Infinite(12)

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” he asked finally, when it was obvious I wasn’t going to open up. He eyed me from behind the wheel, his expression calm and serious, the way it always was. The city lights reflected in his glasses. Even at this late hour, he looked smoothly shaved, except for the neat beard around his mustache and chin.

“Come on, buddy,” he went on. “Talk to me.”

“I drank too much. I got in a fight.”

“You’ve been sober for months. Why fall off the wagon now?”

“It’s been crazy at work. I just wrapped up a week-long conference. I wasn’t ready to go home, so I went to a bar in Mayfair.”

“Is that all?”

It took me a long time to answer. “Okay, it’s also the anniversary.”

“There we go.”

“If I went home, I’d think about it, and I didn’t want to do that tonight.”

Roscoe shook his head. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“I needed to deal with this myself.”

“No, you didn’t. How many times have I told you that? Anyway, it doesn’t matter. You were alone, and you’d been drinking. Then what happened?”

“There was this man at the bar,” I said. “He was being a shit to his girlfriend. I told him to knock it off.”

“I’m sure that went over well,” Roscoe said.

“Yeah. He threw a drink in my face. The girl said I should mind my own business.”

“So you hit him?”

“No. I said thanks, I needed a shower. That was that. The two of them left. I finished my drink and headed out of the bar like fifteen minutes later. But they were still on the street, screaming at each other. I tried to ignore it. I was waiting at the bus stop, and I wasn’t going to do anything.”

“But?”

“But he hit her, Roscoe. He just hauled off and slugged the woman in the face. I lost it. I went over there and threw him to the ground. I got down on my knees and began beating the hell out of him. The two of us went at it until the police got there.”

Roscoe didn’t say anything for a while.

He eased the car to a stop, because Montrose was closed ahead of us. Overnight construction was underway. Weird, when you add up all the things that make a difference. The little choices that change everything. If some bureaucrat had picked a different night for the construction, Roscoe would be alive. If we’d taken Irving Park east instead of Montrose, he’d still be alive.

More than anything, if I’d kept my cool outside that bar, my friend would still be alive.

Roscoe turned onto a leafy side street a couple of blocks from Horner Park. We drove past matchbox homes and old three-story apartment buildings. Cars were parked on both sides, blocking our view. He drove slowly and kept looking over at me, focused on me and my story. He should have been paying more attention, but it was the middle of the night on a deserted street.

“I’m him,” I said.

“Who?”

“My father.”

Roscoe sighed as he pulled up to a stop sign. The only thing that I remembered from that intersection was a house for sale at the corner. A gold stone apartment building with a sign mounted on the lawn.

CHANCE PROPERTIES

I remembered it because it made me think about chance. Chance ruled everything. Chance determined who lived and who died.

“I’m him,” I said again. “My father lost control that night. That’s what happens to me.”

Roscoe took a loud breath. I had no way of knowing it was practically his last one. “Why?” he asked me.

“What?”

“Why did you attack that man? Why did you go after him?”

“Because he hit that girl.”

“Exactly.”

Roscoe eased his foot onto the accelerator and started across the intersection. He was distracted, and he forgot to look right. If he had, he would have seen the headlights of the truck coming down the one-way street and barreling through the stop sign. I was off in my own world and didn’t see it either.

“Buddy, you’re not your father,” Roscoe told me.

That’s the last thing I remembered until I woke up and saw Karly’s face.





CHAPTER 5

This was where we’d met.

The ash tree on the corner still bore the scars of the accident. The truck hit us so hard that it drove Roscoe’s car over the curb and wrapped it around the tree trunk. I ran my fingers over the jagged crevices in the bark, which were the only remaining evidence that something violent had occurred here.

I hadn’t really intended to come back to this place, but Alicia’s office wasn’t far away. The day had turned dark, and rain began to spit on my face. I looked up at the old apartment building at the corner of the intersection. That was the building that had been for sale back then, with Karly as the listing agent. It was one of her first properties. She was twenty-five years old, determined to get a top price to impress her mother. She’d been working late out of a vacant apartment, and she’d fallen asleep, when the noise of the accident awakened her. That was when she rushed downstairs to find me in the car, broken and bleeding.

This beautiful stranger promised not to leave me, and she kept her promise.

Karly rode in the ambulance with me. She stayed in the hospital room with me and nursed me back to health in her own bed. For weeks, she held together the pieces of a shattered man who blamed himself for his friend’s death. I fell in love with her almost immediately, but I couldn’t understand why she’d fallen in love with me, too. The closer she got to me, the more I kept telling her to walk away.