Unexpected Dismounts

by Nancy Rue

  For the flicker of a moment, I saw something real in Troy’s eyes. Not the real of a man who would wash the feet of a down-and-out human being, but the boy who would’ve held a pool party for them all and been the first one in. The boy with sunshine in his cowlick hair and dreams in his eyes. Real dreams.

  When I blinked, it was gone.

  “What does all this have to do with Desmond’s adoption?” I said.

  “He ought to have the right parents. One at least. It can make all the difference.”

  “Well, that’s one thing we agree on,” I said.

  Troy twisted his ring. “This is something I’ve wanted to say for a long time. I’m sorry I made you get an abortion.”

  I stopped breathing.

  “You would have been a wonderful mother. That’s why I want to help.” Troy slanted toward me, forearms on his knees. “I can call this guy off, this Clyde Quillon. I can get the whole thing settled out of court. Forget Doyle and Rodriguez. Forget Judge Atwell. I can make it disappear.”

  My insides were contracting so hard I had to clench the railing. This pain went too deep for me to grab at anything very much below the surface. I went for the shallow end. “How is it that you know every detail?” I said.

  “I’ve told you this before, Ally: I make it my business to know everything about you.”

  “And I’ve told you before: Don’t call me that.”

  Troy spread out his hands. “What am I supposed to do, pretend the past never happened to us? Maybe you can, but I can’t.”

  The sun caught his eyes and he had to look down—the way he used to cast his eyes away from me when he had to leave, to hide the longing because he couldn’t get enough of being with me. I trusted that back then, although even at sixteen I knew Troy Irwin had finesse he hadn’t even used yet. This wasn’t finesse. This was a full-out acting job.

  It was pathetic, but I felt a wave of despair. Not my despair. His.

  “What’s in it for you, Troy?” I said. I was surprised at the softness in my voice.

  “Very little,” he said. He had the nerve to smile. “All I want in return is San Luis Street.”

  “All you want,” I said. “All you want is everything.”

  “It’s one block.”

  “For now. I can’t fight you on West King. I don’t have the stuff. You’re going to take it over and there’s nothing I can do about it. So why my street too?”

  “My street and your street can’t coexist. I need that property.”

  “For Pete’s sake, how freakin’ rich do you have to be, Troy?”

  “Look, I don’t have a black heart, Ally—Allison. I’ll relocate the program for you. I’ll build you a whole complex.”

  “Where?” I said.

  “I have three hundred acres outside Palatka. You can rehab all the prostitutes you want.”

  “No,” I said.

  His fists doubled. “What is so wrong with my money?”

  “Your money’s not the problem.” I slid off the railing. “It’s the fact that you have no regard for these people as human beings that makes the whole idea of taking a nickel from you revolting to me.”

  “I have regard for your relationship with the boy. And yet you’re telling me that you would pass up a guarantee that the adoption will go through because you have some principle.”

  I took a breath and prepared to say the same thing I’d had to say far too many times. The thing that whisked valuable solutions right out of the room.

  “It’s not my principle,” I said. “It’s God’s.”

  I had never seen a conversation shut down so fast. The look that came over his face was pure contempt. And yet I couldn’t stop.

  “I have a personal relationship with the people you want to relocate. They have memories and hungers and regrets and smashed-up dreams. They’ve all but given up. I focus on the thread they still hang on to, and that thread isn’t the hope of being taken away to some rehab facility out in the swamp. It’s rebuilding their lives here, where they live. Where they have a right to live.”

  Troy’s look was long and stony.

  “There was a time when you would have been part of it,” I said.

  “Part of what? Your little footwashing?”

  He spat the words like they were phlegm in his throat.

  “Go,” I said, “before I say the H-word to you.”

  “Are you telling me to go to—”

  “No, Troy,” I said. “I think that’s already taken care of. It’s me I’m worried about.”

  His exit was punctuated with the squeal of BMW tires. Miz Vernell poked her head out of her screen door and glared him all the way to Artillery Lane. I just stood there, feeling homesick, wishing the man would remember the boy. Wishing I could stand up in some boardroom where this heartless shell of a person served and tell them who he used to be.

  And then it stabbed me to the heart that nobody in a corporate boardroom would care about either one.

  Although the good that God reminded me of showed itself in the next few days—India and Ophelia bonding like soul mates, Liz Doyle and Lewis both writing editorials about the rape case, Desmond ceasing having nightmares—I felt like I still had Troy Irwin on my skin, clinging like a cobweb. I couldn’t shake him off, so I carried his stuff on me along with everybody else’s as I moved on. There was a lot to move on to.

  Nicholas Kent asked me to meet him at the Monk’s Vineyard Monday night when his shift was over. I didn’t inquire over the phone what kind of news he had. I could hear the bad in his voice.

  For once George and Lewis were perceptive and left us alone in our corner of the porch after George served us a pair of Lewis’s reportedly new and improved lattes on the house. I barely sipped mine as Nicholas talked.

  “I finally got a couple of guys to admit they know who went to see your women,” he said.

  “Who?”

  “They wouldn’t give me names. All these guys told me was that the officers went on their own, not under orders from the department.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “You got me. I’m still working on it.”

  “Working on it how?” I pushed the cup aside. “Look, I don’t want you getting into any trouble, Nick. I appreciate your help, but you’ve got to watch your own back too.”

  He blushed to the roots of his wonderful red hair. It didn’t occur to me until then how much I really liked this kid.

  “What I want to do is bring over a photo array and have your—what do you call them?”

  “The Sisters.”

  “Are they like nuns now?”

  “Uh, no,” I said drily. “Just Sisters in Christ.”

  He nodded. “Anyway, they could look at the pictures and identify the two guys. That’s our best shot.”

  “Let me ask them,” I said. “I’ll get them on the phone right now.”

  “Before you do that.” Nicholas dug into his pocket and pulled out a slip of paper. “Do you know a Marcus Rydell?”

  “No. Who is he?”

  “He’s the guy who rented the car your Zelda crashed into the pole.”

  “Wait. He rented a car and she stole it from him when she was blown out on cocaine?”

  “That’s what it looks like. We traced the car to Hertz, and they said a Marcus Rydell rented it and then reported it stolen.”

  “Where was it stolen from, did he say?”

  “Nightclub out at the beach.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah, right? No way Zelda stole it from there. Not unless somebody else drove her out there.”

  “It makes absolutely no sense.”

  “Does she remember anything?”

  I looked down at my now lukewarm coffee. “She’s not talking to me.�
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  “Oh. Sorry.”

  He actually did look sorry. Before I could start bawling, I dialed the number for Sacrament House. Mercedes answered, and before I got my question about the photo array all the way out, she was giving me a no.

  “I know that red-haired boy is on our side,” she whispered, as if he were listening in. “But when it come to police and courts, I just had it with all that.”

  “Can you speak for everyone?”

  I heard her click to speakerphone. I repeated the request.

  “I’m sorry, Miss Angel,” Jasmine said, with tears not far behind.

  Sherry was the most vehement. “Don’t ask me that again, Miss Angel, or I might have to move out. I’m serious.”

  “No need to do that,” I said. “Subject closed.”

  I didn’t even have to shake my head at Nicholas. He was already shaking his.

  Bonner’s news was better.

  Hank and I were having coffee Tuesday morning in my kitchen, listening to Chief bite back expletives in the dining room while the physical therapist put him through his paces. He was done with traction, but that apparently meant his workouts could be stepped up. Hank smothered a snort every time he broke out with “son of a biscuit eater.”

  “Looks like he’s going to have a cheering section today,” she said.

  The screen door opened and Bonner appeared with Liz Doyle.

  “You playing hooky?” I said to her.

  She shook her head, blinked, and dumped her armload of stuff onto the floor. Bonner stopped to help her, but he got caught in the crossfire between a hairbrush and the purse she was trying to toss it back into. He came up rubbing a rapidly rising bump on his forehead.

  “Let me,” Hank said to him. “Sit. Have a biscotti. Have two.”

  “Tell her the good news,” Liz said from the floor.

  “We just came from court,” he said. “The judge is releasing Zelda to us for a probationary period. If she stays clean, he’ll consider it time served.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Being processed.”

  “Don’t you love the terminology?” Hank said, putting a mug into Bonner’s hand. “They make it sound like we’re ordering something on Amazon.”

  “How is she?” I said. I searched Bonner’s face.

  “She’s not spitting at God, Allison,” he said.

  “So what do you think?”

  “I think we have to go with that.”

  I let out a slow breath of air. It had been so long since I’d felt relief, I barely recognized it.

  Liz stood up, purse under her arm, hands full of cosmetics. “Zelda’s scared. Which she probably should be. She has a lot of work to do.”

  “Wait,” I said. “How is it that you know all this, Liz?”

  “I’ve been spending some time with her.” She shoved a compact into a purse pocket and looked at Bonner. I was so used to seeing her blink like a strobe light it took me a moment to realize she was doing battle with tears.

  “What’s going on?” I said.

  “I want to work for you.”

  “You mean at Sacrament House?”

  She nodded so hard, my heart dove.

  “I wish we could afford to hire you,” I said. “I’d take you away from FIP in a heartbeat if we had the funds. As it is—” I looked at Bonner with what I knew bordered on helplessness. “I still don’t know how we’re going to take care of Zelda.”

  Liz raised the hand that was holding a lipstick and a Sharpie.

  “Idea?” I said.

  “Plan,” she said. “I want Zelda to come stay with me.”

  “Oh, Liz. Really? I mean, think about it.”

  “I already have. We can go to Sacrament House for meetings and all, but at my place she’ll have her own room and my full attention until you get the second house.”

  “But we can’t help you financially.”

  “I have some savings.” Liz hugged the restuffed handbag to her chest. “Please, Allison, I want to do this. I have to.”

  I looked at Bonner again, just in time to catch him gazing at Liz with tender eyes.

  Well, go figure. I really had been out of the loop.

  “We’ll give you all the help you need,” I said. “Bless your heart—this is—”

  “God,” Liz said. “It’s God.”

  Everyone was gone when Chief finished up his PT session. I was convinced they timed their exit so they wouldn’t catch the backlash of the mood he would have to be in after an hour of whatever kind of torture went on in there.

  But he looked rather pleased with himself when he pushed open the swinging door and rolled into the kitchen in a wheelchair, leg sticking out like a cannon in front of him.

  “Look at you!” I said.

  “I needed some wheels under me,” he said.

  “Wait till Desmond sees you. You know he’s going to want to put pipes on that thing.”

  “Probably give it a nickname.”

  “Ya think? Anybody who spends five minutes with him gets one. He’s started calling Kade Cappuccino.”

  “That’s our boy.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  A funny silence fell. I collided with myself rushing to break it.

  “Should we celebrate? There’s still a ton of food. Or do you just want coffee? Tea? How about tea? Tea would be better.”

  “Classic.”

  “Tea, then?”

  “Thank you.”

  “For what?” I laughed like a fifteen-year-old. “I haven’t given you anything yet.”

  Chief held out his hand to me. When I took it, he pulled me close to the wheelchair and looked up at me. Even then, he seemed larger than my life.

  “You’ve given me everything,” he said.

  “Yes. My special burnt toast. A twelve-year-old so you won’t be bored.”

  “Like I said—everything.”

  He tugged at my hand and let it go.

  “So, tea?” I said.

  And Hank thought Chief was romantically challenged.

  Yet things had already taken on a rhythm. I felt something just as good as romance, something I couldn’t name, but it was there. When I was preparing mac and cheese out of a box for him or adjusting the blinds while he napped so the sun wouldn’t wake him. The word for it didn’t come to me until late that afternoon when Desmond decided they were going for a HOG ride, broken leg or no broken leg. I sat at the bistro table, “bustin’ a gut” as Desmond himself put it, while he pushed Chief through the house, both of them clad in helmets, making engine sounds that rivaled any bike down at the HD dealership.

  “Imma pop a wheelie,” Desmond called from the dining room.

  “Try it and you’re dog chow,” I called back.

  “Busted,” Chief said.

  That was the moment I gave the feeling a name.

  It was home.

  In the evenings that week, however, home turned into command central. With the hearing looming on Thursday—Maundy Thursday, I realized—Kade was there every night, working with Chief and me after Desmond went to bed. He came earlier Tuesday and Wednesday, though, so he could hang out with Desmond, who had decided Cappuccino was part of Hog Heaven.

  “What changed your mind?” I asked Desmond when I saw him to bed Tuesday night.

  “Don’t know,” he said. “He give me the prickles at first, like I knew him before or somethin’, but now—it’s all good.”

  So good, in fact, that before Kade got there Wednesday, the night before the hearing, Desmond did a caricature of Kade that was all teeth and sticking-out hair.

  “Dude, I look like some kind of twisted George Clooney,” Kade said when he arrived. He tried a grin as big as the drawn-in one
and came up several molars short.

  “Looks like a used car salesman,” Chief said. “I wouldn’t buy a vehicle from this guy.”

  “Say somethin’, Big Al,” Desmond said. “They dissin’ my art.”

  I didn’t say what actually came to me as the face in the drawing laughed into mine. Those were Kade’s clear eyes, on steroids, and his handsome, symmetrical features to the hundredth power. That was his New England pluck that fell just shy of smug, and his boyish appeal, which even in two dimensions vacillated toward the man in him and came back again. What I couldn’t name was a thing that made him familiar, as if Desmond had captured déjà vu with his pencil.

  “Big Al, you killin’ me here,” Desmond said.

  “Your talent makes all words meaningless,” I said.

  “Imma put this on the refrigerator.” He headed for the kitchen, tripping over a piece of PT equipment on the way.

  “Are you joining us when Hank and everybody comes over?” I said.

  “Not unless you make me,” he said, and pushed through the door. It swung hard in his wake like a tattletale classmate. Did you hear that? Did you hear it?

  “What was that about?” Chief said.

  “He’s decided he doesn’t want to be baptized,” I said. I watched the door until it stopped telling its tale.

  Kade looked up from the coffee table, where his files were spread out solitaire fashion. “I remember those days.”

  “What days?” I said.

  “When my mood flipped around like that. I’d be messing around with my mom in the kitchen, y’know, juggling the eggs or something, and then she’d, like, look at me wrong and I’d tell her she didn’t understand me and I’d go sit in my room in the dark like Heathcliff.”

  I perched on the arm of the red chair. “Heathcliff?”

  “Wuthering Heights.”

  “You read Wuthering Heights?”

  “I thought that was only adolescent girls,” Chief said.

  Kade shrugged. “Anybody can read Brontë.”

  “No, I thought only adolescent girls had mood swings like that.”