The Weight of Him(21)

He arrived at the stationery shop, breathless. The dim, musty space boasted a bigger turnover in staff than it did in its tired, dated stock, but he liked to support small businesses. The cashier stood slouched behind the counter, a mobile phone held close to his face. The light of its screen lent his dark cheeks and forehead a bluish tint. The lone customer nodded at Billy and exited, a white-haired man with a broad build and a spring in his step that made Billy think of his father. He was whistling the tune to some ballad Billy recognized but couldn’t name. Billy removed the two flyers from his back trousers pocket and moved toward the rear of the shop. The cashier seemed oblivious, enthralled with whatever game he was playing on his phone.

It took several trial runs with various paper weights, and many paper jams later, but Billy succeeded in copying the pledge sheet and the flyer for the march onto the thickest, most durable paper possible. As the machine spat out the copies, he placed the failed pages into the recycling bin, glad they would get another go-around. He watched the clock. He would never make it back to the factory and his conveyor belt in time. He was pushing his luck, and right when he wanted to keep favor with Tony and Bald Art and not cause any more waves. He needed the factory’s sponsorship. He also needed to keep saving the seconds.

His jaw locked. Bald Art had made such a stupid, unnecessary fuss about the missing seconds. So what if Billy was taking them home? They were going to be dumped anyway. Billy had thought of Bald Art as a friend. So much for that. His mood hardened. Bald Art needed to keep out of his business. He’d been messed with enough already.

The copier finished, he plucked the stack of sheets from the tray and hurried toward the cash register. Michael’s photograph stared up from the warm bundle. Billy thought of a Wanted poster and Michael’s upcoming inquest. He’d give anything not to have to go. Would give anything to spare Tricia from it, too, but nothing would make her miss it.

“Of course I’m going,” she’d told him. “How could I not?” Her fear, and her anger at a heartless legal system that was putting them through all this, had felt like something live in the air between them. He suspected her crackling rage was also aimed at Michael, but he doubted she’d ever admit as much to herself, let alone to him or anyone else.

At the register, Billy reached into his back pocket for his wallet. The cashier lifted the stack of copies, about to place them inside a brown bag.

“Any chance you’d put a couple of these in your window?” Billy asked. “It’s for a good cause.”

The cashier scanned the paperwork. “Handsome boy.”

“Yes, he was.” Sweat fastened Billy’s shirt to his back. He pictured large, dark animal shapes. A hippo. An elephant. A raging bull.

“He your son?”

“Yeah, got his looks from his mother, obviously.”

The cashier’s dark finger jumped back and forth between Michael and Billy’s pixilated faces. “I see you in him.” Pain filled Billy’s throat like food he couldn’t swallow.

The cashier removed a flyer from the top of each stack, promising to put them in the front window. Billy thanked him and paid, tucked the thick brown bag under his arm. As he walked out, the cashier called after him, a five-euro note held between two fingers and his face split with a large smile. “Good on you, Big Billy.”

Billy accepted the money, a warm feeling spreading through him. “Thank you…?”

“Ajadi.”

“Ajadi,” Billy repeated, liking the feel of the name in his mouth. His stomach growled. “Thank you, Ajadi.” He left the shop, savoring the thrill of having impressed someone.

*

After a bland dinner of brown rice, steamed vegetables, and a broiled chicken breast, Billy placed the flyers inside two manila folders and prepared to leave the house, his head full of Michael’s initials in the tree.

“Where are you going?” Tricia asked.

“To put up flyers around the village.”

“You’re going ahead with it, then?”

“Why are you so dead set against this?” he asked. “I’m trying to save lives, in Michael’s name.”

“Why does it have to be you? Can’t you let someone else take it on?”

“I want it to be me. I want to do good.”

“What about what I want? What the rest of your family wants?”

“What do you want?”

“I’ll tell you what I don’t want. I don’t want Michael, everything, to be about suicide now. Tell me you can understand that?”

“Everything is about suicide now.”

“Please,” she said. “You need to stop all this, if not for me or your parents, then for the children’s sakes. They need things to get back to some kind of normal around here, and the sooner the better.”

She sounded as though she were being tortured. That hurt Billy in a way that was new, in a way he didn’t know you could ache. “I’m sorry,” he told her. “I can’t turn back. Nothing has ever felt so right. If all I do is help save even one life in Michael’s name and spare another family from what we’re going through, wouldn’t that be something?”

She searched his face, her eyes filling. “Yeah, of course it would, but it’s the way you’re going about it all, it’s not right.”