She nods. “Do Mormons even pee?”
“How would you figure that out? Feed one water and keep him in captivity?”
The front entrance isn’t clear to us, so we circle the building clockwise, keeping an eye out for Lois Clancy. As we get to the final part of our lap, I spot an elderly woman sitting on a bench under a tree. She’s wearing a beige floppy hat and a maroon jacket, and the black handbag on her lap looks too big for her small body.
I hurry over to her. “Mrs. Clancy?” I ask.
She smiles and puts her hand up in front of her mouth as if she’s shocked. “You’re Russ’s grandson.” She speaks slowly, as if her brain works at about one-fifth the speed of mine. “I didn’t get a good look at you the other night.”
“Yes.” I stand in front of her and let her look at me.
Her smile is warm and genuine. She shakes her head. “Well, you do look like him,” she says. “Isn’t that something. All these years later.”
I introduce her to Aisha, then we both sit down.
“I’m so terribly sorry about the other night,” she says.
I realize she doesn’t know that we heard her husband say that thing about black lesbians through the door. I look at Aisha, but she seems fine. “It’s okay,” I say, wanting to get past the awkward stuff and on to any information. “I hear you might have something for me?”
She nods and clutches her purse, and I get the sense that maybe I’m going too fast for her. “Your grandfather and I came here once and sat for hours. Such a pretty spot. We both loved choir music. Such a good man, that Russ.”
“What can you tell me about him? I found a letter he sent my dad last year, and I have no idea where he is. My dad is sick, and I’m trying to reunite them before —”
“Oh dear,” she says.
“So do you know where he is?”
“I don’t, dear. I must say I’m surprised —”
“What? What are you surprised about?”
She tightens her lips and looks down at her purse, which she slowly opens. She pulls out a slate-gray hardcover book. The title reads Alcoholics Anonymous.
“This is really all I have. I wanted to keep Russ’s anonymity,” she says, “but maybe in this case, it’s okay to break it.”
My heart pounds. “What? Please, tell me.”
“Your grandfather was in Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“Okay. I know about AA,” I say.
“He stayed with us for two weeks. I took him to his first meeting. I’ve been in the program now fifty-five years. We had a lot of good talks. Your grandfather was such a kind man.”
My throat catches. “Was?”
She waves it away. “Oh, I don’t mean that. I have no idea where he is. I lost touch with Russ about eighteen months after he stayed here. He didn’t answer three letters in a row, so I stopped writing.”
“Do you still have his address?”
She slowly shakes her head. “I’m sorry. That was many years ago.”
“That’s too bad,” I say.
“We wrote back and forth all the time. He was a good friend for the year I knew him.”
“Can you tell me about him?”
She is quiet for a long moment. “Hard life.”
“Could you say more about that?”
Again, it’s like we’re having an interview on TV and there’s a tape delay.
“I’m sorry, dear. I’m old-fashioned, maybe. I feel like there are things friends say to each other that shouldn’t ever get repeated.” She closes her eyes and bows her head. “Proverbs twenty-six twenty: ‘Without wood a fire goes out; without gossip a quarrel dies down.’ ”
She opens her eyes and smiles at us. I glance at Aisha and we share a look that could kill an old lady.
“But you might know something that could help us find him,” I say.
“The book is all I have for you. I can tell you that he was a good man, and he was never anything other than kind to me. Or my husband, who was not always kind to him.” She motions toward the book. “He sent me this a year after we met. Go on. Open it.”
On the inside front cover, there’s an inscription. I recognize the shaky handwriting.
She says, “It’s the AA Big Book. Russ sent it to me from San Francisco on his first AA birthday. That’s the anniversary of his first year in the program.”
San Francisco! Now we’re getting somewhere. “Okay,” I say, waiting for the next thing. The big thing that’s going to tell us what to do, where to go next. San Francisco, I guess. But that’s a pretty big place.
“So he got help for his problem,” Lois says.
I nod again. That’s cool. I’m glad my grandfather got help. But then she doesn’t say anything else. “So that’s it?”
Lois looks meek. She shrugs her shoulders. “I thought you’d want the book. I thought you’d want to know that he joined the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous. It’s life-changing, you know.”
“Sorry,” I say. “I’m glad. It’s just, I need to find him. I feel like you know something and you’re not telling me, and … I mean, it’s still a dead end. You really won’t tell me about his struggles?”
“That’s not for me to tell.”
I sigh, thinking about the stupid Bible quote. Maybe it’s true that gossip is bad, but I’m not asking for gossip. I’m asking for information about an actual family member so I can find him and save my dad’s life. But Lois doesn’t seem like the kind of old lady who’s going to change her mind. “You sure you don’t know anything else that could help me find him?”
“I’ve found many answers in the book,” she says slowly, and I have no idea what the hell that means, but to her it means something, I guess, because she stands up.
“Bless you both,” she says. “God can, and God will. If you let him.” And then she toddles off.
We sit there, watching her leave, and the only thing she’s told us that’s new is that my grandfather went to San Francisco. But did he stay there? What happened after he stopped writing her? Without any more information, that’s just about nothing.
“Done. Over,” I say. “We’re heading back to Billings.”
Aisha leans back on the bench. “Looks that way.”
I thumb through the book absentmindedly. Two pages after my grandfather’s inscription, on the bottom of the copyright page, is more writing. The writing is circled in a different color of ink.
“Huh,” I say, pointing it out to Aisha.
She looks. “Keep coming back. Turk B.”
“She circled it. That’s a new circle.”
Aisha grabs the book and studies the circle. “Yeah,” she says. “That’s new.”
“I guess she thinks it’s not gossip to just circle something?” Lois is out of sight now, and I have no idea where she went.
“That’s so weird. Religious people can be so weird,” Aisha says.
“What do you suppose the ‘Keep coming back’ part means?”
“I have no clue. Looks like someone gave the book to him before he sent it to Lois.”
“There’s a number,” I say. “No area code.”
Aisha pulls out her phone. “You said he went to San Francisco, right?”
“Yep.”
She Googles it. “The San Francisco area code is four-one-five,” she says. “Give it a try. I mean, it’s from nineteen eighty-something, but —”
“This Turk B. guy could still have a landline. He’s an old person,” I say. My heart is in my throat. I take out my phone and punch in the number. The ring sounds old, which gives me hope. It just rings and rings. I stay on for a full minute, wishing someone would answer.