Don't Fail Me Now(75)

“What did he die of?” Leah asks. She’s more composed now, but her nostrils are still flaring.

“Well, he had hep C,” Carly says. “But so do I. The difference is, he kept drinking. I told him he had to quit, but he couldn’t. So his liver went. And once the liver goes . . .” She shakes her head and looks down at the shoebox. She takes off the lid, revealing a beat-up brown wallet, some car keys, a pair of aviator sunglasses, and a half-full pack of cigarettes. She puts the cigarettes and the car keys in her purse and then looks through the wallet for bills, finding none.

“Can I see that?” I ask. Carly shrugs and hands it to me, and I pull out Buck’s driver’s license from behind a scratched plastic window. The photo’s not too sharp, but he looks pretty much the same as I remember him. Longish hair, handsome face, maybe a little thinner in the cheeks. There’s an address listed for Venice Boulevard. “Does he have an apartment?” I ask.

“Please, that man had no credit,” Carly says. “That’s an old girlfriend’s place where he used to get mail. Since we hooked up, he’s been staying with me.” Drinking, bouncing from place to place, making promises he couldn’t keep—it seems like Buck didn’t change much. The thought is both depressing and oddly comforting.

“I’m Michelle,” I say, realizing I haven’t introduced myself. Not that she seems to have been wondering.

“Nice to meet you, honey,” she says, extending a bony hand. “You look like him. All three of you girls.” She smiles at Tim. “You, not so much, but you’re a cutie like Buck. Just don’t be a jerk like him, okay?”

“I won’t,” Tim says and puts a hand on the small of my back.

“Buck called,” I say, glancing at Leah. “He said he had something for us. Did he leave a will or anything?”

“There’s nothing but a lot of debt that I know of,” Carly sighs. “Luckily his mother’s taking care of that. She’s living large out in Utah someplace. Stopped giving him any money a while back, though.” She frowns into the box. “Unless you count paying for the funeral.”

“What about the car?” I ask.

“He left that to me,” she says a little sharply, closing the shoebox with a possessive thump. “It was one of the last things he said.” She laughs bitterly. “It figures he’d spend his last living minutes yakking about a stupid car.”

I turn back to Leah and Tim. “He didn’t say anything about what it was?” I ask. Leah bites her lip and shakes her head, and Tim frowns apologetically. “It was an heirloom,” I say to Carly. “Something from his family, maybe?” Hearing that “Grandma” Polly got rich gives me a sliver of hope. Maybe there was a piece of jewelry she gave him specifically for us. Maybe he didn’t tell Carly because he knew she’d try to cheat us.

“Oh,” she says, smacking her thigh. “Of course. I remember now. There’s another car somewhere, one he got from his dad. That one’s yours. Hope it’s worth something.”

A hysterical giggle rips out of my throat. Goldie. The “heirloom” he left for us was Goldie. I don’t know what’s worse, that she’s as dead as Buck is or that he had the nerve to leave us a piece of property that he already left behind eleven years ago and that we already owned by default.

“You okay?” Carly asks, and I nod mutely. I look back and see Cass and Leah whispering furiously. “Well,” she says, standing up, clutching her worthless box. “I have to get to work. The funeral’s Friday, if you’re sticking around. All of his Venice Beach buddies are coming. It’s gonna be a good time, just like Buck would have wanted.” Her eyes are watery and unfocused, and for a second I’m afraid she’ll burst into tears. But instead she just blinks a few times, gives us a limp wave, and bangs the door open with one bony hip. It slams shut behind her with a brittle clap.

“Wow,” Cass says.

“Who was that lady?” Denny asks.

“No one,” Leah says, clenching her jaw. Her eyes flash. “So that’s it?” she asks, looking back and forth between Cass and me. “That’s all we came for?” She sits down hard on a chair and bursts into tears.

“Hey.” I crouch down and rest my hands on her knees. It’s kind of a relief to be able to snap into comforting mode instead of dealing with my own feelings, which still are shifting kaleidoscopically from guilt to disappointment to anger and back again. “I know it’s not what we wanted, but if we had never come, we’d always wonder.” I look up at Cass; this is meant for her, too. “And now we know.”

“It just seems so unfair,” Leah cries.

“That’s because it is.” It’s all unfair: what Buck did to us, what happened to Mom, the fact that we traveled this far, sacrificing so much, only for Buck to peace out for good while we sat on a Greyhound bus just hours away, leaving us with nothing but a broken-down car full of bad memories. There’s nothing that’s ever going to make that fair. I try to think of something to say to soften the blow, but instead I find a lump forming in my throat. “Excuse me,” I whisper and make a break for the bathroom. I know I need to stop crying in them—it’s so pathetic and clichéd. But in order to break down I need a closed door, and that’s the only one I see.