Linwood Barclay - Far From True

“No, I don’t think so. Looks like you’re dealing with something.”

She moved me toward the far end of the porch, away from the door. “He’s falling apart.”

“I figured.”

“I mean, I’m worried, too, you know. About how much longer we’re going to be able to pay the bills. But we’ll manage somehow, right? Maybe it’s just as well we never had kids. Think how much worse this would be if we had mouths to feed. But it’s just us — we’ll get through. But no matter how much I tell Dwayne that, he’s just not hearing me. The stress of it’s killing him. It goes right to the heart of who he is, being able to look after me. Hey, I can get more hours if I have to, but it’s been wearing him down for a long time.”

“I have money,” I said.

She put a hand on my arm. “Cal.”

“No, really. I have some. Enough to get you through a couple of weeks, anyway.”

She went up on her tiptoes and kissed my cheek. “You’re a good brother. You really are.”

“If there’s anything I can—”

The front door opened. Dwayne said, “What’s going on here?”

“Cal just dropped by.”

Dwayne looked at the backpack I’d left on the porch. “What the hell is this? You’re bunking in with us?”

“No,” I said. He’d wiped his eyes, but I could see where tears had been running down his cheeks.

“I don’t have enough problems? I gotta take people in?”

“Dwayne, Jesus,” Celeste said. “It’s okay.”

“You know, Cal,” Dwayne said, “you had some awful shit happen to you. I get that. Your wife and your kid, what happened to them, that’s a tough break. But we got problems, too, you know? You can’t be coming around here all the time bringing us down.”

“Shut your mouth,” Celeste said. “God, just stop it.”

“It’s okay,” I said. I walked toward the door, grabbed my bag, and went back down the walk to my car.

“Good plan,” Dwayne said. “Good plan.”

I remembered there was a motel on the road to Albany, but when I got there, I found the place all boarded up. “OUT OF BIZNESS” had been spray-painted across the plywood sheets that had been nailed over the windows.

So then I tried the Walcott, parked under the front apron, and went inside. To my surprise, the place was fully booked. Normally, they’d have had more rooms, but one wing was undergoing renovations.

“Rented my last place to some guy who lost all his credit cards,” said the guy at the front desk. “But he had a good roll of cash.”

Well, shit.

I supposed I could drive closer to Albany. But I’d be spending the better part of an hour on the road before I had a chance to start looking for anything.

I had a thought.

I called Lucy Brighton’s cell phone. She picked up before the second ring.

“Yes?”

“Got a favor to ask. There was a fire and—”

“What?”

I explained. She said, “Can you give me half an hour? To get the guest room ready?”

“Sure,” I said. “I really appreciate it.”

I was going to hit a diner. A couple of crackers and cheese earlier had not quite done the trick.

Lucy had been watching for me, and opened the door before I reached it. I thought she might be in pajamas or a nightgown, but she was dressed, and in something a little nicer than what I’d seen her in earlier in the evening. A black, low-cut top that showed a hint of cleavage and a pair of tight jeans.

“This is really kind of you,” I said. “Sorry to have kept you from going to bed.”

She had questions, and I told her more about what had happened. She offered to make some coffee, but I told her no. It had been a long day.

“I’ve got you all set up in the spare room,” Lucy said, her voice just above a whisper. Crystal, I figured, had gone to bed some time ago.

“She left me a surprise in my car,” I told Lucy.

“What are you talking about?”

“Her graphic novel. She left it for me to read. I haven’t gotten to it yet, but I will.”

“That little scamp.” Lucy almost looked as though she might cry. “Do you know how rare it is that she’d do something like that?”

I didn’t.

“Crystal likes you. She senses that you’re a good man. That’s why she wants to share her artwork with you. She isolates herself so much, but every once in a while, she reaches out. That’s what she’s doing with you.”

We went upstairs, where she showed me my bedroom. The top of the dresser was stacked three deep in white cardboard business boxes full of files. There were more on the floor, but Lucy had created a path around the bed so I wouldn’t stumble if and when I got up in the middle of the night to hit the bathroom down the hall.

“I’m sorry about this,” she said, indicating the boxes. “This room almost never gets used, so it becomes a kind of dumping ground.” We were standing close together by the foot of the bed, where there was barely enough room for two people to get by.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

“The bathroom’s right there, but it’s the only one up here, so if it’s occupied, you can use the little one, the powder room, on the first floor, and there’s another bathroom in the basement, but the one up here is the only one with a shower. God, I’m rambling.”

“This is all good,” I said, setting my bag on top of the double bed. “I appreciate it.”

“That’s a small bag. If you’ve forgotten anything, you can probably find what you need in the bathroom. Every time we go to the dentist, they give us new toothbrushes and I must have a dozen of them that have never been opened. So if you need—”

“I’m good,” I said.

“But I don’t have shaving cream. I mean, I’ve got ladies’ shaving cream, you know, and it’s probably the same stuff — it just comes in a pink can.”

I turned to face her and put my hands on her shoulders. “It’s okay.”

Her lips were twitching. “I know, to many people, he wasn’t a good man, my father,” Lucy said. “But I loved him.”

I waited.

“I did. He was my father. I know there was a kind of... hollowness about him. I believe he loved me, and I believe he loved Crystal. At least, as much as he was able to. He could certainly pretend to love. Does that make sense?”

“I think so.”

She took two steps toward the door, closed it. “I don’t want to wake her up.”

“Sure,” I said.

“But he taught me well, you know. From the time I was a little girl, he taught me to stand up for myself. I’m a survivor. I’m a single mother. When my marriage wasn’t working out, I could have tried to stick it out, but I thought, I can’t live like this. Not even for Crystal’s sake. Because what would that teach her? That you stay in an unhappy situation, that you surrender your life that way?”

“Your father seemed to be someone who went after what he wanted.”

“You mean that room?”

“I guess I mean that he didn’t let the conventions the rest of us tend to live by keep him from living the life he wanted. I’m not judging. I’m just saying, that’s what I see.”

Lucy thought about that. “I wondered sometimes if he was a borderline psychopath, but not in a malicious kind of way. I read somewhere that many successful CEOs are psychopaths. They don’t let the feelings of others get in their way because they’re not even aware of them, but they’re good at acting like they are. Sort of like politicians.”

Lightly, Lucy rested the tips of her fingers on my chest.

“You feel things,” Lucy said. “I can tell.”

I hadn’t slept with a woman since Donna and I made love the night before she died.

Three years.

“Lucy, I—”

“Don’t say anything. Just hold me.”