“Come on, Roy, I don’t want to be late.”
“Why do you want me to go with you?”
“For protection. Just in case Billy’s acting strange.”
“Do you think he’s dangerous?”
“I don’t really know what to think, baby. Get your coat, the blue parka.”
“Where are we meeting him?”
“In the lobby of the hotel he’s staying at. Then we’ll go somewhere, a public place where other people are around.”
Roy’s mother was going to meet her soon to be ex-husband, her second, to have him sign papers declaring their marriage null and void, as if it never existed. Roy was eight years old and did not quite understand what was happening, only that Billy Cork, whom he liked, had for the past six months been his stepfather and now he wasn’t going to be and according to the law never was.
“Are you getting a divorce, Ma?”
“No, an annulment. It means we were never married.”
“But you were married. I was at your wedding.”
“The Catholic church doesn’t allow people to get divorced, Roy. Billy didn’t tell me before we were married that he wasn’t right in his head, so the church granted permission for me to have the agreement annulled. This means that in the eyes of God and the church Billy and I were never legally wed, and that’s all that matters. Take your gloves.”
It was mid-November and already cold in Chicago. Roy’s mother drove toward downtown and parked a block away from Billy’s hotel.
“Put up your hood, Roy, we’re near the lake so it’s very windy.”
They walked to The Cass, a rundown, semi-residential hotel on the Near Northside. Before he and his mother entered, Roy saw Billy through the glass doors standing in the lobby. He was wearing a dirty beige trenchcoat.
“He’s there, Ma.”
“I see him. This won’t take long, I hope.”
“Hello, Kitty,” Billy said when she and Roy were inside. “Hello, son,” he said to Roy.
It appeared to Roy as if Billy were trying to smile but couldn’t make the corners of his mouth turn up. He was unshaven and needed a haircut. His right eye was bloodshot.
“Hi, Billy,” Roy said, and smiled.
Billy stuck out his right hand to shake and Roy put his own into it.
“Too cold for you, hey, me bucko? I’ll bet you wish you were down in Havana with your father, or with Uncle Jack in Florida, fishing in the Gulf.”
Billy liked to call Roy bucko. His family were Irish, from Donegal. Billy had come with his mother and father and sister to Chicago when he was about the age Roy was now. Roy had never met any members of Billy’s family. He knew only that Billy’s sister, Marjorie Anne, was married and living in West Virginia, where her husband, Billy said, was a foreman in a coal mine.
“My dad is in Las Vegas right now,” Roy said. “He’ll be back in Chicago next week for Thanksgiving.”
“You’re looking fine, Kitty. Where would you like to go?”
“I don’t want to go anywhere, Billy. I just want to get this over with.”
“We’ll take a walk, then. I’d like to get out in the air.”
The three of them left the hotel lobby and headed in the direction of Lake Michigan, which was a few blocks away.
“There’s a cozy park on the next street,” said Billy. “We can sit on a bench there and talk.”
As they walked, Billy put an arm around Roy’s shoulders. Kitty kept her distance from Billy and looked straight ahead, not saying anything. The last time Roy had seen Billy was when he refused to get out of bed and just sat up staring at nothing without speaking or moving. Roy’s mother had shouted at him for a while, then run screaming out of the house. She called a doctor from the McLaughlins’ house next door and did not come back until the doctor was with her.
Roy had gone into his mother’s bedroom and stood at the foot of the bed. Billy sat still. He didn’t blink. Roy had only known him for a few months but he and Billy had gotten along well. Billy was tall and handsome and a good athlete. They had played catch with baseballs and footballs and gone swimming with his mother in lakes in Northern Illinois and Wisconsin. Billy smiled a lot and seemed happy to have a family of his own, which he told Kitty and Roy he’d not had before. This turned out to be a lie. Kitty found out later from Billy’s sister that he had been married to a woman in Minneapolis with whom he had two children, a boy and a girl. Billy had abandoned them without warning, just walked out of their house one morning two years before and not contacted them since.
Roy heard the doctor say that Billy was catatonic, a word Roy had never heard before. The doctor called for an ambulance to come and take Billy to a hospital. Roy’s mother told him to go to the McLaughlins and stay with them until she came to get him.
Roy sat on a bench separate from the one his mother and Billy sat on in a small park from which they had a view of the lake. Roy watched the gray-black waves gnash at the sand and die there. He thought about bait fishing with nets in Tampa Bay with his Uncle Jack. To do this you had to hold one end of the net with small weights attached in you mouth and throw the other weighted end into the water and make sure to open your mouth when you threw the net so that your front teeth didn’t go with it. Roy did not like the extreme heat there any more than he disliked the freezing cold winters in Chicago but when he was on the water in Jack’s boat or in a skiff off Varadero with his dad and a guide he felt good. Snow flurries began falling and blowing around.
“Let’s go, Roy,” his mother said.
She was standing in front of him, shivering in her thin calico coat. Neither she nor Billy wore a hat.
“Kitty, wait,” said Billy, who remained seated on his bench. “Can’t we just talk?”
Roy’s mother brushed snowflakes from her face with a few folded up pieces of paper, then put them into her purse. She didn’t reply to Billy, just took Roy by one hand and led him out of the park without looking back. Roy did, though, and saw Billy still sitting, letting the snow pelt his head and the shoulders of his trenchcoat.
Once Roy and his mother were back in her car, he asked her if Billy had signed the papers.
“Yes, Roy. Now we’ll never have anything to do with him again.”
“He didn’t act crazy,” Roy said. “If he had attacked you I couldn’t have stopped him, he’s too big and strong.”
“You would have run and gotten help, maybe found a policeman.”
“I was a little afraid he would hit you.”
Kitty drove home without saying anything more to Roy. She walked into the house and into her bedroom and closed the door behind her. Roy stood in the hallway until he heard her talking to someone on the phone. He went back outside and sat down on the front steps. There were a couple of inches of snow on the ground and the sky was darker than it should have been at two o’clock in the afternoon, even in November.