protectively, he wanted to take her back to the hotel suite and lay her down on the bed and undo her cream-coloured blouse. He wanted to run away with her. They would leave behind their missing, mean, broken, lost, sick, soft-in-the-head, odd, off, criticizing, crazy, disappointed parents and start a new life together. He leaned forward and touched the back of her hand.

“Listen. Do you wanna come with me—” he began.

“To Baldwin Street?”

He laughed. “No, Quick Draw McGraw.” Baldwin Street didn’t matter. Baldwin Street was crumpled paper in the bottom of his rucksack. Tonight he would get on the bus and cross the border, and his new life would start; he didn’t have time to waste on Baldwin Street. He said, “I have a better idea. Coming?”

He could see the answer in her eyes before she said it. She was from the City of Yes. Town Motto: Yes.

I
t was hard to tell when the ending actually arrived, partly because it came disguised as a series of new beginnings: a bag of money, a sparkling clean house, baby Amy, Opening Night. For a while, Dawn blamed the bartender at the club for the whole thing, because if he hadn’t taken Professor Pollo and stuck him behind the bar like some kind of ornament, Dawn wouldn’t have left Jimmy unattended, and Jimmy wouldn’t have ended up in the hospital having his stomach pumped, and the police wouldn’t have come to the house and found a stolen car in the garage.

It was Jimmy who found the bag of money. He appeared in Dawn’s room one afternoon, gesturing crazily, with a look on his face like he had to pee really bad. She followed him to the spare room, which was going to be the baby’s room but which was latched and locked because Dean said there were rusty nails sticking up out of the floorboards, and he was going to clear it
out and paint it, and Dawn and Jimmy were going to help. Someone must have gone in there earlier, though, and left in a hurry, because today the lock was hanging open off the latch. “I already went in,” Jimmy whispered. “There are no nails.”

Dawn pushed open the door. Inside was a bed with a naked mattress, a lamp without a shade and a bunch of empty cardboard boxes. Jimmy told Dawn to sit on the bed, hold Professor Pollo and make a wish. His eyes were so bright, Dawn felt spooked. She sat down and accepted the Professor. “All right. I wish for a million dollars. There. Happy?”

Jimmy was wriggling and wiggling all over. “Yes! Yes! Now look under the bed.”

Dawn looked, then got down on her knees and pulled out the garbage bag. When she saw what was inside, she gave a little scream.

Jimmy said, “See?” He plopped Professor Pollo down on top of the bag and said, “Whaddaya think of that, sunshine?”

They stared at the bag for a long time. Then Dawn said, “Jimmy, you know what we have to do?”

Jimmy nodded. “Go to the store.”

“
No
, Jimmy. No. We have to count it.”

They were still taking out handfuls of money when Geraldine called from downstairs, “Dawn? Jimmy? Are you up there?”

“Coming!” They stuffed the money back and barely got themselves out of the room before they heard Geraldine start up the stairs. Dawn was so terrified, she clicked the lock shut, and they both collapsed on the floor and pretended to be playing with Professor Pollo. “What are you two doing up here?” Geraldine asked. “Why are you sitting in the dark at the end of the hall?”

“We’re just playing,” Jimmy said.

“Well, come downstairs for dinner.”

They watched her waddle back down the hall. “Why did you lock it?” Jimmy whispered. He was furious. “That was so stupid!” Fat tears rolled down his face.

“She was gonna see the lock was open. Then she’d know we were in there.”

“So?
So?
Who gives a care if she saw?”

“We’ll get back in, don’t worry. We will, Jimmy. We will.”

They looked at each other. Jimmy wiped his eyes. “I know how it got there, too,” he said.

“How?”

“Bank robbers. They hid it there.”

But that wasn’t it at all. Dawn had just figured it out. She told Jimmy about hermits: rich old geezers who didn’t trust banks and hid their money under their mattresses. They ate stale bread and reused their tea bags and saved every last penny.

Jimmy said, “Are Vera and Frank hermits?”

“No, they believe in the bank, see. But hermits hate banks. This house belonged to a hermit. He lived here all alone, and he had no family, so no one knew about the money. He died and no one thought to look under the bed.”

Jimmy wanted to know how he died.

“He choked to death on a chicken bone.”

“You said he only ate stale bread.”

“And chicken wings. He got them cheap from the grocery store.” She considered telling Jimmy the rest—the old man’s body had been partially eaten by his cats—but Jimmy was really too young for that.

Every day the next week, when they came home to find Geraldine sleeping, they searched the house for the key. It was most likely on Dean’s big key chain, but Dean was working every day and night at the club, and when he did come home,
he was a whirlwind of instructions: “Jimmy, go upstairs and get me a clean white shirt.” “Dawn, pour me a glass of orange juice, please.” “Geraldine, I need the phone book. Hurry up, hurry up, I haven’t got all night, they’re putting in the bar and I have to get back.”

Then something so surprising happened, they forgot about the money, or at least Dawn did, at least temporarily: they came home from school to find the whole house clean. The bathroom sink gleamed, the kitchen floor was light blue again, all their clothes were neatly folded in their drawers. Even the garbage pail was scrubbed white and smelled like a Christmas tree. They hadn’t seen the house like this since they moved in. It was even better than the day they moved in, because the beds were made.

Geraldine was awake and sitting at the kitchen table. “There’s something special for you guys in the fridge.”

It was a tray of yellow cupcakes with thick orange icing. Geraldine asked them to get her a pencil and paper. She wanted to make a list of things they needed: new shoes, underwear, jeans, sweaters, whatever. Dawn asked if they could afford all this, what with the baby coming and everything. She didn’t want to mention the bills on top of the fridge. Geraldine said she had been given a bonus at work. “Now, get your coats on,” she said. “We’re going shopping!”

They wore their new outfits to see the finishing touches being put on the club. In the green-walled room, crescent-moon seats encircled high round tables. This was Emerald City. Another room was red: plastic red flowers hung from the ceiling, and red flowers with black centres were painted on the walls. There were no chairs in here, only benches against three walls, and a stage. The mural in the main room was almost finished; through the middle, a road made of yellow funk wound its way to the sparkly
red shoes Jimmy had found at the flea market. In the centre of the room, like an island, was the showpiece: a circular bar.

Antoine was finishing the ceiling in the women’s bathroom. On the black surface, he was painting silver stars around a black-and-white picture of a surprised woman’s face.

“Why is I Love Lucy here?” Dawn asked.

Antoine said, “This is a different Lucy. This is Lucy in the Sky.”

But anyone could see that it was Lucy from
I Love Lucy
. Dawn said, “It should be Dorothy.”

Antoine said, “Well, you can call her Dorothy. How’s that?”

That, thought Dawn, was just stupid. But instead of answering, she went to find Jimmy. He was in Dean’s office, a windowless room under the stairs, trying to open the safe behind the desk. He was still looking for the key to the spare room, even though Dawn had told him over and over to forget it—the lock, the key, the bag of money. She wasn’t even sure she believed in the money anymore. It seemed so unlikely that it might have been a mirage, like on Bugs Bunny. She suggested this to Jimmy.

“Come on, Dawn,” Jimmy said scornfully. “It was a
bag
of money.”

From the doorway, Dean said, “What bag of money?”

Jimmy looked to Dawn for help. Dawn said, “It was on TV.”

Dean looked from one to the other. “Get your coats,” he said. “We have to go home.”

Things were very bad because of the money. Dean stamped up the stairs, yelling his head off for Geraldine to get her ass up there right now. When he came out of the spare room, his face was pale and sweaty. “Go get it,” he said. “Right now.”

Geraldine stomped downstairs to the basement and came back up with an almost empty garbage bag. She threw it at him.

“Where’s the rest of it?”

Geraldine pulled Dawn and Jimmy out of the doorway of Dawn’s room. They stood side by side in the hall, Geraldine’s hands on their shoulders. She started softly. “Where is it? Where
is
it? Your kids are wearing it. It’s in their closets. It’s in the medicine cabinet. It’s in the goddamn fucking fridge. That’s where the rest of it is.” By the time she got to “the goddamn fucking fridge,” she was screaming.