Don’t Let Me Go(106)

“He’s going to come over in a minute to talk to you himself,” she said, settling comfortably on his couch. She’d begun to stay for long visits since the cat moved out. “But I just wanted to talk to you alone for a minute first.”

Billy sighed, and waited, and let the information filter down into his gut. It was hardly unexpected. That was the best he could say for it. And he knew it must be a much greater hell for Rayleen, who was, after all, his girlfriend.

“Well,” Billy said, in his best attempt at circumspection, “it’s not like we didn’t know it would happen. Sooner or later. Is he leaving you with the car?”

A long silence. A silence freighted with some important subtext, but Billy could not imagine what it was. After all, it was just an old junker of a car.

“I’m going with him,” Rayleen said.

And they sat.

“We’ve been talking about it for a while now,” she said. “But I didn’t know if I could bring myself to abandon Grace. But now we can’t see Grace anyway…And, look, I feel really bad about leaving you, too. It’s not that I don’t get that this probably feels like an abandonment to you, too. But—”

“But I’m a grown man,” Billy said. “I may not do the world’s best job at it, but I’m an adult. And it would be lunacy for you to stay here just for me. Absolute lunacy.”

“Thank you,” Rayleen said, “I really appreciate you taking it this way. It’s just that…I just keep thinking maybe this is the last train to happy. And I better get on.”

“You better,” Billy said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Billy said. “Just go be happy. Just get on the damn train.”

? ? ?

Later on that same lonely day, Jesse came over by himself, to say a proper goodbye. He held a paper grocery sack in one hand.

“I brought you three presents,” he said, in that voice Billy could no longer recall how to live without. “Well, two and a half. They’re not new. They’re hand-me-down presents, because I’m almost out of savings. I need to go home and get back to work.”

He handed Billy the bag.

Inside Billy found a pair of red-silk pajamas, which he realized with a jolt must have been Jesse’s, and the partially burned sage stick.

“That’s not an invitation to live in pajamas twenty-four seven,” Jesse said.

“I’ll try not to take it as such. Thank you. Is the sage stick the half?”

In which case one whole present was still missing, but it might seem ungrateful to say so.

“Oh. The car,” Jesse said. “We’re leaving the car. I was going to leave it to you, but we talked it over and decided it would be more of a burden to you than anything else. You’d have to go to the DMV and get it in your name, and get your license back, and pay for insurance. So I signed it over to Felipe, with the understanding that it’s really for the three of you. You and Felipe and Mrs. Hinman. So I guess that’s a third of a present. He promised to drive the two of you to the grocery store at least once a week.”

“That’ll be nice for Mrs. Hinman.”

“That’s what we thought,” Jesse said. “I think it’s hard for her to walk.”

“It is.”

“We thought it’d be nice for you, too. That delivery service can’t be cheap.”

“It costs almost as much as the groceries,” Billy said.

“Something to remember us by.”

And then he stepped in and embraced Billy. And it hurt so much that Billy almost couldn’t embrace him back. And not because of his ribs, either, though they still ached some. But in time he did manage to fulfill his side of the hug.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do without you guys.”

He’d been trying not to say it. But sooner or later it had been bound to break through.

“You won’t be without us,” Jesse said. “We’ll just be a lot farther away. And you’ll have to start checking your mailbox again.”

“I can do that,” Billy said.

? ? ?

Three lonely days later, they were gone.

? ? ?

In the four lonely days that followed, Billy and Felipe and Felipe’s shy girlfriend Clara and the building super, Casper, moved Mrs. Hinman downstairs into Rayleen’s old apartment, which seemed to make her happy.

And seeing Mrs. Hinman happy made Billy feel just the tiniest bit less lonely. But like everything else, good and bad, the feeling passed along on its own.

In the lonely weeks that followed, Billy now and then heard unfamiliar voices in the hallway as two new couples moved in.

Once he stuck his head out into the hall and said hello to one of the couples, a young Hispanic boy and girl who didn’t look a day over seventeen. But it seemed to alarm them. So he gave up on that and went back to being lonely.

? ? ?

Two lonely months later, Billy found another bright yellow note tucked under his door.

It said, in Grace’s careful block printing:

MR. LAFFERTY THE GIRL CAT MISSES YOU. AND SO DO I.



LOVE, GRACE



The words had been written inside a border, a little pen drawing. At first Billy took it to be a stylized heart, even though the top lobes were too pointy, and the series of loops all around it didn’t seem to fit the heart motif. Later he realized it was a pair of wings, the loops depicting feathers.