Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (22 page)

“What about this?” Scoot asked. He held up a tin car—flecked green paint and a missing tire.

Will shook his head. “That’s a Dick Tracy cop car from the early thirties. I’ve got to keep that.”

Scoot put it down. “Okay. This?”

Will mulled it over. His brother was holding a movie projector from the 1960s. It was broken, but Will had been meaning to fix it up one of these days to get it back to its former glory. He could probably sell it for a fair return. “Naw. I got plans for that.”

Scoot put it down roughly. “You got plans for everything.”

Will looked over his treasures—each one held stories within stories: the story of when he’d bought it, and the story of its life before it came to this barn. He felt bad that such amazing finds weren’t getting better treatment in somebody’s house, sitting in somebody’s kitchen or living room, and inspiring endless conversations. In those situations, antiques like these came alive. But now they were dormant, collecting dust and years, waiting until they could wake to life again.

His collection had started innocently enough. When he’d first started picking, he’d sold almost everything he found, for as much or as little money as he could get. The point was just to make a buck. To get Arlen a better lawyer and to get out of poverty and his
mother’s house. But as the years went by, and Will saved up some money to open the shop and live in the apartment above it, he felt courageous enough to put his heart on the line and risk falling in love with some of his own picks. The organ from the old church in Fredericksburg. The rusty chassis of an Indian motorcycle that would never move again. And the keys—always the keys—that were so inexpensive to collect and yet endlessly intriguing.

When he fell in love, he fell hard. The items he picked seemed to draw from him a life of their own. And once that happened, Will was obligated, indebted, charged with the task of caring for the items because he knew nobody else would be able to care about them as much as he did.

He’d planned to use the old barn for a workshop, to refurnish, resurface, and repaint. But instead, as he allowed himself the leisure of collecting, the barn began to fill. And fill. And fill. And now there was no floor to speak of except for a patch, no loft except for a platform that was piled high with his things. The barn itself seemed to be growing tired of sheltering all these objects that Will had fallen in love with and promised to take care of. And Will was getting tired too.

“What about this?” His brother held up a little piano fit for a child. It was plastic, and not very old.

“That?” Will scowled at him. “Are you kidding me? Do you know what that is?”

“A kid’s toy.”

“
Your
kid’s toy. It’s the same one you used to bang on when we were kids.”

“You saved it all this time?”

“Well, okay, technically it’s not the same one. But it’s the same
model.
”

“So I guess we’re saving it in case I decide to take up playing piano with one finger again?”

“I didn’t think you could play that well.” He took the toy from his brother’s hands. Then he set it gingerly down on top of an older piano, a real piano, that hadn’t played a note in fifteen years. He glanced around the barn and knew he wouldn’t be getting rid of anything today. “C’mon,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

“We’re not done with this,” Scoot said.

“Yes, we are.”

Outside, the first raindrops flecked his shirt and skin. The sound of the padlock’s muscular
click
when it closed was a welcome relief.

At first, Lauren didn’t think she was being followed. She felt a noticeable strangeness as she walked through Shockoe Bottom, her yoga mat over her shoulder, her water bottle sloshing at her side. But she didn’t think the pricking at the back of her neck was necessarily ominous. Instead, she’d written off the feeling as being residual guilt, a result of having slept in late on a Saturday morning. Not yet a week away from Albany, and already her routine was getting sloppy and soft. By the time she’d opened her eyes, her office had called twice and she’d had to put out two minor fires before she’d gotten out of bed. If she’d risen earlier, the fires would have been little more than match-sized flames.

So, as she crossed the street, she thought,
Guilt
. Guilt was giving her the unpindownable feeling of something not quite right. Rizzi had called to beg her to talk to Burt—to at least call and check in. And Lauren had said that, yes, of course she would. She’d meant to. She’d meant to again and again. And yet, there was always a good reason not to call him: like dinner with Maisie, like a hike through high weeds with Will, like a walk through downtown. She’d felt within herself a kind of loosening over the last few days—as if the heat had not only made her muscles slacken, but had softened her own definition of herself as a busy, productive
workaholic. Each time she meant to call Burt, she thought of what it was that she really needed to say to him, and she found herself tongue-tied. So she did not call him at all.

Now she walked through Shockoe Bottom, through corridors of brick and mortar, past shops with tall bay windows advertising vegan sandwiches or massages. She passed big factories that had gone condo; stenciled white letters on red brick advertised flowers, rug making, and power tools. Some probably dated to the early twentieth century. Despite the pace of traffic and modern convenience, Richmond had an oldness about it—as if the present were happening on the backdrop of the past. Among the tattooed buildings, she thought of Burt, and work, and her dream of Will—and still the strange feeling of something she couldn’t quite place lingered.

She stepped out of a patch of sunlight and into the shade of a small tree; then she shaded her eyes to look around.

Was she being followed?

She squinted behind her: women pushing sport utility strollers, men with canted heads talking on phones, children walking heavy-footed and pointing at things. No one was behind her. No one on the street looked dangerous. But still, the feeling lingered.

In all her years of getting the occasional threat of vandalism, she’d never once had a feeling of being followed. Not like this.

The thought occurred to her:
Arlen
.

She stopped walking, crossed her arms, and stood in the middle of the sidewalk looking around. In her chest her heart began to sputter, but she shushed it quietly—closed her eyes and exhaled. Arlen would have read her note by now; she wondered if he was looking for her—or, if not looking, then just being curious about her, to know what he was in for if he agreed to meet. Lauren stood motionless on the rounded tip of a street corner, exposed and in the sun. If Arlen wanted to see her, she wanted him to know that she was prepared for it. She waited, ready. She thought,
Come on
.

But if Arlen was following her, he didn’t show.

The sidewalk was empty except for a few people, some walking Lauren’s way also with yoga mats and towels. Some looked at her when they passed. Lauren stood until she began to realize how foolish it was to be putting so much faith in what was likely enough her imagination. Gradually, the feeling of being followed subsided, leaving behind it the strange sense of being completely and vulnerably alone.

She would see Arlen soon; she could feel it. She adjusted her yoga bag on her shoulder and walked into class.

Eula’s mother didn’t like to eat her vegetables. So twice a week Eula drove to the nursing home to make sure she did, coaxing her through swallow after swallow of corn, kale, and peas. Even mashed potatoes had become a problem lately, with her mother saying they were too mushy or too dry. Nobody tried Eula’s patience like her mother—but she supposed it was payback. She’d never liked vegetables as a kid.

“Here we are, Ma.” In the cafeteria, she set her mother’s tray down gently before her. The room was quiet, soft voices not quite echoing but taking on the hollowness of a big space. Cheery pictures of lemons and oranges brightened the walls between the windows, and at plastic tables, senior citizens sat hunched over rectangular red trays. Eula straightened her mother’s dinner before her. “Look. Lemon and herb chicken. And peas on the side.”

Her mother gave a little frown but said nothing. They’d gone through this ritual so many times that she knew there was no sense in fighting. Eula picked up her fork and stabbed at the chicken. Thick globular sauces saved it from being dry as the napkin she used to wipe her mouth. She chewed slowly, settling into the rhythms of the room.

“I got a little raise at work yesterday,” Eula said after a few minutes. “It’s not much. But when I get paid next week, I can take us out to dinner. How would you like that?”

“I’d like it just fine,” her mother said. “Will your husband be joining us?”

“What husband?” Eula asked carefully.

“Well,
your
husband, of course. Arlen. Is that boy coming too?”

Eula pushed her peas around her plate. She didn’t want to eat them either. “I don’t think so, Ma.”

“Good for nothing,” her mother said. “Men.”

Eula sighed. For the past couple weeks, her mother had been imagining that Arlen was still a part of their family. Perhaps she’d been responding to the news that Arlen had been let out of prison. She might have heard his name mentioned by a gossiping staff member, and perhaps she’d seen him on TV. Either way, Eula ached every time her mother said his name.

She’d thought, when Arlen had first been let out of jail, that she wouldn’t have any trouble coping. So he walked free. Big deal. What did that mean to her now that she’d gone on with her life?

And yet, she was living in a constant state of jumpiness—half fear, since she knew Arlen was furious with her and that he had every right to be—and half excitement, at the thought that she might see him again. At night, she dreamed he was in her bed, his arms around her as they both drifted off to sleep within sleep. And when she woke in the morning and he was gone, the pain of loss was nearly physical, as if he’d been convicted all over again.

The life they’d wanted had been snatched away from both of them by a court system gone wrong. Everybody felt bad for Arlen, wanted to help Arlen. But Eula? She was nothing more than the wife who hadn’t believed in him enough. Who hadn’t believed in her heart he was fundamentally good. The guilty verdict had ruined both their lives—but Arlen had been cleared of blame.

Some days, she made plans to go see him. Scenario after scenario flitted through her mind. She could hire a private detective, track him down. She would show up wherever he was—she always envisioned the confrontation would happen at a movie theater or a public park or some other place she could easily imagine—and she would hold her head up high and say to him,
If you want me, here I am.

Sometimes in her mind he didn’t answer. He stood looking at her with his gorgeous brown eyes, soulful and forlorn. Until she stepped backward foot over foot out of her fantasy and returned to wherever she happened to be—her desk at the bank office, the grocery store, watching TV.

Other times, when she offered herself, he kept her waiting a moment, as if the decision of whether or not to forgive her hadn’t occurred to him until now. He needed a moment to watch her with hope and suspicion. And then he kissed her until they were both crying—because they were not too old, because they
could
still have it all, because the courts had taken everything from them, but not
this
.

The first scenario she could bear—the sight of Arlen walking away from her, the lonely feeling of disillusion as she came out of her dream and into the real world again. But the second fantasy—it caught her off guard. And when it did, it wrecked her. To think that he could still love her—and to know that he could not—was a torture no woman could stand.

“Let’s not talk about Arlen,” Eula said. “Let’s talk about where you want to go out to eat dinner next week.”

“Wherever it is, there won’t be any peas,” her mother said.

The Richmond coliseum on Saturday evening was so full of sights, sounds, and smells that it was almost too much for Arlen to bear all at once. Some concert was going on—thrash metal, and a band
Arlen had never heard of but whose music sounded like terrible fighting cats—and now excited stragglers were milling around the sidewalks, scavenging for action or drama.

In his regulation green shirt and cotton slacks that were too heavy for the warm evening, Arlen used a metal and plastic grabber to pick up paper cups and napkins. Someone had decided it was a good idea to hand out yellow “Richmond’s hottest girls” fliers before the concert, and now they dotted the sidewalks like crumpled flowers. Some were wedged into sewer grates. He did his best to pry them out.

The church had come through for him, giving him money without asking questions and finding him a job. He liked the work. He liked the satisfaction of seeing a piece of garbage on the ground—and then seeing that it was gone. This was his third night of working at the coliseum, and he never quite knew what he was going to be doing until he got to work. His first day, his job was to amble around the concourses and clean up stuff as he saw it (he realized it was busywork, hardly work at all, but it felt good). His second day he was given a job that was more meaningful; he was loading equipment onto a truck—boxy black speakers and wires that seemed entirely mysterious and powerful. And now, his third day, he was outside in air that couldn’t quite be called fresh, watching the kids in their early- and mid-twenties stand around looking for trouble. He felt a thousand years older than they were. And he looked older too, by how he was dressed and how he stood. Yet he was only five or so years away from the oldest of them.

He worked the street, cleaning. A handful of kids at the end of the road were laughing and monkeying around on a lamppost, playing at climbing. Arlen watched them. He felt a certain territoriality over the street now that he’d cleaned it. And he didn’t like to see a bunch of hoodlums screwing around.

He made his way toward them. Though they were half in
shadow, there seemed to him to be something electric and pressurized about the group. They were laughing loud, calling out to strangers across the street, punching fists in the air. Arlen lingered a few feet from them, hoping that his presence as a person who looked semiofficial might be enough to make them settle down or at the very least move on.