Don’t Let Me Go(29)

Billy rose to object, but it felt like too much trouble.

“You go first,” he said.

“OK. What I want more than anything is for my mom to get better. And what scares me most is what Mr. Lafferty said, about how people almost never do. Because then I got to thinking that maybe she never will.”

Silence. The rain fell harder, if such a thing were even possible. Like water falling from a chute, all at once and not even separated out into drops.

“That was a fast turn,” he said.

“Your turn.”

“I know. That’s what I was just complaining about. OK. Here goes. What I want the most is…nothing. That’s the problem. Everything I ever cared about is behind me, and there’s nothing left to want. And, by the way, that’s also what scares me. No future. Nothing to want. That’s no way to live, let me tell you, baby girl.”

They watched the rain in silence for a few minutes more.

“Usually the game makes me feel better,” Grace said.

“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“This day sucks.”

“No more so than usual, if you ask me.”

“Next time I won’t, then,” Grace said.

? ? ?

It didn’t seem late enough for Rayleen to be home. But then he heard her knock. She had a special knock, Rayleen. With a rhythm to it. Four little taps. One, two three…pause…four. If it could go on long enough, you could almost dance to it. And the real beauty of the situation was that Billy hadn’t had to tell her that a special knock would do wonders for his anxiety disorder. She’d figured it out on her own.

He tilted his head toward the still-silent Grace.

“Did you lock it?”

“Oh. No, I forgot. I slipped and fell, and then I had to take the shoes off, and then I forgot.”

But that was a natural enough turn of events, Billy thought. The truly bizarre angle of the situation was that he’d forgotten, too.

“It’s open,” he called. “Come in.”

The door swung wide and Rayleen looked in at them, questioningly.

“What the hell happened to you two?” she asked.

Billy sighed. “Nobody thrives every day,” he said.

“Rayleen,” Grace said. “Can I go ask Mr. Lafferty if he’ll go to the lumber store for us? I know you don’t like him, and I know you don’t really like for me to be around him, but it’s just this one favor. Just so we can get a big piece of wood. Please can I go ask him?”

“A big piece of wood for what?”

“For a dance floor for my tap dancing. So we can put it over the rug, and then it won’t wake up my mom, and so then she can’t come up here and yell at Billy.”

“I don’t know, Grace. He’s such a rotten guy. I’d be surprised if he’d be willing to do you a favor.”

“I could ask, though.”

“Sure. You can ask.”

Grace ran out the door, still in her sock feet.

Billy looked up at Rayleen, who studied his face for a moment. Then he patted the couch beside his hip and she came over and sat with him.

“Question,” he said. “Are we enabling Grace’s mom by taking care of her kid?”

“Hmm,” Rayleen said. “Never thought about it.”

“Too bad. I was hoping you’d say no. It’s just that she does nothing but sleep twenty-three hours a day, and it seems to me she wouldn’t be able to do that without us.”

“Or she just would anyway, and Grace would pay for it.”

“But this way she can do it guilt-free, and with no consequences.”

“What got you thinking about this?”

“Something Lafferty said to the kid.”

“Lafferty! That figures. Goddamn that man. I hate him so much. Maybe I should go after Grace before she even gets up there.”

“Too late. I’m sure she’s talking to him by now.”

Rayleen sighed. Sat back. Gazed out Billy’s big sliding-glass door. What was it about rain that made people want to gaze?

“Sure is coming down out there,” she said.

A long silence, during which Billy had no comment to offer about the rain. It simply rained. It wasn’t one of those things you talked much about, he felt. It was one of those things that just was.

“OK,” Rayleen said. “Honest answer: maybe. I don’t know. I guess I’ll have to give that some thought.”

“Don’t you hate it when a guy like that is right?”

“On those rare occasions when it happens, yes.”





Grace



Grace stood in the hall in front of Mr. Lafferty’s door, balanced on one foot, and scratching the instep of her other foot through the three layers of socks. She’d put Billy’s wool ones on the inside, because they were the ones that bunched up the most when you tried to pull tap shoes over them. But, on the inside, they itched.

The door opened, and Mr. Lafferty looked over her head, frowning, but then he looked down, and the frown disappeared.

It seemed odd to Grace that he was ready with a frown for anybody tall. Only Grace didn’t seem to bring that out in him.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said, sounding like she was an OK person for it to be.