Don’t Let Me Go(43)

“What did she say to you?”

“Oh, she had a few choice names for me. And she kept saying she didn’t believe it was really Grace’s idea. But I think she might be closer to believing it now.”

Rayleen began to move toward the door, and Billy ran quickly to unlock it for her.

“Are we doing the right thing?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Billy,” she said. “Hope to God we are.”

She looked both ways before carrying the girl out into the hall and then unlocking her own apartment.

Billy watched them go, then locked up tight himself.

“God,” he said out loud. “A concept like shine. We remember it, but it just seems so distant now.”

? ? ?

He sat up all night in front of the TV, watching old movies. To avoid the beating of wings. But he drifted off about four thirty in the morning, halfway through Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and so they caught him just the same.





Grace



It was the following Sunday, and Grace was on her way upstairs to go see Felipe, to give him a message from Rayleen. But when she got up close to his apartment door, she saw the door to Mr. Lafferty’s old place standing wide open.

She figured she should probably just ignore it, after all the yelling and grabbing that had happened last time she’d tried to get near there, but by that time she’d forgotten the message for Felipe anyway, so that left her with nothing much to do.

She held still for a long time, trying to hear whether or not there was anyone at home inside Mr. Lafferty’s apartment. Then she heard a big sneeze, and it made her jump.

She clicked over to the open doorway (she was wearing her tap shoes, because she loved them) carefully, ready for anything. A man in jeans and a red sweater was sitting on a little chair, like a kitchen chair, going through some papers in a filing cabinet.

He looked up right away and saw Grace there, even though she was being very quiet.

“Hello there,” he said.

“Hi,” Grace said, and it came out quiet. Probably because she was just a little bit scared.

“Do you live around here?”

“Yeah,” Grace said. “I used to live in the basement apartment with my mom, but I can’t live with her right now because she’s…not feeling good, so I’m sort of mostly living downstairs with Rayleen in apartment D. Who are you?”

“Peter Lafferty,” he said. “I flew in this morning to go through my father’s things. Not that there’s much here to go through. But, even so. I have arrangements to make, anyway.”

“What kind of arrangements?”

He looked right at Grace, like he was trying to decide something, but Grace wasn’t sure what. His eyes were a nice color of green.

“I have to figure out if he left any instructions. For…Well, things like whether he wanted to be buried or cremated. That type of arrangements.”

“Oh,” Grace said.

“Did you know my father?”

“Yeah, I did. He was nice to me. He did three nice things for me, all in just a couple of days.”

He looked up at her again when she said that, and Grace could see he was suddenly more interested. She looked at his eyes, and decided that what she’d just said was more interesting to him than anything else.

“So you knew him well?”

“Not very well, no. But he was nice to me.”

“You didn’t…”

But then it started to seem like he would never finish his thought.

“What?” Grace asked, when she had run out of patience.

“You didn’t spend time alone with him or anything, right?”

“No, why?”

“I just wondered.”

Then he went back to looking through the folders in the filing cabinet.

“Everybody else thought he was mean, but he was nice to me, so I was thinking maybe it’s that he didn’t like people much, but he liked kids.”

“You can say that again,” Peter said, like there was some little joke in saying that, but Grace didn’t get that joke.

Then she couldn’t think of anything more to say, and Peter didn’t say anything more, so it was quiet for a long time.

Grace looked around the apartment. She’d never seen inside Mr. Lafferty’s before. It looked very clean and well-organized, and the rug was brand new. All the other rugs in this building were years old, actually worn thin in the spots that got walked on the most.

“That’s a very pretty new rug,” Grace said, thinking it would be a nice thing to say, but then the minute it came out of her mouth she remembered. She remembered what that awful building super, Casper, had said about pulling up the floorboards and putting down a new rug. And then she wished she hadn’t said anything about it in the first place. “Sorry,” she said. “Never mind. Forget I ever mentioned it. I just remembered why.”

Peter didn’t even look up during any of this, so she didn’t know if she’d upset him or not. She leaned her shoulder on the doorway and watched him for a while, even though what he was doing didn’t seem very interesting.

After a few minutes he sneezed another big, explosive sneeze.

“Bless you,” Grace said.

He looked up then, like he was a little surprised that she would say “Bless you,” even though it seemed to Grace like a normal enough thing to say.