Brendan was leaving this house tomorrow morning, leaving his mother, walking out that shabby door and down those cracked steps, up the great wide street with cars double-parked all over the place and everyone sitting on the stoops, walking out like he was in a goddamned Springsteen song, and not the Nebraska-Ghost-of-Tom-Joad Springsteen, but the Born-to-Run-Two-Hearts-Are-Better-Than-One-Rosalita-(Won't-You-Come-Out-Tonight) Bruce, the anthem Bruce. Yeah, an anthem; that's what he'd be as he walked right down the middle of the asphalt whether bumpers rode the backs of his legs and horns honked, going right up that street and into the heart of Buckingham to take his Katie's hand, and then they were leaving it all behind for good, hopping on that plane and going to Vegas and tying the knot, fingers entwined, Elvis reading from the Bible, asking if he took this woman, and Katie saying she took this man and then? then, forget about it, they were married and they were gone and they were never coming back, no way, just him and Katie and the rest of their lives lying open and clean before them like a lifeline scrubbed of the past, scrubbed of the world.
He looked around his bedroom. Clothes packed. American Express traveler's checks packed. High-tops packed. Pictures of him and Katie packed. Portable CD player, CDs, toiletries packed.
He looked at what he was leaving behind. Poster of Bird and Parrish. Poster of Fisk waving that home run fair in '75. Poster of Sharon Stone, sheathed in white (rolled up and under his bed since the first night he'd snuck Katie in here, but still?). Half his CDs. Fuck it; he hadn't listened to most of them but twice. MC Hammer for Christ's sake. Billy Ray Cyrus. My Gawd. A pair of kick-ass Sony speakers to supplement a Jensen desktop system, two hundred watts total, paid for last summer when he'd done some roofing for Bobby O'Donnell's crew.
Which is how he'd first come close enough to Katie to strike up a conversation. Jesus. Just a year ago. Sometimes it felt like a decade, in a good way, and other times it felt like a minute. Katie Marcus. He'd known of her, of course; everyone in the neighborhood knew of Katie. She was that beautiful. But few people really knew her. Beauty could do that; it scared you off, made you keep your distance. It wasn't like in the movies where the camera made beauty seem like something that invited you in. In the real world, beauty was like a fence to keep you out, back you off.
But Katie, man, from that first day she'd come by with Bobby O'Donnell, and then he'd left her at the site while he and a few of his boys tore off across town to conduct some pressing business, left Katie behind like they'd forgot they ever had her? from that very first day, she was so basic and normal; she hung with Brendan as he applied flashing to the roof as if she was just another dude. She knew his name, and she said, "How come a guy as nice as you, Brendan, is working for Bobby O'Donnell?" Brendan. The word coming out of her mouth like she said it every day, Brendan up there with his knees on the edge of the roof feeling like he was going to swoon right off it. Swoon. No shit. That's what she did to him.
And tomorrow, soon as she called, they were gone. Gone together. Gone forever.
Brendan lay back on his bed and pictured the moon of her face floating above him. He knew he'd never sleep. He was too keyed up. But he didn't mind. He lay there, Katie floating and smiling, her eyes shining in the darkness behind his eyes.
* * *
AFTER WORK THAT NIGHT Jimmy Marcus had a beer with his brother-in-law, Kevin Savage, at the Warren Tap, the two of them sitting at the window and watching some kids play street hockey. There were six kids, and they were fighting the dark, their faces gone featureless with it. The Warren Tap was tucked away on a side street in the old stockyard district, and this made it great for hockey because there wasn't much traffic but shit for night games because none of the streetlights had worked in a decade.
Kevin was good company because he didn't talk much in general and neither did Jimmy, so they sat and sipped their beers and listened to the scuffle and scrape of rubber soles and wooden stick blades, the sudden metallic clang of the hard rubber ball banging off a hubcap.
At thirty-six, Jimmy Marcus had come to love the quiet of his Saturday nights. He had no use for loud, packed bars and drunken confessions. Thirteen years since he'd walked out of prison, and he owned a corner store, had a wife and three daughters at home, and believed he'd traded the wired-up boy he'd been for a man who appreciated an even pace to his life? a slowly sipped beer, a morning stroll, the sound of a baseball game on the radio.
He looked out onto the street. Four of the kids had given up and gone home, but two remained in the street, shrouded by the dark, scrabbling over that ball. Jimmy could barely make them out, but he could feel the fury of their energy in the slap of their sticks, the mad scramble of their feet.
It had to go somewhere, all that youthful uncoiling. When Jimmy was a kid? hell, until he was almost twenty-three? that energy had dictated his every action. And then?then you just learned how to stow it someplace, he guessed. You tucked it away.
His eldest daughter, Katie, was in the midst of that process now. Nineteen years old and so, so beautiful, all her hormones on red alert, surging. But lately he'd noticed an air of grace settling in his daughter. He wasn't sure where it had come from? some girls grew into womanhood gracefully, others remained girls their whole lives? but it was there in Katie all of a sudden, a peacefulness, a serenity even.
At the store this afternoon, as she was leaving, she'd kissed Jimmy's cheek and said, "Later, Daddy," and five minutes afterward Jimmy realized he could still feel her voice in his chest. It was her mother's voice, he realized, slightly lower and more confident than the voice he remembered his daughter having, and Jimmy found himself wondering when it had made its home in his daughter's vocal cords and why he hadn't noticed it until now.
Her mother's voice. Her mother, almost fourteen years dead now, and coming back to Jimmy through their daughter. Saying: She's a woman now, Jim. She's all grown up.
A woman. Wow. How'd that happen?
* * *
DAVE BOYLE hadn't even planned on going out that night.
Saturday night, sure, after a long week of work, but he'd reached an age where Saturday didn't feel much different than Tuesday, and drinking at a bar didn't seem all that much more enjoyable than drinking at home. Home, at least, you controlled the remote.
So he'd tell himself later, after it was all over and done, that Fate had played a hand. Fate had played a hand in Dave Boyle's life before? or at least luck, most of it bad? but it had never felt like a guiding hand before, more like a pissy, moody one. Fate sitting up in the clouds somewhere, someone saying to him, Bored today, Fate? Fate going, A bit. Kinda think I'll fuck with Dave Boyle, though, cheer myself right up. What're you gonna do?