It had been a bad day. Dana and I had a terrible fight that afternoon, our worst one ever, and I got so angry that I raised my fist as if to hit her. I didn’t, but to her it was the same as if I had. She called me a wife-beater and told me to get out. I’d had more than enough by then, so I turned and stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind me. Then I saw Amy sitting on her Big Wheels in the carport, crying, and I realized she’d heard us fighting. “Don’t cry, sweetheart,” I said. “There’s nothing to cry about.” But she kept on, her little chin quivering, so I told her I was going to the store and would bring her back some cherry popsicles, her favorite treat. Normally she would have smiled, maybe even clapped her hands, but that day she just kept on crying. “I’ll be right back,” I said then, and left.
But I didn’t come back right away. I drove around for a couple of hours, not going anywhere particular, just driving and thinking things out. When I’d finally cooled off, I picked up a box of popsicles and some other groceries at Safeway and started back home. But when I turned onto our block, I don’t know, suddenly I felt as if I couldn’t even look at our house. I just wanted to drive on by, as if I’d never lived there and didn’t know anybody who did. I wanted to drive and drive until I was in another life. I saw myself somewhere far away, in Canada maybe, pulling into a motel late at night, the groceries still on the seat beside me. And I did drive by. I passed Amy on her Big Wheels and didn’t even wave, and I felt then the sudden pleasure of conclusion, of closing accounts, the clean pure thrill of zero. By the time that feeling faded and I turned back toward home again, the popsicles were a red puddle on the car seat.
When I got home, Dana and I fought again, and by that night, when I had to go to work, my mind was a whirl of anger and confusion. As the Courier‘s late man, I was responsible for proofing each page before sending it on to camera, but I was too upset to concentrate and I held up the production schedule so much that it was an hour after deadline before we turned the state edition. Even if a big story hadn’t come in over the wire just before deadline—a plane had crashed in Detroit, killing everyone on board except a four-year-old girl—we would have turned late. Still, I hoped I could use that story to convince the managing editor to give me another chance. I knew he’d call me in his office the next day, and when he asked me what my excuse was this time, I’d tell him we’d had to re-do page one to get the story on, and how that meant we had to move our lead story down below the fold, move another story inside, and revise the jump pages. I hoped that would convince him not to fire me, but I doubted it would.
We’d turned the state edition so late I had to run three red lights to get to the Burger Palace before they closed at ten. The Burger Palace was the only restaurant downtown that stayed open Sunday nights, mostly for those of us at the Courier and the Herald, the rival paper, and by the time I pulled into its lot, the sign had already been turned off. But two employees were still behind the counter and there was a customer sitting in one of the booths, so I knew I’d made it in time. I sat there in the car for a second, my heart still speeding, then got out and started toward the door.
I was in a bad enough mood, but as soon as I stepped into the restaurant and heard steel guitars and a cowboy’s nasal twang, I felt worse. The waitresses had the radio turned to KABX, the country station. I’d lost a dozen accounts to that station when I worked for KEZN, and I still couldn’t listen to it without anger. The way I saw it, KEZN was responsible for the problems Dana and I were having. After they fired me, she had to go on overtime at the beauty shop, and we didn’t see much of each other anymore. And when we did, we were in such miserable moods—me, because I wasn’t working; her, because she was working so much—that we fought more than usual. And now things had gotten so bad that I’d almost left her and Amy.
I stepped up to the cash register, trying to ignore the music, and one of the waitresses came over to help me. She was around my age, but she looked younger, partly because she was tiny and partly because she wore her blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail. The nametag pinned to her red, white, and blue striped shirt said “Monica.” She smiled when she said hello, and I decided she was pretty.
“You just made it,” she said. “Carol Sue’s locking up now.”
I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the other waitress, a sullen-looking teenager with greasy brown hair and acne, had come around the counter and was turning the key in the lock.
“Guess this is my lucky night,” I said. Then I ordered King Burgers with fries for myself and the copy editors. They were back in the newsroom, scrolling the wire and subbing out state stories for the city edition, and when I brought them their food, they’d have to keep working at the terminals while they ate. I knew they blamed me for making them work through their dinner break, and I was sure they were complaining about me that very minute.
As Monica rang up the order, I heard a curse from behind me and turned to look. The customer I’d seen earlier had spilled some French fries on her lap. She slid out of her booth, mumbling, a cigarette in one hand, and brushed the fries and salt from her loose Hawaiian print dress with her free hand. She was a short, heavy-breasted black woman, maybe thirty-five or forty years old, and she was so drunk she could hardly stand. Her eyes were half-closed, and she tilted her head back as if to help her see through the slits. She looked toward me. “What you looking at?” she said. I’d heard drunks say that before, but she said it differently, as if she wasn’t so much angry as curious. Before I could say anything, she waved her hand, as if to erase her question, and said, “Just a minute.” Then she leaned over her table, bracing herself with one hand so she wouldn’t fall, and picked up a large green vinyl purse. Turning, she staggered toward the counter. I smelled the liquor on her breath before she reached me.
“Hi,” she slurred, almost giving the word a second syllable. Then she stumbled and fell against me, her shoulder against my arm, her hip against my thigh. “Esscuse me,” she said, but she didn’t move away. She just closed her eyes and rested her head on my shoulder. For a moment I wondered whether she was a prostitute. But she was so ugly she would have had a hard time making a living on her back. Her leathery skin, broad, flat nose, and large mouth all made me think of some kind of lizard or salamander. I cleared my throat. It was a kind of speech, and evidently she understood because she shifted away from me and leaned against the counter for balance. I glanced at Monica. She rolled her eyes, then gave me my change and went back into the kitchen.
The black woman took a drag on her cigarette and blew tusks of smoke out her nostrils. Then she closed her eyes for a long moment. When she finally opened them, she handed the cigarette to me.
“Here,” she said woozily. “Hold this for me.”
I didn’t want to be bothered with her, but I didn’t know what to do, so I took it.
She started to fumble with the worn gilt clasp on her purse. “Come on, purse,” she mumbled. “Open up.”
I was feeling foolish holding the cigarette, so I set it on the counter, letting the long ash hang over the edge. It wouldn’t have taken much to hold her cigarette for a moment or two, but I didn’t.
Then she got her purse open and stood there swaying and looking into it as if it were so deep she couldn’t see to the bottom. “There it be,” she finally said, and pulled out an almost empty pint of George Dickel. She held the bottle out toward me, closed her eyes, and said, “Want a drink?”
“No thank you,” I said. Then I cleared my throat again and said I had to go. I wanted to sit down at one of the booths and relax, smoke a cigarette or two. But as soon as I started toward the booths, she took hold of my arm and said, slowly, as if each word were a heavy weight, “Ain’t you my friend?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I just stood there. She let go of my arm and put the bottle to her lips. When she finished, there was only a swallow left. “What’s your name?” she said.
“Paul,” I said. I don’t know why I didn’t tell her my real name. It wouldn’t have cost me anything.
She moved her face toward me then, as if to see me better, and I saw her red, swollen eyes. That’s when it struck me that maybe she wasn’t just a drunk. Her eyes looked like Dana’s had that afternoon, when I came home after our argument. “My name’s Lucy,” she said, her eyes closing. She seemed to have to force them open again. Then she said, “My boy is dead.”
I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. “Pardon me?”
“My boy…” Then she saw the cigarette on the counter and carefully, as if her fingers were somehow separate from her, picked it up and put it in her mouth, though she did not take a puff. “He died today. My boy. My Freddie.”
I heard a voice from the kitchen then. “Here she goes again,” it said.
I looked toward the booths. “I’m sorry,” I said. But I’m not sure it was true. Mostly, I felt uncomfortable. I wanted to get my burgers and go.
“That’s nice,” she said, and leaned against me again. “You’re nice.” Then she straightened up and smiled at me. When she did, her cigarette dropped to the floor. She stared at it a moment, then looked back at me. “What did you say?” she asked.
“Nothing,” I said.
“I thought you said something,” she said. Then she tilted her head back and swallowed the last of her bourbon. She held the bottle to her thick lips for a long time, tapping the bottom with her finger. When she finally set the bottle on the counter, she looked at me and said, “Empty.”
I nodded and glanced over at the booths. Then she grabbed my arm again. “Please,” she said urgently. “Don’t leave me alone. I been alone all day and I can’t take it no more.”
Her fingers were pressing into my skin, but I didn’t pull my arm away.
“I’m sorry,” I said again.
She shook her head slowly. “He was only thirteen. His voice was still changing.” Her lips started to tremble. “One minute it was high, then the next…” She stopped and tears began running out of the slits of her eyes.
I looked around for the waitresses, but they were still in the kitchen. I heard the sizzle of the grill through the nasal whine of a country singer complaining about his woman running around. I wished they would hurry up.
“Have you talked to someone?” I asked. I meant a minister or a doctor, but I don’t think she understood.
“He won’t talk to me,” she said. “He blame me for it all. He say I the one made Freddie do it, I the one after him all the time to do his schoolwork, clean his room.” She squeezed her eyes shut.
I could have asked “Do what?” but I already knew. Now I wanted more than ever to get away from her and her grief.
“Excuse me,” I said, and pulled my arm out of her grip. “I need to go sit down.”
She followed me toward the booth, talking to my back. “I beg him not to do it,” she said. “I beg him and beg him, but he say ‘Go away and leave me be or I do it now.’ And when I reach out for him, he do it. My boy, he do it.” Then a sob shuddered through her.
It may sound strange, but I was embarrassed by her grief. I felt sorry for her, I truly did, but I was embarrassed too. Maybe it was because she was a stranger and I couldn’t possibly share her grief. Or maybe it was because her grief had taken her so far beyond embarrassment that I felt some odd obligation to be embarrassed for her. I don’t know. All I know for sure is that I wanted to get away from her more than I wanted to comfort her.
I started toward the men’s room. “Where you going?” she asked.
“I can’t help you,” I answered, more bluntly than I intended, then went in the men’s room and locked the door behind me.
“What’s wrong?” she said. She knocked on the door. “What’d I do?”
“Nothing,” I said. But the way I said it I might as well have said, “Go away.” Then, her voice wavering, she started talking about her son again.
I looked around the room and tried not to listen. The walls were covered with graffiti—phone numbers, drawings of naked women and penises, a dirty limerick or two—and on the gray metal toilet stall someone had scratched the words KEEP AMERICA BEAUTIFUL and, underneath, KILL ALL THE NIGGERS. I thought about all the blacks who came into that room and read those words, and I looked back at the door. The woman was saying something about a bridge then, and that’s when I remembered the story. A teenaged boy, a student at Emerson Junior High, had climbed out onto the ledge of an old railway bridge and dove to the rocks below. But it hadn’t happened that day, as she’d said; it had happened at least two weeks ago. I remembered proofing the story. It’d been too long to fit the hole in our Police Beat section, so I had to cut the last paragraph, which mentioned that the boy’s parents witnessed the suicide.
“Cars be going by,” she was half saying, half sobbing, “but nobody is stopping, everybody is just looking out at us. One of them even points at us like we are something interesting. And I say, I say, ‘Freddie, come back, everything be all right,’ and he say, ‘No, Mama,’ and I reach out for him but he just lean forward. He just lean forward and I feel him going like it is me going and oh, his sweet head, his sweet, sweet head!”
I opened the door. She was standing there, swaying back and forth and holding her head as if it were about to shatter.
“I’m sorry,” I said. But she didn’t seem to hear me.
“Ohhh,” she moaned, then slumped into one of the booths. She put her face down on the tabletop and covered her head with her hands, like a soldier under fire.
The younger waitress—Carol Sue—appeared at the counter then with a white paper bag. “Sir, your order’s ready,” she said.
As sorry as I felt for the woman, I was glad to have an excuse to leave. I stepped up to the counter and took the bag. Looking over my shoulder, Carol Sue said, “Excuse me, ma’am, but we have to close up now.” Then she came out from behind the counter with a ring full of keys in her hand.
The woman gradually stood up. She wasn’t crying anymore. “I ain’t got nowhere to go,” she said.
“You can go home, can’t you?” Carol Sue said. “You do have a home, don’t you?”
The woman shook her head. “No. Not no more.”
Monica came out of the kitchen then, wiping her hands on a towel. She smiled in a stiff, controlled way that didn’t reach her eyes. “Is there someone we can call for you?” she asked the woman. “Or a taxi?”
“Ain’t no one,” the woman said.
By this time I was at the door, waiting for Carol Sue to unlock it. I turned my back to Monica and the woman and tried to listen to the radio. But still I heard Monica say I’m sorry but and police. Then Carol Sue turned the key in the lock, and I hurried out to my car, opened the door, and jumped in. As I put the key in the ignition, the woman stumbled out of the Burger Palace and ran toward me. “Wait,” she said. “Stop.”
But I didn’t wait. I started the car and began to back up. She ran up alongside the car and knocked on the passenger window. “Help me,” she said. As I stopped to shift into drive, she put her face up to the window, her wet cheeks glistening in the light cast by the streetlight. “Please,” she said. And she leaned against the car as if it were all that was holding her up.
I could have shifted into park. I could have rolled down the window and asked what she wanted. I could have talked with her for a few minutes or even offered to give her a ride. I could have put my arms around her and consoled her the best I was able. But what I did was reach over and lock the door.
She stood up then and watched me as I turned around and headed out of the lot. I looked in the rearview mirror and saw her standing there in the middle of the black asphalt. Then I turned onto Calhoun and pressed on the accelerator.
As I drove down the street, I once again imagined driving away from everything. I saw myself on the freeway, driving in my dark car through the anonymous night, on my way to a new life, a new self. But this time that thought didn’t give me any pleasure. This time it scared me.
When I turned down Fremont and saw the Courier building looming in the dark, I accelerated and sped past the turnoff to the parking lot. I wasn’t sure where I was going. For a moment, I thought about going back to the Burger Palace and comforting the woman—Lucy, I told myself, her name is Lucy—but I didn’t. Why didn’t I go back? Part of it, I’m ashamed to say, was that she was black. I asked myself, would I have comforted her if she were someone else? What if she were white, and pretty? What if she were Monica? Or what if she were Dana? And then I saw Dana in the Burger Palace, drunk and staggering up to a stranger to tell him her life was ruined, and I felt something narrow inside me open wide, like a wound.
But still I did not go back to the restaurant that night. I went there the next three nights and then occasionally after that, but I never saw Lucy again. I asked Monica and Carol Sue about her, but they didn’t know any more than I did. I thought of checking the police report for her address, but I didn’t. I still think about doing it, sometimes, though I know I never will. It wouldn’t make much difference now. Whatever I said or did would be too late to help.
I didn’t go back to the Courier that night either. Instead, I went home. At first I didn’t realize that was what I was doing, and when I found myself turning onto our street, I thought I must have done it through force of habit. But it wasn’t habit. It was something like habit, only deeper and more powerful. Whatever it was, it’s what I most miss, now that Dana and I are divorced.
When I went inside, Dana was in the kitchen, washing dishes. She turned when she heard me, and I saw that she’d been crying again. Her eyes were red, and there were some Kleenexes crumpled on the counter beside her.
I stopped next to the refrigerator. On it, held up by magnets, was a picture Amy had drawn of a purple flower with a smiling face.
Dana pushed a strand of her black hair behind her ear with the back of a wet hand. “You’re awfully early,” she said.
“I’m not fired, if that’s what you’re thinking. I just came home for a minute. I’m going right back.” I still didn’t know why I’d come home; I only knew that I’d had to.
“Good,” she said, wiping a plate with the washcloth.
“Let’s not fight,” I said.
“Who’s fighting? If I state a simple fact, does it mean I’m fighting?”
“No.”
“Okay. Then leave me alone.”
She kept on washing dishes and stacking them in the rack. I watched for a moment, then cleared my throat. “You’ve been crying,” I said.
“Very observant of you.”
“Please,” I said. “Don’t.”
She whirled toward me then, her face red and pinched and her lips quivering. “Don’t what?” she said, her voice rising. “Don’t hit you? Don’t yell at you? Don’t make our daughter cry?”
I didn’t say anything. She turned back to the sink and began violently scrubbing a pot. “Just leave me alone, will you,” she said. “Just go away and leave me in peace. Leave us both in peace.”
“Is that what you want?” I said.
“That’s what I want.”
I felt groggy, as if I were just waking up. “You mean, you want a divorce?”
“Yes,” she said. “I do.”
I didn’t know what to say. I just stood there, watching her back. Then I heard Amy’s footsteps in the hall.
“Mama,” she called.
I looked at the doorway and there she was, standing in her pink pajamas, rubbing her eyes.
“Hello, honey,” I said, and went over and squatted down beside her. There was a pillow print running down her cheek like a scar. I kissed it and, as I did, I heard Lucy saying “his sweet, sweet head.”
I made myself smile. “What are you doing up so late, little lady?”
“A dog was chasing me,” she said. She spread her arms wide. “A big dog. And he was barking at me.”
“It’s just a dream,” Dana said, wiping her hands on a dishtowel. “I’ll take you back to bed, sweetheart.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “I’ll do it.” And I hoisted her up and carried her back into her dark bedroom and tucked her in. Then I brushed her hair away from her eyes and kissed her forehead. Fear was feathering in my chest, making it hard for me to breathe. I knew this might be the last time I’d tuck my daughter into bed in this house. “Good night, honeybunch,” I said.
“What if he comes back?” Amy said then.
“If he comes back,” I said, “I’ll chase him away.”
“Don’t hit him, though,” she said. “I don’t think he means to be mean.”
“Okay,” I said, and kissed her on the nose. Then I went back into the kitchen.
“Don’t you think you’d better get back to work?” Dana said. She was still doing dishes, her arms sunk almost to her elbows in the sudsy water.
I thought about the bag of food in the car and imagined the copy editors checking their watches and cursing me for taking so long. “Yes,” I said. But I didn’t move.
Dana kept on doing the dishes as if I weren’t there. I watched her for a long moment, and I thought about Lucy and wondered where she was. Then I said, “I’m sorry.”
She didn’t say anything; she just shook her head. I wanted to walk up behind her then and take her into my arms. I wanted to tell her I loved her. I wasn’t sure it was true, at least not anymore, but it had been once and maybe it would be again. There were so many things I wanted to say, but my thoughts withered to one word. “Dana,” I said.
“I don’t want to talk about it now,” she said. “Just go, and we’ll talk about it later.”
Something funny happened then. I don’t know why—maybe it was because I was thinking about going back to the Courier—but I suddenly saw that plane going down in Detroit—not just the words of the story, the black ink, the typos and style errors, but the plane itself. I saw it rock back and forth, then begin to plunge, saw the left wing strike the Avis building, shearing stone into sparks, and the plane skid, streaming fire, beneath the railroad trestle and the interstate overpass. And through it all I saw the terrified faces in the fiery windows.
I felt lightheaded, dizzy, as if I’d drunk the bourbon Lucy had offered me. I had to do something or I’d start to shake, so I stepped up to the sink and took Dana’s arm. She turned and looked at me, her lips set in a hard thin line. I knew then that it was too late to change her mind, but there was something I had to say, something I had to make her understand, though I didn’t know what it was myself until I’d already said it.
“There’s been a terrible accident,” I said. And my voice shook as if I were breaking the news about a death in the family.