Lions (17 page)

Boyd and May sat alone in the empty diner, stirring coffee, empty pie plates beside them. May had turned the overhead lights off and the front door was propped open. It was twilight, last day of September, and the evenings were finally cool again. Across the street, the bar was closed, the cracked window still boarded.

“We could move the bar in here,” Boyd said, his elbows on the table and his head bent over the coffee cup. “Make it yours. Get a liquor license. Change the name of the place.”

“No more Lucy Graves?”

“I think we should change it all.”

“They're just windows, Boyd. We can fix them.”

Boyd shrugged. His mustache had grown into an unkempt silver beard. “Maybe we ought to just go, too.”

May shook her head. “I don't think I could get Georgie to leave, Boyd.”

“You really mean to take care of her.”

“I do.”

“What about Annie?”

“Annie's got her hands full.”

“These could be our last good years together, Maybelline.”

“What, you want to be on vacation?” She was old enough to know better than to think of her life as dear just because it was hers. If where she had ended up was arbitrary, her partner just as much so, she loved and appreciated them no less for it. “I'm sorry,” she said, and opened her hands. “I'm staying here. At my age you make a choice and you do it. Chuck will keep circling through town. Burnsville is there if we need it. Georgie needs me. Twenty-six years I've known her, she half raised my only child, and no doubt Leigh would have been all bad instead of half bad without the Walkers' help.”

“OK,” he whispered. He shook his head, staring into his mug.

She reached over and put a hand on his forearm. “Boyd. Come on.”

He looked up, his blue eyes shining. “That man walked all that way. Somehow made his way. It wasn't until he got here—” He couldn't finish. His eyes spilled over and he pressed them with a forefinger and thumb.

“Boyd.”

“You know something, May? I've wasted my life one night at a time, four beers in and trying to win people over. Some stupid joke. Some stupid story. Some stupid lie.”

“Come on now.”

May stood up and joined him on his side of the booth, and put her arm around him.

“I'm sick of the sound of my own voice.”

“Well,” she said, and nudged him, laughing softly.

“It's like I'm standing right beside myself all the time.”

“Listen, Boyd. We were all responsible this summer. You didn't mean any real harm.” She jostled him lightly. “Did you?”

He sniffed and sucked air in through his mouth and wiped his nose. “Seems like it started with me, doesn't it?”

“That's just people talking. Always been a place of big stories, hasn't it? You're only a man, Boyd. So you don't always get it right. Did you ever meet someone who did?”

He was quiet a minute. “John Walker. Didn't he? Didn't you say you should have been so lucky? Have a man like he was?”

“I don't know how perfect he was.” She sighed. “Pretty odd fellow and before the summer anyone else would have said the same.”

“I guess maybe they still do.”

“He left his wife and kid without much to go on, and by his own stubborn lights. Didn't he?”

“I guess so.”

“And I'll tell you something else. For years I've heard you repeat the same jokes and stories in that bar, night after night.”

“I know,” he said. “Even the good ones are old. I haven't said anything new since I was fifteen.”

“What I was going to say is that I haven't heard any of those stories in weeks. A month. You've been quiet.”

“Well, it's been growing on me,” he said. “Being sorry.”

“OK. It's a change. Right?”

He shrugged.

“Come on,” she nudged him. “Let's make a plan. Is this our home? That's Boyd's Bar across the street, isn't it? And this is the Lucy Graves.”

He shrugged. “What is that,” he said, “nostalgia?”

“God help me, I'm not that old and useless. I'm talking about today. Tonight. And our friends here.”

“No new restaurant and pub in Burnsville.”

She shook her head. “I have to stay.” She pulled him toward her and he put his forehead on her chest.

“We'll stay,” he said into her shirt. “Shit.”

She put her hand over the top of his head. “Then let's go into that bar of yours across the street, and prop open that big old door, and open up a couple of cold beers, and turn on the radio. There's a cool breeze.”

He lifted his head and looked into her eyes. “I don't deserve you.”

“Deserve has nothing to do with what we get,” she said, and pulled him up. When they stood, May glanced out the window and grabbed Boyd's upper arm.

“Now what in the hell,” he said.

It was a truck from a Burnsville towing company hauling the Walkers' old blue Silverado through town.

“I have a feeling I better get Leigh.”

Leigh swung her duffel bag into the back of Boyd's truck and climbed in the cab. May started the engine and pulled out of the dormitory parking lot. It was a picture-perfect day in mid-October and everyone was out. She crossed her arms, eyes red, and turned away from her mother. They'd been twenty minutes on the phone at dawn that morning, a call that was accusatory on May's end, defensive on Leigh's, and which had ended with an arranged meeting time on campus and without a goodbye.

They waited at a red light and Leigh watched a pack of students dressed in green and gold gear for a football game crossing the street before them, headed toward the shuttle that would take them to the stadium. All her life she was outside a window watching the rest of the world, for a few weeks it had seemed otherwise, and now she was back to where she'd always been. Outside trying to get in, and now dragged backward, back to Lions again. All of that again.

“I just want to make sure I have this timeline straight,” May said, both hands on the wheel as she accelerated on the city street widening into highway. Her gaze was straight ahead, her brow furrowed. The truck was smooth and quiet compared with Gordon's. “He left two weeks ago?”

“It was like two or three weeks.”

“What day?”

“I don't know.” She studied the line of cheap motels and derelict mom and pop gas stations. “Middle of the month.”

“Of September.”

“September, yes.”

“A month ago Leigh?”

“Look, mom. He's the one who left. He didn't even say goodbye, or tell me he was going. As usual. The Walker MO. Don't pretend to be surprised.”

“Were you arguing?”

The cars thinned out and the motels gave way to isolated farmsteads and corn stubble. A cheerful man in a denim cap was selling cherry cider and pumpkins and waved at them.

“I'm not interrogating you, Leigh. What are you going to tell Georgie and Dock? Or Chuck?”

“Chuck?”

“We didn't wait to call him. Do you understand Gordon's been missing almost a month?”

“He was gone almost that long a couple times this summer. Chuck didn't want to talk to me then.”

“He was in his truck this summer.”

“And you're sure it was his truck they found.”

“Leigh.”

“Because John took good care of that truck. It wouldn't have just died. And Gordon wouldn't have just left it.”

“It was his truck, it did break down, and Gordon did leave it.”

“You're saying he just left the truck on the side of the road and disappeared into the wide open prairie.”

“It looks like he must have unloaded everything first. Georgianna must have been asleep. She doesn't even seem to know he came and left again. It's a wonder none of us saw him. It must have been the middle of the night.”

Leigh thought she knew which night. “The chair,” she said, and could see the whole living room turned into dorm room restored to living room. She never wanted to see it again. “Well, I don't know where he is. I don't see why I need to come home.”

“You didn't tell anyone.”

“It wasn't my job.”

“Don't you care about him?”

“He left. Again. His choice. How was I supposed to know his truck broke down?”

“OK,” May said, nodding, “I'll give you that.”

“He is not my responsibility.”

May's eyes filled with tears. She wiped them from the corner of her eye with one middle finger, then again on the other side. Leigh turned away and looked out the window.

The sky clouded over behind them and by the time they crossed the county line the clouds had caught up overhead. It was late afternoon on a Saturday and the street downtown was empty, a few scraggly native corn decorations hung on a front door. A lopsided pumpkin on the stoop of the diner, a plastic scarecrow in front of the bar. The diner was empty except for Georgianna, who they could see from the street was refilling the glass sugar canisters at a table by the window.

“What am I supposed to tell her?” May asked her daughter. Something about seeing her old friend there, bent over in the lamplight, quickened her pulse. “That Gordon's been missing a month and no one cared enough to tell her? That now her son is gone, too, and no one knows where? That you never even called?”

“Mom.”

“What were you doing all this time?”

“I was in school.”

“Where you were entitled to a little fun, to a normal experience.”

“Exactly.”

“You act like everything happening in the world is happening in the story of your life. Leigh Ransom's precious life.”

Leigh looked at her mother, uncomprehending. “If it's not my life, whose is it?”

May turned the engine off and climbed out of the truck. Boyd came out of the bar and waved at her. They met briefly in the street and May went into the diner. Leigh sat in the passenger seat with her hands in her lap. Her mother's words hung in the air beside her, but she would not look at them.

Inside Leigh carried two cups of coffee to the table where Georgianna sat. “Can I join you?”

“Leigh,” Georgianna stood and spilled a good half cup of sugar down her dress and onto the floor. “It's so nice to have you back.” Leigh hugged her, and held her breath in her nose. It smelled like the woman hadn't showered in weeks.

“Hi, Georgie,” Leigh said.

She smiled and sat down. “Place isn't the same.”

“Pretty quiet.” Leigh sat.

“Your mother's still getting customers from the highway.”

“I heard they're going to widen it.”

“That's what they say.”

“Are you going to stay here?”

“Me?” Georgianna looked out the window, then turned back to Leigh and stroked the back of her hand. “Sweetheart, there's nowhere to go.”

“There's a whole world out there, Georgie. You're only in your fifties.”

“Leigh thinks the world owes her something,” May said. Leigh was about to fire something back when Georgianna laughed softly.

“Yes, well. She'll get over that,” Georgianna said.

May went behind the counter and washed her hands. She took four heads of cabbage from the walk-in and started chopping.

“Georgie,” Leigh said. Georgianna set the sugar funnel on the table. “I don't think Gordon liked school much.”

Georgianna waved a hand. “I didn't think he would.”

Behind them, the chopping stopped.

“Did you know he left? A few weeks ago? Left school?”

More chopping.

“Of course he did.”

“Do you know where he is, though? They found his truck.”

May stopped chopping.

“Oh, he's around,” Georgianna said.

“Around?”

She nodded, “Course he is.”

Leigh had the same sense she had on the morning of John's death. Then again on her birthday. For Georgianna, talking about her son was talking about her husband. And talking about either one of them was like talking about the quality of the air.

“Georgie,” Leigh said, and caught her mother's eye. Georgianna looked up again, and waited, her gaze fixed on Leigh's. “I was just wondering if you might like a piece of pie?”

“If there's a lemon cream I'd love that.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “I made it myself, and I know it's good.” She winked.

May whispered at Leigh behind the counter as she took down the lemon cream pie and cut into it. “How could you turn your back on him? Gordon was grieving.” The floor behind the counter was shining. May must have been scrubbing the place raw. The stainless steel, the floors, the stove, the grill.

“I know that.”

“Like hell you did. You and Boyd and Dock making up some dead man on the mesa. So full of bullshit you can't smell it on your own nose.”

“I didn't believe any of that,” Leigh muttered. She bit the ragged cuticle on her forefinger with her teeth.

“You what?”

“I said I didn't really believe any of that. Come on.” She shut her eyes. She could see the narrow house on the mesa lit up inside her eyelids like a film negative.

“Keep your voice down. I have never seen such impatience. He lost his father, Leigh.”

“You don't know how hard he made it. He didn't want me anymore.”

“Didn't want you anymore? What would that have to do with anything?” She raised both eyebrows. “Besides, you were his best friend. You should have seen him the day he saw you making out with that man from Denver. He had his head on the steering wheel out there for twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, Leigh.”

Leigh's face flushed and her stomach turned. John's binoculars. “You don't know how hard it was,” she said dumbly. Gordon saw the man lead her into the factory. Did he see the man walk out two minutes later, alone?

“And then there was your proposal to Dex Meredith. On the day of John's service, no less.”

“I never proposed to Dex Meredith.”

“Yes, you did. You were drunk.”

Leigh turned her back on May and looked out at the street. She put her hand on the counter and closed her eyes again. “You don't know anything about it. You refuse to see.”

May circled in front of Leigh and took her daughter's chin with her thumb and forefinger. “Look at me.” May's face was lined with wrinkles and spotted in new places—on her temple, on her cheek. Her eyes were a bloodshot, watery blue. The wraith of a long lost beauty looked out. “Your options aren't as unlimited as you think they are.”

Leigh twisted her face away. “Don't ever touch me again.”

The bells rang on the swinging glass door and Boyd stepped inside.

“Bring that slice of pie to Georgie,” May said. “You're going to have to have a more frank talk with her.”

“I'm all done here,” Georgianna said. She stood up from the table where she'd been funneling sugar and looked across the diner at the three of them. “You know what John used to say about that mesa story? Boggs?” She smiled and crossed the room, stood beside them at the counter. They stared at her, not realizing she'd heard them. Leigh's face was red with embarrassment.

“He knew the story?” May asked.

“Knew it! John said his grandfather made it up himself, just so he could get out of the shop for a few days at a time, keep everyone away and take a break.”

“The heck you say, Georgie. Walkers lived to work,” Boyd said. “That was John Walker or I never knew the guy.”

“But Lord could he be lazy!” Georgie said. “He could put his feet up and read three novels in a row with nothing but a can of beans, a can of sardines, and a can of peaches to interrupt him. And Gordon's the same way.” She shook her head. “I don't know how many paperbacks we have in that house. Hundreds, all of them silly. Full of cowboys and gold and stagecoach robberies.”

“Westerns,” May said.

“Westerns,” Georgianna repeated.

“Georgie what are you telling us?” Boyd bumped Georgianna's shoulder playfully with his own and grinned. “There was never any Boggs?”

Georgianna gave them all a funny look. “What,” she said, “you don't mean really? A real flesh and blood ghost up there? All these hundred and fifty years?” She shook her head and looked out at the street. “Now wouldn't that be scary?”