Let Go (3 page)

“I was sorry to hear about Lucille. I’m glad you found your way back here, though.”

Everett nodded again, his mouth dry and his eyes burning. He was surprised Teeg even remembered him. Surprised but gladdened, his heart heavy. They’d met only a handful of times, but it was sweet Teeg remembered them, even after all the years away and all the faces in between. Everett felt guilty he’d barely remembered Teeg until today, hadn’t thought of the man at all, really. And here was Teeg, remembering both him and Lucille, remembering even her name, and holding onto a condolence for three long years.

Christ.

If Teeg was a mind reader, Everett wouldn’t have been surprised. The chef reached over and, with a surprisingly strong grip, squeezed Everett’s shoulder and, with his other hand, gave him a pat on the arm.

Maddie was bussing the tables, refilling water glasses. He watched her work for a moment, tracking her back through the swinging door to the kitchen. A moment later, she was back out and hitting up the tables she’d missed. Neither time had Everett noticed the bustle of activity in the kitchen, not like before, and he wondered why Maddie was filling water glasses and not the Mexican boy who’d greeted him at the table.

“You seem suddenly short-staffed,” he whispered to Teeg.

The chef’s brow crinkled, his mouth subverted into a deep scowl. He spoke softly, his words meant for Everett’s ears only. “Lost a few bodies,” he said. “Just me and Maddie now.”

“Jesus.”

“These two brothers, see, Philippe and Javier—busboy and short order—worked for me, decided they didn’t want to hack it. Thought they’d be better off running. Took a bunch of knives and bolted out the back door before I could stop them. Wasn’t too long later, they was screaming.”

“Jesus,” Everett said again.

“S’why I don’t want y’all leaving if I can help it. Not yet. Not till it’s safe.”

“We can’t stay here forever.” The voice came from somewhere in the back, behind Mitch and Kara so Everett couldn’t see who it was. Teeg’s voice had been soft, and Everett thought it unlikely the man had heard, but he didn’t know for sure. Maybe the old geezer had heard them, or maybe he was just awfully prescient in his timing.

“Police’ll get it sorted out” came a soft-voiced woman’s answer.
 

“We’re not going to be here forever,” Teeg assured them, speaking louder now to address everyone. “Just long enough to wait it out. Please, everyone, just take your seats for a bit, okay?”

The old-timers were compliant, and soon the scraping of chair legs against the linoleum was loud enough to blot out the noise of fingers drumming noisily and hands slapping loudly against the window and door.

“I gotta get cooking,” Teeg said, rising from the chair with a groan. “Who’s hungry?”

Nobody said anything, but he wasn’t fussed. “Once y’all start smelling the food, your stomachs’ll get grumbling, don’t you worry. I’m making it on the house. We’re all in this together, may as well eat.”

Some of them murmured thanks as Teeg passed by a handful of elderly couples on his way back into the kitchen.

Not sure what else to say to Kara and Mitch, Everett slowly walked back to his table, keeping his eyes averted to avoid meeting those staring, dead gazes ahead. He wished he could blot out the sounds they made, the fleshy
thunks
against the windowpane and the growling, hungry sounds that went with them.

Absently, he resituated his ID and credit card in his wallet, slipped that back into his butt pocket, and slid into the booth. His knees and back protested slightly with achy twinges, and he let out a sigh of relief as he settled comfortably into the worn-out vinyl.

He closed his eyes, a pain in his chest blooming. This wasn’t the way to die, damn it. Not like this. Not at all how’d he planned it or wanted it.

But no, it wasn’t a heart attack but an attack of sadness and revulsion laced with dire, black humor. The absurdity of it, to have his long life felled by something straight out of an overripe horror cliché. There were still things to do. His job, for instance. He sorted mail for the post office, nothing glamorous, but it was his job, and he felt a sense of responsibility toward it. This was to be his last week, after all. Retirement was right around the corner.

And then what?

As he dug in his coat pocket for his cell phone, the backs of his fingers brushed the gun tucked in there, along with the Kindle. Ah, yes. What then? He’d already started thinking about that.

He couldn’t imagine the shape of his life anymore, all the things that had passed and how little was left ahead.

Lucille was gone. His son had his own life, his job, his own family, in a different state. William visited for the holidays, usually, his wife and daughter in tow. Thanksgiving every other year, and Christmas. The occasional phone call, but those had grown more infrequent over the years. Lucille’s death had brought an uptick in William’s calls, but as time marched on, they settled back into their infrequent groove. Everett could have called him, he knew. Should have called him, in fact, but he hid behind the idea that he wasn’t a phone guy when the simple truth was that he was merely lazy and stubborn. William had inherited that much from him.

And soon he wouldn’t even have a job anymore. What would he do all day? Sit around the house, watching bad, mindless TV and reading e-books? That wasn’t a life for him. Whenever he imagined it, it felt hollow and meaningless. He just wanted Lucille back; he missed her so much. So he’d begun thinking about the ‘what thens’ of retirement, of another cornerstone of his life being chipped away and tossed into the dustbin of his personal history, and he began to feel as though he knew the answer, and he carried it with him always.
 

The cell phone woke with a finger tap to the screen, the big white numerals of the current time set against the manufacturer’s default wallpaper.
 

A few moments later, William answered with a breathless, “Hey, Dad, what’s up?”

“Hello, son!” Everett found himself smiling, tears forming a burning, standing puddle that he had to blink away. Somehow he knew this would be the last time he’d speak to his boy. “I just wanted to check in, make sure everything’s okay on your end.”

“Yeah, things are good. How are you holding up?”

“Ah, you know. This weather.”

Behind him, dead fists slammed against glass. He wondered if more police would come, if there would be more gunshots and whether William would be able to hear them through the phone and worry over his father.

“It’s only going to get colder. I’m telling you, you should head to Arizona. You’ll feel better.”

“Maybe,” Everett said. “How are Ellie and Tabby?”

“Both are good.
Tabatha
, though, has decided she hates being called”—he lowered his voice and whispered conspiratorially—“
Tabby
, so we’re all on notice. The fits she throws, Jesus, you wouldn’t believe it.”

Tabby was three going on thirty and had little trouble making her presence and her demands known to those around her.

“Oh, I think I can imagine,” Everett said. When William was his daughter’s age, he’d liked to hide under the clothes racks when Lucille took him to the mall, and he proved to be a holy terror who fought against her, literally tooth and nail, when she dragged him out kicking and screaming.

“Ah, crap. Hey, Dad, I gotta go. Ellie ran to the grocery store for a bit, and the house is strangely quiet. I should go see what
Tabatha
has gotten into.”

“Quiet kids are never a good sign. You better go check. Love you, son.”

“Love you, too, Dad. I’ll call you later.”

William disconnected first, probably relieved to cut the call short. Everett exhaled slowly. He’d wanted to tell his son one last time how he felt about him, and while it hadn’t been the talk he’d imagined, it was as good as it was going to get. “Good enough” was the best he could hope for. If Lucille’s death had taught him anything, it was that there was always so much left unsaid and never enough time to say it all.
 

If he had time, and if William actually called him back, which he doubted would happen, Everett would tell him again how much he loved him. He would apologize, too, for not having been a better father. Everett didn’t think poorly of himself as a parent, and he knew he’d done as well as he could, but always could have—
should have
—tried harder, striven to be a better father. He had wanted to be a better father to William than Everett’s father had been to him. Mostly he’d been successful, but there had also been too many lapses on his part that could never be corrected.

If there was time, he’d talk William’s ear off if allowed to.

Time was such a rare and precious commodity. William’s birth had proven that to him almost immediately. Lucille’s death had driven it home even further, a thick nail through his heart. He’d always thought they’d have more time, that there would be just one more day, and that tomorrow he would be stronger for her, less of a coward. He was going to apologize to her, too. Had meant to, had told himself he would do it tomorrow, before time ran out, but tomorrow turned into tomorrow into tomorrow, and time ran out for both of them.

When Everett was a boy, a teenager who had foolishly thought himself a man, his ill-tempered father had finally had enough. A petty argument between his parents had been the last straw, the final spark that ignited his father’s short, thin fuse. Dad had never hit Mom, but the emotional and psychological abuse he’d left in his wake was violent enough. Sometimes words could do far more damage than a fist. Everett had learned that early in life, and sometimes his own tongue was a lash, and he wanted to tell Lucille he was sorry for that. His father had stormed out of his and his mother’s life, packed up the car and left.

“Maybe one day you’ll see I’m not so bad,” Dad had said. His parting shot across the bow as the back door slammed shut behind him.

Everett had never seen his father again after that, and he had never had the chance to see if his father could be a better man. Everett himself knew he could be better, too, if he hadn’t been so lazy, and he hoped that William did not think as poorly of him as he did his own father.
 

He’d never left William or Lucille, not like that. But too many times, he had checked out emotionally and mentally. Too many times, he had thought about leaving, oh yes. Had come so very close. But his son needed a father, and Lucille needed a husband. He loved them, and in the end that was a strong enough bond to keep him tied to them, despite the occasional urge and depressive insistence that he run and run far.

He’d stayed.

Now they had all left him. All the things that kept him connected, that made him and defined him, slowly detached, one by one.

Lucille. William. His job.

The pounding against the glass behind him reminded him that now, too, the world around him had become unmoored. Impossible things slammed against the glass and rattled the locked door in its frame, reality itself ungluing from all that Everett had thought he’d known. One last illusion undone and stripped away.

His hand fell onto his lumpy coat pocket. The gun in there.

The gun was always for just in case. In case he couldn’t take it anymore. In case the loneliness became too unbearable, the weight of it too crushing. In case he decided he needed, finally, to see Lucille again. In case he lost one more goddamn thing.
 

Always just in case.

He didn’t think he would use it until after Friday, his last day on the job. Not until after he was retired and cut loose from yet one more thing that defined his days. He couldn’t bear the thought of having nothing left. And so he kept the gun in his pocket, just in case.
 

“We can’t stay here.”
 

The man’s voice was gravelly, probably from too many years of liquor and cigarettes. When Everett turned to see who had spoken, he saw it was the Ossie Davis-looking man in the blue windbreaker. The gentleman was older than Everett, with thinned hair and a scalp lightly stained by the coloring used to make his hair an impossible shade of black for a man so advanced in years. His face and hands littered with liver spots. Everett recognized his voice as the same one Teeg had shut down earlier.

“We can’t stay here,” he said again.
 

There were a few nods of agreement, a few whispers of dissent, and a loud silence from those who simply had no idea what to do and were too afraid to commit one way or the other.

The kid, Mitch, was looking at his phone, his thumb sliding up the screen over and over. Kara sat beside him, their chairs butted up together, their knees touching and her head resting on his shoulder. Whatever he was reading caused him to look incredulous.

“They’re calling this a riot,” he said, practically laughing at the absurdity.

“Who is?” Everett asked.

“The news, their
official sources
,” he said, mockingly. “That’s the party line, I guess. ‘Authorities are urging people to remain in their home until the situation is resolved.’”

Mitch snorted then tossed his phone onto the table. “Riot. Yeah, right. A riot. That’s what this is.”

“How long until that glass breaks?” Ossie asked, tugging at the front of his windbreaker. “All of them pressing up against it like that?”

Everett turned to get a look around the corner of the booth. More faces were pressed against the window now. A lot more.

Brown’s didn’t have much in the way of safety features. There were no bars on the windows, no security gates for the doors. Only a dead bolt, maybe an alarm system. The restaurant was situated in a sleepy suburb where crime was low enough to barely register as a concern. This so-called riot, though, may have been enough to single-handedly destroy the small town’s police force. Everett realized it had been a while since they’d heard a siren or even a gunshot.
 

He worried over how widespread things were. William hadn’t seemed to know about it, and that gave him some comfort. Hopefully his son and family were safe and blissfully ignorant of what was happening here.