Bonnie Nadzam - Lions

“She’s got just enough of each to make all the wrong decisions,” May said, then she turned up the old AM/FM radio with her damp and sudsy pinky finger.

On the narrow back road that cut through the darkening weeds, Gordon took his father’s truck into town and pulled up to the single lighted window of the Lucy Graves, closed for the day. Inside, Dex Meredith was holding Leigh in a half-slumped dance across the linoleum floor. The jukebox was lit up. There was an electric candle at one table. A white ceramic coffee mug. An open bottle of Boyd’s Four Roses. The light in the diner cast a perfect upside-down image of the bottle floating in space outside the truck windshield.

Gordon turned down the headlights, pulled around the corner, parked, and came into the diner quietly through the back.

Dex saw him immediately. “I told her to slow down.”

Leigh turned, disentangled herself.

Gordon looked at her. At Dex. “Let’s go home, Leigh.”

“I’m sorry man,” Dex said. His button-up shirt was pressed, his blond hair gelled into place. His shoulders were wide; he was a big guy, but Gordon was taller.

“She filled up a whole mug,” Dex said. “I tried to stop her. She’s really drunk. She’s really upset. About your dad I think.” He lowered his voice. “She saw that guy in the water tower. Did she tell you that?”

Gordon said nothing.

“She says she wants me to marry her,” Dex said.

“Is that what she said?”

Leigh giggled and put her hands over her face. Her makeup was smeared. Gordon put his arm around her and turned her toward the door. Dex grabbed Gordon’s wrist and Gordon jerked back but Dex had him. He dropped three wrinkled ten-dollar bills in Gordon’s hand.

“She was trying to buy from me.”

“Buy what?”

“I won’t sell to her. I won’t even give it to her, dude.”

Gordon took the money and put it in Leigh’s pocket.

“I didn’t touch her, man,” Dex said. “Everyone knows she’s yours. Not that I wouldn’t want to. No offense.”

Gordon said nothing.

“I’m sorry about the other day. I’m sorry about your dad. My dad liked him. Whatever people say.”

On the way to Gordon’s truck Leigh twisted out of his arm.

“I can walk fine,” she said, and tripped over an unlevel lip of sidewalk. Gordon gathered her up again and she let him. He opened the passenger door and buckled her in, and rolled down the window. She closed her eyes and leaned back. They drove out of town in silence. Once he pulled over for her to vomit. He walked her into the house and May stood and turned off the television.

“Oh Christ, Leigh,” she said. “Gordon, you OK?” She took Leigh on her arm and squeezed Gordon’s hand.

Next door Georgianna was awake, still dressed, sitting in John’s old chair, her hair down and all around her like a cobweb, an untouched shot glass full of whiskey on the table beside her. In the dim light, a faint line of hair across her upper lip.

“I keep looking for him,” she said. “I don’t understand where he’s gone.”

“Come on. Up to bed.”

“You know, don’t you? You know where to find him.”

“No, Ma.”

“Would you tell me if you did?”

“I’d take you with me. Straight to him.”

“Are you leaving again?”

“Maybe in a few days.”

“It’s hard to be here, isn’t it?”

When she was asleep in his bed, he went outside and across the lawn into the shop. He left the lights off and walked slowly around the room. He could barely lift a hand to touch the old radio dial. The old coffee machine. He sat down beside the TIG thinking he would never move again. Didn’t need to, didn’t want to. He sat still, breathing calmly, then went into the back room for an old wool blanket, and unrolled it on the concrete floor and set his head in his arms.

In the days ahead Gordon was attentive to his mother and polite with May and Boyd. He fixed the diner dishwasher and he drove south of Burnsville with Boyd where they helped butcher a steer and brought the meat home wrapped and labeled for the freezer at the Lucy Graves. He helped the Jorgensens pack and separate what they would bring to North Dakota from what they would sell or donate to the Goodwill in Burnsville, and he filled the bed of his truck six times and drove there and back to make the donations himself, for which he was rewarded with fried chicken and frosted white cake. He was twice as quiet as usual.

Like his father.

In all the ways.

Kid his age.

Leigh won’t put up with it long.

I think those two have busted up already.

Shame.

Better for her in the long run.

“You and Gordon have a lover’s quarrel?” May asked late one afternoon. She handed Leigh a spray bottle of bleach and water.

Leigh walked out from behind the counter toward the empty tables. “He’s not the same.”

Then May told her, as if Leigh didn’t know, that Gordon’s father had died. She looked at Leigh seriously, as if she were trying to communicate something gravely important, her pale blue eyes as steady as Leigh had ever seen them. “Leigh,” she said. “John Walker is gone.”

“I know,” Leigh said.

“Say it back to me.”

But Leigh wouldn’t say it. In the first place, why? How stupid and embarrassing. And in the second place, that wasn’t how they talked.

Gordon was particularly kind to Emery and Marybeth Sharpe, and Leigh noticed it was somewhat odd that she should pair Gordon with these two. Gordon and Emery in the Sterlings’ front yard, the only time Leigh ever saw Gordon play ball, Emery’s wild throw fast enough to knock the teeth out of your head. Marybeth coming into the diner with a crooked old finger pointed up and a faded postcard in her hand to show Gordon.

Another day, May put a scoop of ice cream in a dish for Gordon, and Leigh watched him carry it to Marybeth and squat down on the sidewalk beside her rocking chair. Gordon had come in and out of the diner without speaking to Leigh. Outside, he squinted in the sunlight and smiled up at Marybeth.

Leigh looked out across the street from behind the lunch counter as the two sat quiet on the sidewalk in the blasting heat. “What do you think those two talk about?” Boyd asked her, handing her his empty coffee cup for a refill.

Leigh shrugged. She took the mug and filled it from the half pot behind her.

Boyd nodded. “She’s an odd one.”

“So is he.”

“More and more,” he said.

“Do you get the sense he’s being so nice to everyone to make a point?”

“What point would that be?”

“Something about me.”

He looked at her and smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

Outside Marybeth touched Gordon’s arm with her palsied hand, and wrapped her fingers around it. The blue irises in her eyes seemed to be dissolving into their whites, and her hairline was every year receding farther back from her spotted pink forehead. “You never go to church on Sundays,” she said.

He laughed lightly. “Can’t say I do.”

“Your father never did.”

“No.”

“He traded all he had in this world for the three kingdoms.” She opened her trembling hand and counted off on her fingers. “The one, the two, and the three.”

Gordon looked up the street to a small tornado of dust. “Which three are those, Marybeth?”

In response she gripped his arm tighter. The ice cream was melting into a bright pink soup in the little white dish. “Gordon,” she said, “you are such a good boy.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

“I do. There’s some of us that do.”

“OK.”

At dawn in his mother’s kitchen the following day he filled a paper grocery bag with canned goods, the labels bright and cheerful: ranchero beans; cling peaches in heavy syrup; chicken and dumpling soup; beans and canned spaghetti. He took a flat can of sardines, and a plastic-wrapped roll of paper towels, and a sack of red apples. From his closet he took a wool blanket, his old G.I. Joe sleeping bag. From his father’s bookshelf, he took a dozen old cowboy books, an illustrated copy of Aesop’s Fables, and a world atlas. When he stepped outside in his blue jeans, the sky was still a soft black. He started the truck and took the narrow county road up north.