Bonnie Nadzam - Lions

For a minute or two, she had all their attention.

She told them about the wounded traveler who could walk barefoot and naked across a hundred miles of bone-breaking cold. And then all of John Walker’s visits out of town, and Gordon’s, and about Gordon’s vow, and how he’d thrown his life away for the sake of something he wouldn’t even talk about, not with anyone, not even with her. She hiccupped.

They stared at her. “Are you for real?” somebody said. He had dark shining hair and screwed up his face and raised an eyebrow.

“No no,” somebody said, “I stopped there on my way out. It’s true. It’s all true. There’s a sign on the side of the highway.”

“That is the most asinine thing I’ve ever heard,” somebody else said.

Someone changed the music. Someone handed Leigh a fresh beer.

“If that’s true,” somebody said, “you should totally go back.” He flashed his eyes wide at everyone. “Ghost town.”

“Nobody lives there anymore,” Leigh said. “You can’t live out there. Doesn’t even have a grocery store. What are you supposed to eat? Bugs and dirt?”

Anyone still listening to her now was moving in close to bump a shoulder to hers, or to place a hand on her waist. They weren’t that interested.

“I’m not going back,” she said to no one. “I hate it there. Hate it.” She felt the slight vibration of a passing train beneath her chair. The muted roaring of blood in her ears.

On her way home she passed a bright pub that smelled like beer and onions. Aprons of light poured out across the sidewalk from open doorways. Every small beautiful thing — the masses of green leaves, the way the interior lights from a restaurant lit up a line of blue glass bottles in its front window — seemed to shut a door on her. Not for you, it said. Not for you.

She found a little dive in what had once been a bank with a giant vault; it was nearly empty and quiet. No music, no TV. Gordon would have liked it. John, too. Only the murmur of human conversation. The ringing of glassware. At the bar she asked for something strong. The bartender was a young guy with a rough beard and a pair of suspenders over a white undershirt. He poured her four inches of amber liquid in a glass.

“You don’t have your ID on you, do you?”

“Left it at home.”

“Thought so,” he nodded. “First one’s on me,” he said. “You look like your best friend just got hit by a train.”

Boyd and May sat alone in the empty diner, stirring coffee, empty pie plates beside them. May had turned the overhead lights off and the front door was propped open. It was twilight, last day of September, and the evenings were finally cool again. Across the street, the bar was closed, the cracked window still boarded.

“We could move the bar in here,” Boyd said, his elbows on the table and his head bent over the coffee cup. “Make it yours. Get a liquor license. Change the name of the place.”

“No more Lucy Graves?”

“I think we should change it all.”

“They’re just windows, Boyd. We can fix them.”

Boyd shrugged. His mustache had grown into an unkempt silver beard. “Maybe we ought to just go, too.”

May shook her head. “I don’t think I could get Georgie to leave, Boyd.”

“You really mean to take care of her.”

“I do.”

“What about Annie?”

“Annie’s got her hands full.”

“These could be our last good years together, Maybelline.”

“What, you want to be on vacation?” She was old enough to know better than to think of her life as dear just because it was hers. If where she had ended up was arbitrary, her partner just as much so, she loved and appreciated them no less for it. “I’m sorry,” she said, and opened her hands. “I’m staying here. At my age you make a choice and you do it. Chuck will keep circling through town. Burnsville is there if we need it. Georgie needs me. Twenty-six years I’ve known her, she half raised my only child, and no doubt Leigh would have been all bad instead of half bad without the Walkers’ help.”

“OK,” he whispered. He shook his head, staring into his mug.

She reached over and put a hand on his forearm. “Boyd. Come on.”

He looked up, his blue eyes shining. “That man walked all that way. Somehow made his way. It wasn’t until he got here—” He couldn’t finish. His eyes spilled over and he pressed them with a forefinger and thumb.

“Boyd.”

“You know something, May? I’ve wasted my life one night at a time, four beers in and trying to win people over. Some stupid joke. Some stupid story. Some stupid lie.”

“Come on now.”

May stood up and joined him on his side of the booth, and put her arm around him.

“I’m sick of the sound of my own voice.”

“Well,” she said, and nudged him, laughing softly.

“It’s like I’m standing right beside myself all the time.”

“Listen, Boyd. We were all responsible this summer. You didn’t mean any real harm.” She jostled him lightly. “Did you?”

He sniffed and sucked air in through his mouth and wiped his nose. “Seems like it started with me, doesn’t it?”

“That’s just people talking. Always been a place of big stories, hasn’t it? You’re only a man, Boyd. So you don’t always get it right. Did you ever meet someone who did?”

He was quiet a minute. “John Walker. Didn’t he? Didn’t you say you should have been so lucky? Have a man like he was?”

“I don’t know how perfect he was.” She sighed. “Pretty odd fellow and before the summer anyone else would have said the same.”

“I guess maybe they still do.”

“He left his wife and kid without much to go on, and by his own stubborn lights. Didn’t he?”

“I guess so.”

“And I’ll tell you something else. For years I’ve heard you repeat the same jokes and stories in that bar, night after night.”

“I know,” he said. “Even the good ones are old. I haven’t said anything new since I was fifteen.”

“What I was going to say is that I haven’t heard any of those stories in weeks. A month. You’ve been quiet.”

“Well, it’s been growing on me,” he said. “Being sorry.”

“OK. It’s a change. Right?”

He shrugged.

“Come on,” she nudged him. “Let’s make a plan. Is this our home? That’s Boyd’s Bar across the street, isn’t it? And this is the Lucy Graves.”

He shrugged. “What is that,” he said, “nostalgia?”

“God help me, I’m not that old and useless. I’m talking about today. Tonight. And our friends here.”

“No new restaurant and pub in Burnsville.”

She shook her head. “I have to stay.” She pulled him toward her and he put his forehead on her chest.

“We’ll stay,” he said into her shirt. “Shit.”

She put her hand over the top of his head. “Then let’s go into that bar of yours across the street, and prop open that big old door, and open up a couple of cold beers, and turn on the radio. There’s a cool breeze.”

He lifted his head and looked into her eyes. “I don’t deserve you.”

“Deserve has nothing to do with what we get,” she said, and pulled him up. When they stood, May glanced out the window and grabbed Boyd’s upper arm.

“Now what in the hell,” he said.

It was a truck from a Burnsville towing company hauling the Walkers’ old blue Silverado through town.

“I have a feeling I better get Leigh.”

Leigh swung her duffel bag into the back of Boyd’s truck and climbed in the cab. May started the engine and pulled out of the dormitory parking lot. It was a picture-perfect day in mid-October and everyone was out. She crossed her arms, eyes red, and turned away from her mother. They’d been twenty minutes on the phone at dawn that morning, a call that was accusatory on May’s end, defensive on Leigh’s, and which had ended with an arranged meeting time on campus and without a goodbye.