“Oh God,” April said, placing her hand over her mouth. “Oh God.”
“What?” R.J. said, scanning the page.
“What has she done?” April tried to stop them, but one of her tears got away, blazing a trail of blurred ink down the newspaper page.
R.J. saw her tears, too, and April could tell he didn’t know what to say.
Twenty-Two
In her notebook McGee kept two lists. If she opened it in the front, spiraling back the tattered, duct-taped cover, there were addresses. The addresses came to her on scraps of paper — receipts and wrappers and corners of magazines. She was in charge of the master list, a column spreading down the left-hand margin, all in the same blue pen, all in her tidy rounded print. Every day, the list grew.
Michael Boni seemed to work by memory, adding places that for one reason or another had pissed him off: a garage that had sold him a worn-out clutch; a bank where the tellers had always looked at him funny; a grocery story where he’d once gotten a can of bad ravioli; the club where he’d been robbed.
Though he later admitted he hadn’t actually been inside the club when the robbery happened. He’d been walking past, on his way to get a coffee, someone in a puffy coat sticking a nine millimeter in his ribs. The club hadn’t even been in business at the time. But still it made the list.
It felt wrong to her, humoring such petty grievances. But they had to start somewhere. Otherwise there was just too much. And anyway, the places were all empty now, the people who had wronged Michael Boni long gone. For all she knew, the owners themselves had their own bad memories they’d just as soon see forgotten.
Darius’s additions to the list were just as arbitrary. To her at least. They were places he passed on the bus on his way to work, depressing sights that caught his eye. Obstructions in the skyline — towers full of gaping windows, like spent candy Advent calendars; and smokestacks caked with dead soot. They were offenses to the eye, which meant they were often large and prominent and hard to get rid of. On their first try, still working out the kinks, they’d managed to inflict barely more than a blemish.
To the entire list, she’d contributed just one address. And she was saving it for when they were ready.
If she opened the notebook in the back, the plain brown cardboard holding on by just a few untorn tabs, she could see the other list, the dozens of letters she’d begun and then abandoned.
Dear Myles:
I love you, though you think I don’t.
Dear Holmes:
I know it was you who broke my mug, the one with the glazed yellow sun. I forgive you.
Dear Myles:
You always smelled best coming in from the cold.
Dear Fitch:
Last New Years Eve I laughed so hard I peed on your couch.
Dear Holmes:
I was the one who broke your watch, the one with the peeling leather strap.
Dear Apriclass="underline"
I tried to like Inez. I really did.
Dear Myles:
I don’t know what to say.
Dear Fitch:
Did you know, the first time we met, that your cousin was trying to set us up?
Dear Apriclass="underline"
I also question your taste in men.
Dear Myles:
I know that you don’t understand. I’m not sure I do either.
She meant every word. And that was why the letters were impossible to send.
Only one had she succeeded in signing and folding into an envelope, addressed to April, three states away. That one had been easier — also full of things she meant, but all of them comfortably buried in a lie. A lie somewhat softened, she hoped, by cookies.
Twenty-Three
The knotty pine booth came from a private club in Hamtramck, a dingy, subterranean dive pretending to be a mountain lodge, bear traps and beaver pelts mounted to the walls.
The bright red molded-plastic booth looked like a piece of playground equipment; she’d found it in a hamburger joint on Woodward.
The third booth came from an east side diner, marbled laminate edged in imitation chrome.
“I was in a library,” Dobbs was saying as they staggered across the floor at either end of a wrought-iron patio table. “I had one of those encyclopedias — you know, the big, heavy kind.” With a melodramatic shiver, he fell silent, implying what she supposed was more of his grisly comic book violence.
He liked to talk about his dreams. He was the palest, unhealthiest person Constance had ever known, but he dreamed blockbuster action movies: explosions, chases, high-wire fight scenes. The villains were interchangeable, but Dobbs was the indestructible hero. Except of course there was nothing heroic about him. Even the table had him gasping, nearly breathless. More than forty years younger than she was, and he let down his end first. At this rate it would be days before they finished.
“The thing is,” Dobbs said, “I’ve never even been in a real fight.”
Constance said, “No kidding.”
By the time they were done for the night, it was three o’clock in the morning. The place didn’t look half bad. They’d managed to squeeze in six tables, three in the center and the three booths along the back wall. No two of them matched. And there was a van full of chairs and lamps and assorted stuff from the housing project, still waiting to be unloaded.
Dobbs sat down at the red booth and poured himself a cup of coffee. “What are you going to call the place?”
Constance came over to join him, her bottom nearly slipping out from under her on the slick plastic bench.
“How about Constance’s?” he said. “Simple but classic.”
“I’ll leave that to you.”
Dobbs lifted his cup, waved it vaguely around the dining room. “This is the future, you know. When everything else collapses—”
“You make it sound romantic.”
“People will remember you,” Dobbs said. “What you started.”
“I prefer when people don’t talk like I’m already dead.”
Dobbs raised his hands in protest.
“Tell me about your parents,” Constance said.
“My parents?”
“These dreams of yours …” Constance said.
He gulped his coffee like water. “You think I’m damaged goods? The product of a troubled childhood?”
She shrugged. “You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”
“They’re lovely people,” he said. “There’s nothing to tell.”
“All right,” Constance said. “Then let me tell you about mine.”
In 1941, Constance said, when she was six and Darrell, her brother, three, her family moved into the Brewster Projects. Getting into Brewster then was like winning the lottery. The place was a marvel, clean and shining and new, the same age as Constance. For a family even to be considered for an apartment, at least one parent needed to have a job. Constance had only one parent, and as far as she knew, her mother had never worked a day in her life.
Constance measured her childhood by her mother’s illnesses — birthdays and holidays entertaining herself in dark, curtained rooms. When her mother was away in the hospital, it was Constance’s job to take care of the apartment and of Darrell. This was when most of Constance’s happiest memories took place. Left to themselves, Constance and Darrell slept curled up together in their mother’s bed. In the morning they strolled to school singing “Chickery Chick” in off-key harmony, and each night they ate lukewarm soup in front of the radio until they dozed off, fully dressed. But the bliss never lasted. As soon as their mother was discharged and sent home, Darrell turned feral, tearing at the couch cushions with his teeth and nails, charging at his mother and sister, butting their legs with his head until their mother shouted, “I guess I have to do everything!” and then closed the door to her bedroom until it was time for Constance to bring her dinner.