9 Letters
By
Blake Austin
Copyright © 2016 by Blake Austin
Cover art/design by: Najla Qamber
Cover photo: Lane Dorsey
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including emailing, photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or
dead, is entirely coincidental.
Eighteen-wheelers rolled through
Kansas City on the 70 outside the window, and noon light came in
through the blinds. Neither the noise nor the light did much good for
my hangover, and I didn’t so much wake up as I gave up on
sleeping. The day was weighing on me already.
Maggie was still asleep. I was in
her bed again, in her dead-end apartment, again, on her dead-end
street. Again. I said the previous time was going to be the last
time. Bad habits were like that.
Even with her makeup smeared by
sleep and sex, Maggie was hot in that way that bartenders knew how to
be in order to bring in tips. I eyed the black ink of the tattoos
that climbed the curve of her back, then looked away, looked down at
the floor in shame. My wife had been gone for a year already. I told
myself there was nothing to be ashamed of, the same as I did every
time I woke up next to my co-worker with a hangover and the vague
hope we’d remembered to use protection. Telling myself it was
fine didn’t work most days, least of all on the anniversary of
Emily’s death. She deserved better.
Maggie’s arm was over my
chest, and I lifted it just enough to slide out of bed. Standing, the
headache came on worse. Physical pain was good. A headache was good.
Anything that kept me from thinking was good. I could handle physical
pain.
She rolled away, her long hair
black against her black sheets, her skin freckled and tan. Her mouth
was open just the slightest bit. It wasn’t her fault we didn’t
get along. We scarcely liked working together, and she didn’t
care about much besides nightlife and computers and meaningless
things like that. But there was a sort of vicious chemistry between
the two of us in bed. I hated everything about the whole situation.
If only I could quit coming back.
I found my jeans, shoes, shirt,
flannel, and hat, all scattered on the floor, but I couldn’t
find my belt. My pants would stay up without it, but I didn’t
want to give myself a reason to come over after work again, so I
didn’t stop looking.
The place was a mess, even worse
than my house. Stacks of takeout boxes and checkout-line magazines
sat atop mismatched furniture, and after a few minutes I gave up and
went to use her bathroom. My belt was on the worn linoleum floor,
next to her bra. I ran the leather through the loops on my jeans,
clasped the Royals buckle into place, and looked in the mirror. I
could use a shave, but I was doing alright. Even with a soft job like
tending bar, my arms still had definition. I adjusted my cap, then
went out and crossed the room as quiet as I could, hoping to get
outside before she woke.
“Luke,” Maggie
mumbled, her eyes barely open. “Sneaking out like you always
do?”
“Just didn’t want to
wake you,” I said. It was the truth, at least.
Maggie rolled her eyes. “You
gonna call me?”
“Sure,” I said.
“No you’re not,”
she said. “You’re just going to ignore me at work and
then turn around and hit on me when you get drunk after your shift.
Like you always do.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Like I care,” she
mumbled, rolling back over and pulling a pillow over her head. “Get
out of here.”
She fell back asleep, and I
slipped out the door.
Emily died in the springtime.
Nobody should die in the springtime, but least of all someone so
alive. Now I dreaded the warmer days, the green of the season. The
memories were too strong.
I pulled on my flannel as I
walked to my truck, the brim of my cap almost working to keep the sun
from doing its best to ruin my life. Still, it felt good to step up
into my Chevy and turn the engine over. I let it shake to life, got
my left foot off the clutch and my right foot on the gas, and took
off out of that dead-end street.
You’ve got this, I told
myself. You’re tough. You’ve been through worse.
I pulled out onto the 70, cranked
down the window, turned up the heat against the chill still hanging
on despite it being midway through April. Cold wind poured into the
cab, clearing my head a bit and knocking Granddad Cawley’s dog
tags where they hung from the rearview.
I wanted a cigarette, maybe a can
of Skoal, more than I wanted to deal with the day. But I’d quit
tobacco for Emily. I’d promised her I’d quit, even though
she was the one who’d died of cancer and she’d never even
smoked. She was dead, but my word meant something to me. My word was
all I had. I wouldn’t disappoint her. Not anymore than I
already had.
I drove faster, instead. I
ignored my phone as it went off in my pocket, I ignored the speed
limit, and I let myself be grateful for my truck and the wind and the
Sunday lack of traffic. Maybe I’d get out of town sometime
soon. Get my boots in the dirt, get mud on my tires. Go fishing. Call
my brother, maybe even my dad. Maybe.
Kansas City is alright for a
city, anyway. I’d be alright. I was tough.
You could still get a pretty good
house in Kansas City on a truck driver’s take, and my granddad
had given me a house, a fixer-upper two-bedroom place with enough
yard for kids and enough garage to keep a man happy. I pulled into
the drive and tried not to think about the look on that man’s
face when he’d handed me the deed at the wedding.
“The hell do I need the
money for anyway,” Granddad Cawley had said, like he didn’t
care. “Was going to leave it to you in my will, but I don’t
want no grandson of mine plotting against me. Was going to give it to
you sooner, but I didn’t want you thinking things in life came
much for free, either.” That man had been proud, so proud, that
all of his years and miles behind the wheel were enough to provide
for his family.
It was a small miracle that
Granddad went to his grave before Emily did. He’d never had to
know that there weren’t going to be kids in that house, that I
was never going to get to build a swing set in that yard. What sort
of world is it, where your Granddad’s death is a small miracle.
As soon as I cut the engine, the
hangover came on, and worse. I made it into the house, turned on the
heat. A house should have an engine block, should just warm up from
use like a truck. But it doesn’t work that way.
Inside, I scanned the fridge, but
there weren’t any eggs. I still had a half a deer in the deep
freeze in the garage, but nothing hot I could make fast enough to be
worth the effort. No breakfast today, then. Guess I’d drag
myself to Price Chopper sooner or later.
A shower would do me better than
cold cereal anyway, and I made it to the bathroom off from the master
bedroom. The one I’d been working on when we’d found out
Emily was sick, the one I’d never finished remodeling. I
stripped, stepped into the hot water. The first half of the shower, I
decided I needed a better way to keep Emily off my mind than sleeping
with Maggie, because sleeping with Maggie didn’t work anyway.
The second half, I didn’t care that it didn’t work,
because I didn’t care about much anything at all.
From the time I was seventeen to
twenty-three, I’d lived with Emily at my side, in a bliss I
didn’t know the world had to offer. Now that she was gone, I
wasn’t prepared to face the world without her. Hell if I knew
why I kept on going in the first place. I guess because Emily would
hate it if I quit. And if I was honest with myself, I was afraid she
might not be waiting for me on the other side if I took my own life.
Whether or not I was right with God, no matter how shaken my faith,
it just wasn’t a risk I was willing to take.
The water ran cold all too soon.
Drying off in the bedroom, I
found myself flipping through the stack of proof prints from our
wedding, like I did most days.
I’d memorized every one of
them.
Emily on horseback in her wedding
veil, head thrown back in a laugh, me holding the reins from the
ground and staring up at her like I’d never seen anything so
fine. Another with Emily in her white gown, smirking, leaned against
my chipped beige Chevy pretending to aim a slingshot at me while I
held back a grin. The two of us sitting on the tailgate, hand in
hand, the skyline of our western city silhouetted against the setting
sun, mud on both our boots.
The photographer had charged too
much, I used to think. Emily and I’d argued over it, even, in
that halting, loving way that was the worst the two of us had ever
really argued. She’d been right, of course. She’d always
been right.
It was too overwhelming. I set
down the stack of photos, but I could feel her blue eyes follow me
across the room. April 15th, when those eyes had shut forever, was a
date burned into my brain deeper than September 7th, our wedding, or
September 28th, her birthday.
I threw my clothes back on and
left the bedroom.
My cell phone sat on the butcher
block counter that separated the kitchen from the living room. The
house was a minefield of memories—I’d built her the
countertop as soon as we moved in. I unlocked my phone and saw two
missed calls, two voicemails. One from my brother Mike at 10am, the
other from my work, at 1pm.
“Luke,” Mike’s
voice said, impatient. “Wake your ass up. Am I going to see you
at church? Ever again? You even alive?”
I deleted the voicemail before it
even finished playing.
“Hey, so I don’t know
if you’re really into having a job,” Warren, my boss,
said in his familiar drawl, “but if you are, you can’t
keep pulling this shit. I got in this morning and the place was a
mess. You didn’t do the dishes, you didn’t close out the
register, you didn’t wash the mats or take out the trash. I
feel like I’m lucky you even remembered to lock up on your way
out. I’m sick of cleaning up after you, and I know we’re
friends but I’m going to find a new guy if you do this to me
again. See you at three.”
I had to be at work by three.
I looked at my phone. Two-thirty,
and a thirty-minute drive.
Without another thought, I went
out the door. There was a package on the stoop, about the size of a
book from Amazon, but there was no return address. Just my name, Luke
Cawley. No postage, no address, just my name.
I picked it up, tossed it inside
the house before I locked up, and ran to my truck.
“Jesus, Luke, you look like
shit.”
I didn’t doubt it, but I
didn’t care, either. I was out on the street with a keg on the
hand truck, trying to hump it up over the curb. The place didn’t
have a soft curb, so I got one boot back behind the wheel of the hand
truck to keep it from rolling back—love wearing steel-toed—and
pulled the thing up onto the sidewalk. Everyone else rolled theirs
halfway down the block to the nearest drive.
“You go home with a girl as
hot as Maggie and then you come in here looking like you hate
yourself,” Jake kept going. “I hate to say it but
sometimes I think you’re an idiot.”
“I’m trying not to
think about Maggie right now,” I said, half a note of menace
beneath my voice without me even meaning it.
Jake was the bar back, nineteen.
Just a kid. He was alright. The worst parts about him were that he
didn’t realize how dull he could be and that he cared about
microbrews from Oregon. The best parts about him were that he was
always down to watch the game at work and that he didn’t pry
about my personal life. Usually.