CHAPTER

30

JAMIE TURNED HER collar up and walked with her back to the freezing wind blowing down Main Street. That cop was starting to get to her. Maybe he was on the level. Or maybe he was just good at getting to people, but he knew she was involved and denying it any longer was beginning to feel useless. He was doing that thing counselors do, looking in her eyes, talking low and slow. It was probably all technique and psychological training but it made her feel weirdly safe, like that day she and Angel had smoked some super-chill weed and baked brownies all afternoon.

When she got to the diner, Mike Tuckahoe and old Mrs. Tuckahoe were coming out, rattling the bells on the front door. The woman smiled at her son as though he were still a Little League star with a big future. He stuck close to his mom, glancing once at Jamie. She resisted the familiar urge to kick him in the knee.

The lights went out in the pawnshop and Mack Dyson stepped onto the sidewalk. Jamie paused for a moment before following him into the diner, waited as he stood near the cash register and ordered a coffee to go, then she sat at the far end of the counter. Phoebe saw her, wiped at the bangs that had fallen out of her hair clip, and brought over a bowl of beef stew. Her hands were thin-skinned and veined, chapped from cleaning fluids and hot plates. It was impossible to imagine this frail woman pointing a gun at any breathing creature.

Jamie blew on her soup, picked out a hunk of meat, and set it on a napkin.

“You always were a picky eater,” Phoebe said.

Mack poured cream into his coffee and set a dollar and a napkin on the counter.

Phoebe rang up his coffee, swept the napkin into a garbage bin, and said, “Have a good night.”

He hesitated.

Phoebe stared a question at him.

He tapped the counter with his finger.

Phoebe said, “Oh,” and grabbed the napkin out of the garbage. As she stuffed the napkin into her pocket, Jamie noticed it had been written on. She blew on a spoonful of soup wondering just how close Phoebe and Mack had become and if her mom was making up for lost time by screwing every man in town.

As Jamie ate, her mother bussed the remaining plates, dirty glasses, and cups. Then for a moment the woman stopped moving and stared into space, fingering the string around her neck.

Jamie thought about what Garcia had said. Her brother, the truck being dismantled by the cops, her fucked-up family. Her choices were getting complicated. The diner was emptying out. She asked for the check.

Phoebe waved at the air. “Oh, for God’s sake, Jamie. It was just soup.”

“Then how about I walk you home?”

“Walk me home? I live two blocks from here.”

“I’ve never seen your place.”

Phoebe untied her apron. “Ha. Okay, but there’s not much to see.” She gathered the tips she’d collected in her apron pocket and laid them on the counter. “Count this for me while I clock out.”

Jamie counted the bills, all singles, twenty-four dollars and change. Her mother had been born to wait on others, a one-woman delivery system for blue-plate dinners. Never mind that she could never collect enough three-dollar tips to get ahead or that one week with the flu or a sprained ankle was likely to put her on the street.

Phoebe returned from the kitchen, picked up the cash, and brought it to her nose. She took a deep breath and her face relaxed. “Don’t you love the smell of cold hard cash?”

“I guess,” Jamie said, remembering how her science teacher had said almost all paper money contained cocaine residue.

They left through the back door and entered the damp alley.

“Wouldn’t you feel safer taking the street?” Jamie asked.

Phoebe walked quickly, said nothing.

“Because I would.”

“What did you really come for tonight? What do you want?”

Jamie slipped on a patch of black ice and caught herself. Phoebe reached for her arm, but Jamie bristled. “I didn’t come for myself.”

“What then?”

“Toby.”

Phoebe slowed her pace, glanced sideways at Jamie. “I thought Loyal took care of that.”

“He did.”

“So, what do you need me for?”

Jamie reached out to touch Phoebe’s arm, to stop her so they could talk, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d touched her mother and pulled back her hand. “Could we stop walking for a minute?”

Phoebe spun around. Overhead, sleet fell like tinsel in the alley lights.

“He got caught using stolen credit cards.”

“What? For God’s sake.” Phoebe lifted her face to the sky. “What the hell? Where did he get them?”

“Probably found them in Loyal’s room.”

A rat scampered out from behind a dumpster and Jamie moved closer to her mother.

Phoebe stamped her foot. “They don’t come at you unless they’re rabid.” The thing disappeared and she started walking again. “I guess it runs in the family.”

Jamie followed behind. That and a persistent disregard for the law. But she needed to get to the point. “Loyal won’t post bail for him again.”

“Let me guess. The first bail money was forfeited with the second arrest, right?”

Jamie hung back. “Mom,” she said, trying out a word she hadn’t spoken for the last eight years. She was surprised at how easily it rolled out of her mouth—and just how lonely she felt saying it.

Phoebe stopped walking again and raised her head. “What?”

“They were TJ Bangor’s cards.”

Phoebe shook her head. Sleet wet her eyelashes. A bone-thin cat crossed the street where the alley ended. Something small and dark twisted in its mouth. The sleet was thickening and turning to snow.

“Put your cap on, Jamie,” Phoebe said, and turned down the alley. “God, it’s cold.”

Iced-over metal steps led to her apartment on the second floor. At the top of the landing, Phoebe unlocked the door and flipped the switch for the overhead bulb. They stepped inside. There wasn’t a kitchen, just a cabinet with a sink and a hot plate, cracked plaster walls, a linoleum floor, a couch with a blanket and a pillow. Remnants of breakfast sat on the coffee table.

A suitcase, filled with thrift store clothes, lay open on the floor. Phoebe pushed it with her foot and sat on the edge of the couch, squeezing the back of her neck.

Jamie said, “We could go to the jail and see him in the morning. Get him a lawyer. He’s going to need a lawyer.”

Phoebe bent her head forward, stretching it from side to side. “Public defender. They’ve probably already assigned him one.”

“He deserves better than that.”

“Deserves? What’s that ever had to do with anything? Besides, there’s no money for that. A public defender will have to do.”

“What about that?” She nodded at the string around her mother’s neck. It seemed an obvious solution.

Phoebe fingered it. “That would be ironic, wouldn’t it?"

“No one else is going to help him.”

Phoebe pulled the ring from beneath her blouse and studied it. “If I get caught fencing this, it all comes down on me.”

Jamie took a breath and said, “It looks to me like it’s all coming down on Toby.”

Phoebe took the clip out of her hair and shook her bangs loose. “Is that what it looks like to you? Because to me it looks like an ex-con with stolen property who was present during the commission of all kinds of felonies. That adds up to parole violations and one very convenient scapegoat.” Her voice got tighter with each word. “It looks like the rest of my life behind bars.” She rubbed her eyes, her fingers digging into her temples.

How many times had Toby made that same gesture? Jamie remembered him sitting at the kitchen table just before he’d given up on algebra, rubbing his forehead that same way. She went to the window, opened it, and stuck her head outside, hoping the cold air would clear her mind. “You could go see him.”

Phoebe slumped against the couch. “No, I can’t. I can’t go there. You can’t ask that of me. You have to understand that.”

“If none of you speak up, they’ll pin this on him. You know that, right?”

“What do you want me to do? He’s just like his father. He used stolen credit cards, Jamie. I mean, it is against the law.”

Jamie brought her head back inside and sat on the window ledge. “Loyal’s given up on him.”

“He’s just letting him cool off. They’ll get him for the credit cards but there’s just not enough evidence for anything else.”

“Do you really believe Keating can’t frame him for this?”

“I really believe you and I are no match for that man.”

“So, what are you going to do?”

Phoebe pulled Mack’s note from her pocket, read it silently, and put it back in her pocket. “You could come with me. There’ll be enough for the two of us. Mack found a buyer. A guy on the Jersey coast.”

“How much?”

“Plenty.”

Toby was sitting in a jail cell right now enduring what his mother could not face. “And leave Toby?”

“He’s going to do some time, despite your good intentions. He used a stolen credit card. There’s no way around it.” Phoebe folded a blouse and tossed it in the suitcase.

What she was really saying was that they shouldn’t both go down for it.

“Don’t you want a new start, Jamie? We could get a little apartment near the water, have a real kitchen. You could have your own room. We could sew some curtains. Something yellow. Someplace sunny. This is a real chance. Jamie, think about it.”

“There’s nothing to think about. I can’t just leave him in there.” She stepped over the suitcase on her way to the door.

“Your father,” Phoebe said, stopping Jamie when she was halfway across the room. “He had good intentions, too.”

“My father? You mean the guy who died in a barroom fight?” She grabbed the doorknob, her skin whitening over her knuckles. “Why would you bring him up? I barely remember the man.”

“He died trying to protect his little brother, but it wasn’t exactly a fight. It was stupid. He and Loyal weren’t even that close and the fight hadn’t even started. A couple of them went outside to settle things and your father tripped on the curb, fell and hit his head. Died on the sidewalk before the ambulance even got there. He was a handsome man. You favor him. You’d remember him if you tried.”

She remembered more than she wanted. Jamie and Toby had walked into the funeral home and seen the coffin but Toby had stayed at the back. Jamie had walked right up to it. The wood was shiny and glossy. Someone had put a small step stool by its side. She realized years later that it had been meant as a place to kneel and pray, but on that day she’d stepped on it and hoisted herself up to see inside the coffin, to see her father’s face. Up until that point she’d never seen death up close, not a dead bird, not even roadkill. Her father’s face appeared to be smiling or maybe grimacing, but he was dead and it was impossible that he could smile at a time like this, at this departure that she realized was completely irreversible, and at that moment, at ten years of age, she had decided that death was a permanent state of pain. She’d lowered herself off the stool, turned to see her mother sobbing in the first row, and Loyal, with his vacant face, sitting on the opposite side and swaying slightly, the smell of whiskey hovering in the air around him. Toby had stayed at the back, his face as white as his button-down shirt, his hands clenching and unclenching, breathing through his slightly parted lips. She’d walked up the aisle, grabbed his wrist, and taken him out of there.

Her mother’s voice seemed an echo from the future. “He would’ve been proud of you. He would’ve wanted you to leave Blind River.”

After the funeral, she and Toby had hidden in the back seat of the car until suppertime and only come into the house after everyone had gone home. But there’d been no need to hide. No one had come looking for them. Loyal was drunk and snoring on the couch. Their mother was being tended to by a neighbor who, when she saw them in the kitchen, made them each a plate of food, clumps of unrecognizable brown casseroles. Toby had swallowed mouthfuls, belched, and finished Jamie’s plate.

But it seemed to Jamie like she’d fallen off the earth. Her father’s voice, his face, his good-night hug. Everything that had meant anything was gone. Grief was like air, everywhere and invisible, unavoidable, filling every breath she took.

Remembering only left her gutted.

She watched her mother on all fours reaching for something under the couch. Jamie asked her, “Did you even notice that we weren’t at the funeral that day?”

“What?” Phoebe threw a pair of sneakers into the suitcase. “At the funeral? I hardly remember a thing from that day but I would’ve sworn you were there, both of you.”

“We were, for a few minutes.” Jamie watched her mother fold another blouse.

Snow was blowing sideways, sticking in inches, despite gravity, to the metal staircase, the side of the power pole. A few snowflakes blew in through the open window, across the room, settled on the arm of the couch, and started melting. The draft made Jamie shiver.

Phoebe said, “Close that window.”

“I like the cold.” But she went to the window and closed it. “When are you leaving?”

“Loyal asked me to deal at that tournament tomorrow and I need to get him off my back. Acts like I owe him my life. I leave after that.” She found a clean sweatshirt and pulled her work blouse off. A tattoo was on her shoulder blade. Prison quality.

“You got a tattoo?”

Phoebe glanced at it in the mirror. “Stupid, is what I got. Another six months when they found the needle hidden inside my mattress.”

Jamie looked closer. The queen of spades. “You should get it touched up.”

“Supposed to be the card of wisdom. Huh. Whatever.”

“You always said, ‘Follow your heart—’”

“‘—but bet your spades.’ You remember that?”

“Toby says it all the time.”

Phoebe froze and for a moment Jamie thought she’d finally gotten through to her. Then she picked up the necklace Toby had shown her that day on the sidewalk, still in its box, and handed it to Jamie. “You should find the receipt and return it. I’m pretty sure he paid cash.”

Jamie took the box, wishing it would bring enough to retain a lawyer but knowing it wouldn’t. “Mom. I was there. I saw you in that upstairs window.”

Phoebe didn’t react. She picked up and folded a towel. “The less you know about that night, the better.”

“I saw him.”

“What did you see? A tarp wrapped around something big. A shadow in a window. That’s all you saw.”

“I saw his face.”

Phoebe held the towel to her chest, looked at Jamie. “What are you talking about?”

“The tarp fell off when we pulled him out of the truck. I saw his face.” She braced herself in the doorway, waited for her mother to say something, childishly hoping she could make it better.

Phoebe tossed the towel on top of the clothes and turned back to packing. “What can I tell you, Jamie? The best thing is to wipe that out of your mind.” She closed the suitcase lid.