Don’t Let Me Go(110)

“Oh,” Grace said again.

“You sound tired.”

“I am. It’s late.”

“OK, I’ll go round up your mom and drive you guys home.”

On the way to the door, Grace smacked right into Curtis again. Literally. Banged her shins running into his chair.

“Ow,” she said. “I hope your mom and dad stay with it this time.”

“Seriously?” He still wouldn’t look at her.

“Of course seriously. I hated it when my mom was out using. I wouldn’t wish that on anybody. Not even you.”

Then they walked to Yolanda’s car together, Yolanda and Grace and Grace’s mom.

Yolanda said, “I thought you hated Curtis.”

“I do. He’s a giant stinkhead.”

“You were pretty nice to the giant stinkhead.”

“Yeah. Well. No point me being a giant stinkhead, too.”





Billy



It was nearly the end of June, the morning when Billy heard a soft knock on his door.

Nobody knocked on Billy’s door any more. No one. He had gotten his wish about that. Felipe still came once a week to take him to the grocery store, but at such a set time that Billy always waited for him in the hall. And no delivery person had come by here in ages.

“Who’s there?” he called through the door, trying not to sound edgy. Not realizing, until his words fed back to him, how badly he had failed.

Such a soft knock. Filled with something like trepidation, or even humility. If Billy had to venture a guess, he’d say the spooky, incredibly young couple upstairs needed something. Probably something he didn’t have anyway.

“Eileen Ferguson.”

“Oh,” Billy said, realizing deeply within himself how desperately he did not want to open the door for her. “What do you want from me?”

“I was hoping I could come in and talk.”

Her voice sounded lifeless and droopy, and it hit Billy hard that something might have happened to Grace.

He ran to the door and threw it wide.

“What’s wrong? Where’s Grace? Is she all right?”

“She’s fine. She’s downstairs.”

“Oh,” Billy said, his heart still hammering. “All right. You want to come in. All right. Come in. I guess. Should I make a pot of coffee?”

“Oh, my God, that would be great. I could so use some coffee. It’s near the end of the month and I’m out.”

She did not follow Billy into the kitchen. She just sat on the couch while Billy started the coffee. In his head, he tried on a dozen different ways to ask why she was there, but did not succeed in asking any of them.

“Black with sugar, right?”

“How do you know how I take my coffee?”

“Long story.”

Then he couldn’t decide whether to stand there and watch the coffee drip or go back out and sit with Eileen. And the decision locked him up so completely that he knew he had to break in one direction or another. So he rejoined her in his living room.

She did not speak.

“So, how’s Grace?”

“Medium,” Eileen said. “Still a little droopy.”

“Is she still dancing?”

“No. She says she got sick of doing that same dance over and over. She asked me if she could take lessons, but I said no. Because we don’t have the money. Seriously, we don’t. But all the time I was saying it I knew she could get lessons for free if I would let her, and I just felt like such a total shit.”

On the word “shit,” tears began to leak from Eileen, despite an obvious effort on her part to prevent them. Billy brought her a box of tissues. He’d had them for nearly a year. A box of tissues didn’t fly away, not like it had used to. Nobody came over to Billy’s and cried any more.

“I’m not sure how much you know about twelve-step programs,” she said.

“Really nothing.”

“You have to make amends to the people you hurt.”

“Oh. I would think you’d want to make amends to Grace, not me.”

“I already made amends to Grace. Why? It didn’t hurt you when I took her?”

“Oh, no. It did. Quite a lot. Still does.”

“Then why would you say Grace and not you?”

“Oh,” Billy said. “I don’t know. Good question. I guess because I care more about Grace than I care about me.”

After that conversation-stopper, a long silence reigned.

Finally Billy popped up and said, “Let me just go get us that coffee, and then you can do whatever this thing is you came to do.”

He noticed, as he handed her the mug, that his hands were shaking. Eileen must have noticed it, too.

He sat across from her, and nothing happened for a truly excruciating length of time. Billy sat stock-still, weirdly aware of the slant of morning light through his thin curtains, and the way tiny dust motes danced in it, performing in front of his nose.

“It was mostly humiliation,” Eileen said, startling him.

Billy did not dare speak.

“You know that feeling, like you’re a total fraud, and the world is going to find out, and then everybody’s going to judge you?”

“Yes,” Billy said. “I do.”