I didn’t say, Right here, you’re looking at it. She knew.
Ruby had started a grief group in her church. Mrs. Peggot was hanging in, with kids or grandkids going over there every day so she could fix them dinner. Maggot and Mariah were both still working at PetSmart and staying clean. I promised to go see him soon. The whole family knew about Maggot’s boyfriend now. Some of them prayed it was a stage he’d outgrow, most said hallelujah. June had met the young man himself. He actually was the store’s reptile expert, and kept a lot of snakes in glass boxes at his trailer home. I said that sounded about right.
The apple in June’s eye was still Emmy. She’d moved into an apartment in Asheville with some other girls in recovery, somewhat like my situation. Probably minus the poker nights and porn. June said it was in an older building where Grace Kelly had lived at one time. I didn’t know who that was, but acted impressed. She got serious then, and asked if Emmy had hurt me.
“How do you mean?”
June did that thing of running both hands through her hair. “I don’t know. She’s such a charmer. You know what I mean. Guys are just moths to her flame. I’ve wondered if she was a little too dependent on all that.”
I said I couldn’t speak for others, but I was never Emmy’s moth. “Well okay, maybe in the early days. She was my first love disaster. But I lived to fight another day.”
June smiled. “You never were one to fall only halfway down the well, were you?”
“No ma’am,” I said. “I fall all the way in.” Then I asked how was her love life, and she reached across the table and pinched my nose, like I was twelve.
She told me Emmy loved Asheville to pieces. She had a job as a restaurant hostess and was in a sober and body-positive dance group, which believe it or not does exist. They put on shows. Emmy was thinking about going in the direction of theater, so. There’s Emmy, wagon hitched back up to the stars. I asked if she ever got homesick down there.
June’s coffee cup froze halfway up to her mouth. “All the time. That’s what she says. But she can’t come back here. Not to live.” She said it with so much sadness. Age-old heartbreak of this place, your great successes fly away, your failures stick around.
June assumed I would be going to the program for Coach that night, and was relieved to hear I wasn’t. She still blamed him for my downfall. “The daughter, though, Angus. Are you two still friends? I ran into her yesterday at the health department.”
In her emails, Angus had made her summer and short-term jobs here into dark comedies. The nursing home where people talked to the dead. The in-school aides that talked messed-up kids out of murdering their teachers. “An impressive young lady,” June called her, which I’m pretty sure was the first time in history those words were used on Angus. Or maybe not, what did I know anymore. My stomach did a thing every time Angus came up, because I really wanted to see her and really didn’t. Everything else had changed. So she would have changed. And I couldn’t take it.
June hated to run off, as usual, but did. I got in the Beretta and sat with my hands on the wheel a good five minutes before it decided where to go. Murder Valley.
My grandmother and Mr. Dick couldn’t get over it. Me! Showing up! Bygones definitely bygones, as far as failures to apply myself. Reaching the height of six foot four evidently gave me a pass on all previous sins. She kept saying she hadn’t thought I could look any more like my father, but look at me now. Mr. Dick for his part had the hots for my car. He wheeled himself all the way around it, looking it up one side and down the other, saying “It’s blue!” They invited me to dinner and asked if I was aiming to move in. I said just visiting, but thanks all the same.
I whiled away the day looking at Mr. Dick’s newest kite and being handy. Got up on a ladder and cleaned their gutters. Unjammed a casement window that had been stuck open since August. Not the tight ship of its former days, that house. Miss Betsy told me Jane Ellen had graduated, and Mr. Dick winked at me, so I knew what that meant. By getting married. I wondered who did their driving. Dinner took forever because it was all on Miss Betsy and she was slowing down. The legs looking more than ever like bags of walnuts in stockings. A stool by the cookstove so she could stir sitting down. I know pain if I see it.
At dinner they wanted to hear about the book I was writing. I was floored. How did they know about that? Angus. She’d told them all about the stories I put out on the computer, and my history book that was going to get published. Never at any time did the word “cartoons” come up, or “the adventures of Crash and Bernie, teenage addicts,” so Angus must have put a respectable spin on things, which I appreciated. I told them I would do a chapter in my book on the Melungeons, and was counting on Mr. Dick to help me with that. He looked tickled. At some later date I’d have to break it to them it was more pictures than words.