Don't Let Me Go (41 page)

“Please, Mom,” Grace said, her voice breaking Billy’s heart. “I’m worried Billy’ll be too lonely without the cat. Please?”

“Just take the cat,” her mom said. “You’re always complaining how I won’t let you keep your cat and I won’t let you see your friends. Take the damn cat.”

Billy bent down and placed the cat in her waiting arms.

“Take her,” he said. “It’s OK.”

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “You sure you won’t be too lonely without the cat?”

“I’ll be OK.”

Then Grace’s mom grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her along the hall and down the stairs.

Billy closed the door and gathered up everything that belonged to Mr. Lafferty the Girl Cat, attaching sticky notes to each item to indicate when it was to be used and how. Then he stacked it all in the hallway outside his door. As a final afterthought, he dragged out the plywood dance floor, managing to lever it up at a sharp angle to get it through the door.

Then he put himself back to bed, listening as it was all dragged and carried away.

It was lonely without the cat.

• • •

Twelve lonely days later, Rayleen announced that Jesse would be flying home soon.

“He’s going to come over in a minute to talk to you himself,” she said, settling comfortably on his couch. She’d begun to stay for long visits since the cat moved out. “But I just wanted to talk to you alone for a minute first.”

Billy sighed, and waited, and let the information filter down into his gut. It was hardly unexpected. That was the best he could say for it. And he knew it must be a much greater hell for Rayleen, who was, after all, his girlfriend.

“Well,” Billy said, in his best attempt at circumspection, “it’s not like we didn’t know it would happen. Sooner or later. Is he leaving you with the car?”

A long silence. A silence freighted with some important subtext, but Billy could not imagine what it was. After all, it was just an old junker of a car.

“I’m going with him,” Rayleen said.

And they sat.

“We’ve been talking about it for a while now,” she said. “But I didn’t know if I could bring myself to abandon Grace. But now we can’t see Grace anyway…And, look, I feel really bad about leaving you, too. It’s not that I don’t get that this probably feels like an abandonment to you, too. But—”

“But I’m a grown man,” Billy said. “I may not do the world’s best job at it, but I’m an adult. And it would be lunacy for you to stay here just for me. Absolute lunacy.”

“Thank you,” Rayleen said, “I really appreciate you taking it this way. It’s just that…I just keep thinking maybe this is the last train to happy. And I better get on.”

“You better,” Billy said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Billy said. “Just go be happy. Just get on the damn train.”

• • •

Later on that same lonely day, Jesse came over by himself, to say a proper goodbye. He held a paper grocery sack in one hand.

“I brought you three presents,” he said, in that voice Billy could no longer recall how to live without. “Well, two and a half. They’re not new. They’re hand-me-down presents, because I’m almost out of savings. I need to go home and get back to work.”

He handed Billy the bag.

Inside Billy found a pair of red-silk pajamas, which he realized with a jolt must have been Jesse’s, and the partially burned sage stick.

“That’s not an invitation to live in pajamas twenty-four seven,” Jesse said.

“I’ll try not to take it as such. Thank you. Is the sage stick the half?”

In which case one whole present was still missing, but it might seem ungrateful to say so.

“Oh. The car,” Jesse said. “We’re leaving the car. I was going to leave it to you, but we talked it over and decided it would be more of a burden to you than anything else. You’d have to go to the DMV and get it in your name, and get your license back, and pay for insurance. So I signed it over to Felipe, with the understanding that it’s really for the three of you. You and Felipe and Mrs. Hinman. So I guess that’s a third of a present. He promised to drive the two of you to the grocery store at least once a week.”

“That’ll be nice for Mrs. Hinman.”

“That’s what we thought,” Jesse said. “I think it’s hard for her to walk.”

“It is.”

“We thought it’d be nice for you, too. That delivery service can’t be cheap.”

“It costs almost as much as the groceries,” Billy said.

“Something to remember us by.”

And then he stepped in and embraced Billy. And it hurt so much that Billy almost couldn’t embrace him back. And not because of his ribs, either, though they still ached some. But in time he did manage to fulfill his side of the hug.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do without you guys.”

He’d been trying not to say it. But sooner or later it had been bound to break through.

“You won’t be without us,” Jesse said. “We’ll just be a lot farther away. And you’ll have to start checking your mailbox again.”

“I can do that,” Billy said.

• • •

Three lonely days later, they were gone.

• • •

In the four lonely days that followed, Billy and Felipe and Felipe’s shy girlfriend Clara and the building super, Casper, moved Mrs. Hinman downstairs into Rayleen’s old apartment, which seemed to make her happy.

And seeing Mrs. Hinman happy made Billy feel just the tiniest bit less lonely. But like everything else, good and bad, the feeling passed along on its own.

In the lonely weeks that followed, Billy now and then heard unfamiliar voices in the hallway as two new couples moved in.

Once he stuck his head out into the hall and said hello to one of the couples, a young Hispanic boy and girl who didn’t look a day over seventeen. But it seemed to alarm them. So he gave up on that and went back to being lonely.

• • •

Two lonely months later, Billy found another bright yellow note tucked under his door.

It said, in Grace’s careful block printing:

MR. LAFFERTY THE GIRL CAT MISSES YOU. AND SO DO I.

LOVE, GRACE

The words had been written inside a border, a little pen drawing. At first Billy took it to be a stylized heart, even though the top lobes were too pointy, and the series of loops all around it didn’t seem to fit the heart motif. Later he realized it was a pair of wings, the loops depicting feathers.

He wrote a note back.

Remember how you said you’d always find me? Well, don’t ever forget that. Please.

Love, Billy

But it sat under his door for more than a month, and Grace never seemed to manage to get away to retrieve it. So in time he took it back and threw it away.

• • •

Three lonely months after that, Felipe came to his door, and sat with him, and talked to him, and announced that he was moving in with Clara.

“It’s just that her apartment is so much nicer than mine. Bigger, and in a better neighborhood. And with both of us paying one rent, we’ll have a lot more money. Maybe even enough to get married. She’s putting herself through cooking school, did I tell you? She’s gonna be a chef. Not a lot of lady chefs. ‘Specially not a lot of Chicana ones. That’s a big deal, you know?”

They sat for a time.

Billy made a pot of coffee.

“I’m not trying to take the car. I know it belongs to all of us. If you want, I’ll leave the car.”

“What would I do with the car? I don’t even have a license.”

“We won’t be so far away. It’s like a fifteen-minute drive. I’ll come back once a week and take you and Mrs. Hinman to the store. I won’t let you down on that.”

“I know you won’t.”

He poured Felipe a mug of black coffee, and poured himself a mug with more than an inch of room for cream. He took more cream in his coffee now that he didn’t have to have his groceries delivered. A lot more.

“It’s not that I don’t feel bad leaving you here,” Felipe said. “I do. It’s just that…”

“It’s just that this might be the last train to happy. And you want to make sure to get on it.”

Felipe chewed that over for a moment.

“I guess. I wasn’t thinking of it like a train. But something like that. Yeah.”

“And you should,” Billy said. “You should get on the damn train.”

• • •

A lonely month after that, Billy bumped into Grace and her mom in the hallway on his way out to check the mail. They must have been coming in from school.

He was wearing his red-silk Jesse-pajamas, and his hair was uncombed.

Grace’s eyes lit up to see him. But they still didn’t look anything like Grace’s eyes before. When she was thriving.

“Billy!” she shouted.

“Stop talking to him,” Grace’s mother said, and steered her down the basement stairs by the arm.

Billy peered over the railing, and Grace looked up at him and waved sadly, and he waved back.

He locked himself into his apartment, made coffee, then realized he had never checked the mail, and had to do it all over again.

It was worth it, though, because he’d gotten a letter from Rayleen.

She said, among other things, that they had a foster kid now, that his name was Jamal, and he was only four, and his mom had just died from an overdose. But she said Jesse was working his famous Jesse magic on him.

“I don’t doubt that,” Billy said, out loud to his lonely apartment.

And, also, as both Jesse and Rayleen always did, she enclosed a letter to Grace, for Billy to pass along. If. If he ever saw her.

“Well. I saw her,” he said out loud.

He wrote a letter back to Rayleen.

“Dear Rayleen,” it said, among other things. “You’re a natural. This is the role you were born to play.”

• • •

Four lonely months after that, Mrs. Hinman passed away.

Billy hadn’t seen her in a day or two, but hadn’t thought much about it, because sometimes he saw her every day, but oftentimes he did not.

Then Felipe came over to drive them to the grocery store, and knocked on her door, but never got an answer. Felipe jimmied the lock on her mailbox and found about three days’ worth of mail, including her Social Security check, which she was notoriously careful about retrieving promptly on the third of every month.

Felipe called the super, Casper, on his cell phone, and Casper came over and unlocked the door. Neither Billy nor Felipe went in.

A minute later Casper came out and said she was in bed, just as if she were sleeping, and that it looked like she had died peacefully in her sleep.

“Well, that’s something,” Felipe said.

And Casper said, “Yeah, we all gotta go sometime.”

“Least she had somebody to take care of her right up to the end.”

“Yeah,” Casper said. “When did you guys get so close, anyway?”

But Billy didn’t like to talk to Casper, and Felipe chose not to offer the obvious answer.

Later, after Casper left to notify the proper authorities, Felipe asked if there was anything Billy thought they should do.

“No friends or relatives,” Billy said.

“So no memorial,” Felipe answered.

“Unless we have one ourselves.”

So they did, even though they had no idea what they were doing, figuring the intention was more important than the style in a case like this.

• • •

Then one morning Billy looked out his window, and it struck him that it was nearly spring again, and that all those lonely days and weeks and months had added up to a lonely year.

“So what did you think, Billy Boy?” he asked out loud. “That just this once they’d break with tradition and add up to something else?”

Grace

Grace heard Yolanda let herself in with her spare key. It was the key that used to belong to Grace, only now Grace’s mom figured Grace wouldn’t need a key any more, since she never went anywhere by herself.

Grace was lying on her belly on the plywood dance floor — because it was cleaner than the rug — doing homework. The Lewis and Clark expedition and Sacagawea. Grace was writing an essay about how the woman didn’t get enough credit in the history books. Like what’s new?

Yolanda came and stood over her.

“History?” Yolanda asked.

“Yup.”

“I used to like history.”

“I hate it.”

“Don’t you ever dance any more?”

“Not so much, no. I got tired of doing that same dance over and over. I asked my mom if I could take lessons, but she says we can’t afford it. Are you here to go to the meeting with us? For her one-year anniversary? You’re pretty early. It’s not for, like, two hours.”

Yolanda squatted down and put a hand on Grace’s back.

“We need to do her fifth step first.”

“Which one is that?”

“Grace. I can’t believe, after all the meetings you go to, you don’t know the steps.”

“Nobody said I had to
listen
.”

“The fourth step is the one everybody hates…”

“Oh, right. The inventory. The one where you have to write out all your character defects. Oh, wait, I know. Then the fifth step is the one where you have to tell them all to your sponsor or somebody.”

“And that’s the one thing I absolutely
insist
on as a sponsor. Any sponsee of mine has to finish her fourth step in the first year.”