“Who’s your walker?” Amos said.
The boy yanked back away from his hand. “Don’t touch for free, man.”
“No troubles. I’m not a grabber. Just who’s walking you? He around?”
“Don’t know what you mean.” The boy started looking around for an escape route.
“Yeah, okay. Get lost.” Amos watched the boy run off and felt something pressing at his stomach like the onset of a cramp. He couldn’t help out every street kid he came across. There were too many of them, and he had other work to do. Frustrating, that. Maybe the kid would find his pimp and tell him about the big scary guy who grabbed his face. Then the pimp would come looking for him, to teach him a lesson about not fucking with the merchandise.
The thought put a smile back on Amos’ face and made the knot in his stomach go away.
Lydia’s house was thirty-seven blocks from the train station in a low-income neighborhood, but not in a government housing block. Someone was paying actual money for the place, which was interesting. Amos didn’t think Lydia could have cleaned up her records enough to qualify for job training. Maybe the husband was a citizen with the skills and clean background to get a straight job. That was interesting too. What kind of guy living an honest citizen’s life marries an aging gangster like Lydia?
Amos walked at a leisurely pace, still sort of hoping the pimp would track him down and make an appearance. An hour and a half later his hand terminal told him he’d reached his destination. The house didn’t look like much. Just a small one-level that from the street was an almost exact copy of every other small single-story house in the neighborhood. A tiny garden filled the narrow space between the house and the sidewalk. It looked lovingly tended, though Amos couldn’t remember Lydia ever owning a plant.
He walked up the narrow path through the garden to the front door and rang the bell. A small, elderly man with a fringe of white hair opened a moment later. “Can I help you, son?”
Amos smiled, and something in his expression made the man take a nervous half step back. “Hi, I’m an old friend of Lydia Maalouf. I just found out she’d passed, and I was hoping to pay my respects.” He worked his face for a minute, trying to find a version of his smile that didn’t scare little old men.
The old man—Charles, the obituary had said—shrugged after a minute and gestured for Amos to come into the house. On the inside it was recognizably Lydia’s space. The plush furnishings and brightly colored wall hangings and curtains reminded Amos of the apartment she’d had back in Baltimore. Pictures lined the shelves and tabletops. Snapshots of the life she’d had after Amos left. Two dogs in a field of grass, grinning and lolling their tongues at the camera. Charles, more hair on his head, but still silvery white, digging in the garden. Lydia and Charles together in a restaurant, candles on the table, smiling over their wineglasses.
It looked like a good life, and Amos felt something in his belly relax when he saw them. He wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was probably a good thing.
“You got a name?” Charles said. “Want some tea? Was making some when you rang.”
“Sure, I’d take some tea,” Amos said, ignoring the first question. He stayed in the cozy living room while Charles banged around in the kitchen.
“It’s been a couple months since the funeral,” Charles said. “Were you up the well?”
“Yeah, working in the Belt most recently. Sorry it took a while to make it back down.”
Charles came back out of the kitchen and handed him a steaming mug. From the flavor, it was green tea, unsweetened.
“Timothy, right?” Charles said, as if he were asking about the weather. Amos felt his jaw clench. Adrenaline dumped into his bloodstream.
“Not for a long time now,” he replied.
“She talked about your mom, some,” Charles said. He seemed relaxed. Like he knew whatever was going to happen was inevitable.
“My mom?”
“Lydia took care of you after your mom died, right?”
“Yeah,” Amos said. “She did.”
“So,” Charles said, then took another sip of his tea. “How does this go?”
“Either I ask if I can take some of those roses out front to lay on her grave…”
“Or?”
“Or I just take them because no one lives here anymore.”
“I don’t want any trouble.”
“I need to know how it happened.”
Charles looked down, took a deep breath, and nodded. “She had what they called an ascending aortic aneurysm. Went to sleep one night, never woke up. I called the EMTs the next day but they said she’d been dead for hours by then.”
Amos nodded. “Were you good to her, Charles?”
“I loved her, boy,” he replied, a hint of steel in his voice. “You can do what you want here, I can’t stop you. But I won’t have you questioning that. I loved her from the moment we met to our last kiss goodnight. I still do.”
The old man’s voice didn’t quaver a bit, but his eyes were watery and his hands trembled.
“Can I sit?” Amos asked.
“Suit yourself. Let me know if you want more tea. Pot’s full.”
“Thank you, sir. I’m sorry about rousting you like that. But when I heard, I worried—”
“I know who Lydia was before we met,” Charles said, sitting down on a small couch facing him. “We were always honest with each other. But no one ever bothered us here. She just had a leaky artery and it gave out one night while she was sleeping. Nothing else.”
Amos rubbed his scalp for a moment, waiting to see if he believed the old guy. Seemed like he did.
“Thanks. And, again, I’m sorry if I came on strong,” Amos said. “So, can I take a few of those roses?”
“Sure,” Charles said with a sigh. “Ain’t my garden much longer anyway. Take what you want.”
“You moving?”
“Well, the guy who was doling Lydia stopped when she died. We had a little set aside, but not much. I’ll be going on basic pretty soon, so that means the government block.”
“Who was floating her?” Amos asked, already knowing the answer.
“Kid named Erich. Runs a crew in Lydia’s old hometown. Somebody you used to know, I guess.”
“Used to,” Amos agreed. “Does he know about you? That Lydia was married?”
“Sure. He kept in touch. Checked up on us.”
“And he cut you off after she died.”
It wasn’t a question, and Charles didn’t answer, just sipped at his tea.
“So,” Amos said, standing up, “got a thing I need to go do. Don’t start moving out yet. One way or another, I’ll make sure you’ve got the money to keep this place.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Sort of do.”
“For her,” Charles said.
“For her.”
The high-speed to Baltimore took less time than the walk to the station had. The city itself hadn’t changed at all in the two decades Amos had been away. The same cluster of commercial high-rises, the same sprawl of basic and minimal-income housing stretching out until it hit the orderly blocks of middle-class houses on the outskirts. The same rotting seaweed smell of the drowned eastern shore, with the decaying shells of old buildings sticking out of the murky water like the ribs of some long-dead sea monster.
As much as the realization bothered him, Amos had to admit it looked like home.
He took an automated electric cab from the train station to his old neighborhood. Even at the street level, the city looked the same, more or less. The streetlights had been swapped out for a different, boxy design. Some of the streets had changed from pedestrian-exclusive to mixed use. The thugs and dealers and sex workers were different faces now, but they were all on pretty much the same corners and stoops their predecessors had worked. New weeds growing in all the city’s cracks, but they were the same cracks.