Don’t Let Me Go(7)

Lafferty swelled his chest and opened his mouth to speak, but the noisy girl beat him to it.

“Do you guys have to fight?” she asked, at full volume.

Billy smiled, inwardly admiring her. From where on earth did that brand of courage emerge? Then again, she was a kid. A kid could get away with just about anything.

Lafferty looked down at the girl disapprovingly.

“Why aren’t you in school?”

“Her name is Grace,” Felipe said.

“I know that,” Lafferty said, but it came off as unconvincing, and Billy was not sure, from the sound of it, whether Lafferty had known that at all. “Why aren’t you in school, Grace?”

“Cause I’m not allowed to walk all that way by myself. My mom has to take me. And she’s asleep.”

“At nine o’clock in the morning?”

“Is it nine o’clock?”

“It is. Five after.”

“Then, yeah. At nine o’clock.”

“That doesn’t sound right.”

“You’re the one with the watch,” Grace said.

Lafferty sighed miserably. “Do you have a key?”

Yes, Billy thought. She does. It’s very new. It sparkles. It has shine. That wonderful, indefinable quality. Shine.

“Yep.” She held the key up so Lafferty could see it. It still dangled on the long cord around her neck.

“Go inside and see if you can wake her up.”

“I already tried.”

“Try again. Will ya?”

The girl blew out her breath, loud and dramatic. Then she rose to her feet and tromped inside.

The minute she did, Felipe made his way down the stairs. Lafferty moved closer, stood nearly chest to chest with the younger man, and they stared each other down.

Billy leaned on the edge of the sliding door, feeling mildly faint.

“I’m not your compa?ero,” Lafferty said.

“You don’t even know what it means.”

“No, I don’t, and that’s just the trouble.”

“It’s not an insult.”

“Well, how am I to know? When I was your age, I was taught to respect my elders. My father taught me that.”

“You know what my father taught me? That if I wanted respect I better plan on earning it. All I did was get down and ask that little girl how come she wasn’t in school, and then here you come out of nowhere, treating me like I’m some kind of child-molester or something.”

“You shouldn’t even ask her that much. It’s a crazy world. Everybody’s suspicious about everything. Guy your age shouldn’t even get that near a little girl to ask anything at all. It could be taken the wrong way.”

“A guy my age? You sure my age is the problem here? What about you? You asked her.”

“That’s different. I’m older.”

“Oh. Right. I forgot. Guys in their fifties are never child-molesters.”

“You got a mouth on you, son.”

“I’m not your son.”

“You’re sure as hell not. If you were my son you’d treat me with respect.”

Just then Grace appeared again, and the two men jumped back, as if the little girl were their parent or their teacher, and they’d been caught fighting. It seemed ludicrous to Billy from the outside, from the observer’s stance, but in another way he could imagine how such a thing could happen in the confusion of the moment.

“She won’t wake up,” Grace said.

Lafferty looked at Felipe, who looked back.

“That doesn’t seem right,” Lafferty said to Felipe. Then, to the girl, “Did you see any bottles lying around?”

“No. What kind of bottles?”

“Like the kind of bottles you drink from.”

“She wasn’t drinking.”

“Is she OK? Should somebody call a doctor?”

“She’s not sick. You just can’t wake her up when she’s sleeping.”

She sat back down on the stairs, as if planning on staying a while.

Lafferty looked back at Felipe again. Then he took the young man by the sleeve and pulled him across the weedy grass and out of the earshot of the little girl.

And that, unfortunately, put them squarely out of the range of Billy’s ears as well.

But they weren’t fighting now. That much Billy could tell from their body language. They had their heads together, conferring about something, deciding something. Occasionally Lafferty would glance over his shoulder toward Grace.

“Have a wonderful solution,” Billy said, out loud, but quietly enough so as not to give himself away to Grace, who was still quite close by on the stairs. “Because this is certainly a problem.”

But a moment later Felipe peeled away and strode down the sloping lawn, out on to the sidewalk, and down the street.

Lafferty came up the stairs, and Billy waited hopefully, still thinking his neighbor might have a perfect idea up his sleeve. But he walked right by Grace, as if some alien force field had suddenly rendered her invisible.

Just as his foot touched the top step, he looked up and saw Billy watching — caught his eye — which was as close as possible to the only part of Billy peeking around the curtain. He stopped in his tracks.

“What’re you looking at?” he bellowed.