Save Me from Dangerous Men (Nikki Griffin #1)(28)
“So does Flannery O’Connor always make her characters suffer this much?”
We were reading The Violent Bear It Away. The question was from Samantha. She was gorgeous, a tall black woman with an orange silk Hermès scarf wrapped high around her neck. She had a beautiful husky voice and sang jazz at the local East Bay clubs. She always wore the scarf. I was probably the only one in the room who had seen the lurid scar that the scarf concealed. Or met the person who put it there. A drunk heckler at a nightclub in Oakland. He’d gotten angry when she made some mild joke after an hour of him shouting for her to take off her top. Supposedly the heckler was a local tough guy. The house bouncer had conveniently gone deaf.
“Suffer, sure. But not only suffer,” I said. O’Connor was a favorite. “Her characters struggle. With themselves, with the world, with their faith and identity. With who they are. With what they believe.”
Samantha nodded. “I get the struggle part.” A few of the women smiled. Knowing nods. There had been some struggle in that group. I saw Zoe smile for the first time. Her eyes were excited. I saw Jess had given her a spare copy of the book.
That night, in response to Samantha’s joke, the heckler had thrown a highball glass that shattered on the brick wall behind her, spraying a burst of glass splinters. I’d held a dish towel against her neck until the ambulance arrived. The heckler had left quickly after he heard the screams. Self-preservation in the very lowest form. The security cameras had been down and Oakland kept the cops busy. Maybe they’d tried hard to track him down. Maybe they hadn’t. I’d always privately felt that if there wasn’t a body laid out neatly next to a smoking gun, some cops seemed to suddenly care a lot less about getting to the bottom of things. I’d seen plenty of cops seem more excited about giving a traffic ticket than solving a cold case. It didn’t surprise me that eventually they had given up the search.
I hadn’t.
It had taken me three weeks. Asking around up and down the city. Bars, gyms, backdoor card games, barber shops, liquor stores, the works. Finally, I got a name. With a name, everything became much easier. Pretty soon I had an address to go with the name.
Afterward I was pretty sure the heckler wouldn’t throw glasses anymore. He probably wouldn’t be much good at throwing anything. Maybe a few years down the line he’d be able to lob a bocce ball, although he hadn’t seemed like the bocce ball type.
“Have a cookie, Nikki. Fresh-baked this morning,” said Marlene, offering me a plate piled with oatmeal cookies. She was a wide-hipped, cheerful woman who was the head chef at one of Berkeley’s most beloved restaurants, The Redwood Tavern, just down the block. Marlene never failed to show up to the book club meetings with something delicious.
“I can’t,” I said apologetically.
“Don’t tell me you’re watching your weight,” she exclaimed. “Where’s that leave me?”
I’d met Marlene a few years earlier. She’d been having a hard time, working at a San Francisco restaurant owned by one of the celebrity chefs, the handsome, enfant terrible type who not only got their own cookbooks but then went and posed shirtless on calendars with a cigarette and scowl. A genius in the kitchen, but not really a nice guy at all. Not to his female employees, anyway.
I’d helped her move on.
“I have a dinner right after this,” I explained. “No cookies. I need my appetite.”
“A date,” clarified Jess. “A double date. And our poor Nikki is terrified.” There was laughter and I theatrically threw an arm over my eyes and slid down in my chair. I liked the book club sessions. Half talking books, half just talking. I’d been in the habit of informally inviting some of the women I helped to drop by the store and stay in touch. But the actual idea, the book club idea, had been Jess’s.
The door opened and a voice called out. “Anyone work here?” The speaker was a Hispanic guy of about thirty, brooding eyes and black hair frozen solid with styling gel. Stubble shadowed his face and I smelled his cologne from halfway across the store. He held a plastic-wrapped bunch of red roses in one hand.
Jess stood and hurried over. “Sorry, right here! Can I help you find a book?”
The man shot her a broad smile and gestured with the roses. “Actually, you can help me find my girlfriend.”
Her tone changed. “This is a bookstore. That’s what we have. Books.”
Zoe was already standing. “What are you doing here, Luis?”
“Can I talk to you, baby?”
“I’m busy now, I can’t talk.”
His voice lowered, pleading. “I came by to say sorry, baby. That’s all.”
Our group had fallen quiet; one of those awkward moments when talking and trying not to listen seemed equally impossible. “Just come here for a second,” he said again. “You know I love you.”
Her voice was determined. “No, Luis. Leave me alone. I’m busy. I mean it.”
He gestured again with the flowers. “Fine, baby. I just wanted to give these to you.” His voice changed, some of the affection fading to disinterest. “I don’t want to bother you. I’ll get out of here.”
She hesitated for a moment, her eyes showing a blatant indecision. Like a smoker, trying to quit, staring at a pack of cigarettes. As he turned away she hurried over. “Give them to me, then.” She took the flowers and his hand grazed her wrist. She pulled her hand away, slowly, and his fingertips stretched to brush her skin. I watched his fingers against her hand.