Reprise (3 page)

He hadn’t been the first she’d been with, but he’d been the first to make good and proper use of her body. He’d made her feel sexual, empowered, all from the fact he couldn’t keep his hands off her or stay away from her. A man like that, who could have anyone he wanted, came after her like a bull seeing red.

She shifted the truck into drive and pulled out into traffic, still shaken but able to drive. She headed to her small studio apartment located on top of a bakery. If anyone could doubt she lived over a bakery she’d point out the size of her ass.

Bobby
the guitar came with her up the exterior wooden stairs, and she set him down while unlocking the door and the deadbolt. Once inside she left Bobby by the door so she couldn’t forget him on the way to the gig later that day, locked herself in, then drifted to her bedroom, moved by an unseen, highly emotional, force.

Behind her closet door, top shelf, hiding beyond an ill-advised cowboy hat purchase, was a shoebox that made her heart clench just at the sight of it. Her hands still trembled as she pulled it down and carried it to her unmade bed. Eyes locked on the lid that just read “KEDS,” she sat cross-legged, taking a few grounding breaths.

Once a year, always on November 20th, she opened this box and took a crying jag down memory lane. She was a couple days early, but seeing Harlon brought it back and she needed this fix ahead of schedule.

With an uneven exhale she plucked the top off the box and picked up the small white leather photo album in one motion, like pausing would steal her nerve. Maybe it would.

The leather was still very white. It was only handled and looked at once a year, after all.

The front page was a piece of parchment with harvest gold lettering, and baby rattles drawn in the corners.
Angelina Anabelle Gray
, it read in her mother’s teacher-perfect hand.
November 20th, 1987.

Tears started immediately. They were silent and expected, so she turned the page without thought. Tucked into the plastic holder was a photo she looked at annually but still found new things about it to cherish.

Her newborn daughter in a moss-green knitted cap, matching green and butter-yellow blanket swaddled tightly around her. Lying on her father’s chest. Harlon Gray was 29 in that photo, hair long. Scruff starting to turn into a beard as dark as his hair. Smiling at the camera.

This time the light hitting his eyes struck her as new. He had a twinkle to them, one large hand holding their daughter to his chest as the other was extended towards the camera. He’d been motioning to her, she remembered. Telling her to put the camera down, let his mom take a photo of the three of them together.

Which was the photo on the back page of this one. Jesus, she was a baby, too. Just out of the hospital and still thinner than she was now. Not a line on her face, totally unmarked. Grinning like she’d just won a prize at the county fair. She could overlook the size of her hair. Maybe that’s why she looked so much smaller.

Harlon had his free arm around
her
in this one, kissing her temple. Angelina slept on. This was just thirteen months after they’d met in the bar. Look at her, so grown up at twenty-one.

A pain in the center of her chest made her heart gape open wide. Thirty years dissolved in the time it took a Dodge Ram to drive past her on Main Street. She could look at these every year and feel sad for all that she’d lost, but never
him
.

She never missed
him
.

But now the numbness had, evidently, worn off. This hurt. This really fucking hurt, and she wasn’t done being angry. Not by a long shot.

If only she’d stayed away from him that night. But no, she’d followed him out to his truck, parked in the long haul spots behind the diner that joined with the bar. Her legs had been shaky from fear
and
want. The first gave a painful edge to the latter. Mallory knew what to expect from high school boys and the kids her age. Not from men old enough to drink in bars and drive long trips for a living.

The smell of him had been stronger in the truck’s cab. The berth in the back was little more than a piece of camping foam with a flat pillow and two blankets tossed to the side. It had been his home for many miles and she’d been excited by that. He’d seen more than her, done more than her. She was also thrilled by the incredibly stupid thing she was doing, just being there.

Truthfully, she would have let him take her on a bed of nails. She remembered the foam under her back, his rough hands on the skin of her legs, hip, neck. The way he’d worshipped at her breasts as though it was his first time ever seeing a pair. It was as out of her head as she’d ever been in her life, no doubt aided by the tequila shots he’d bought her. He was too much, and yet perfectly everything all at once.

“I’ll make your dreams come true, sugar.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

The book flew from her hands and across the room before she could rein in her emotions. It hit the wall with its corner, making the binder-style spine spring open. Pages flew everywhere.

She stalked past the photos. They weren’t all of Harlon, for the most part they were boring, standard shots that all new parents took when they had a baby. Boring to others, fascinating to the parents of said baby.

She grabbed the guitar case and pulled
Bobby
from inside, sitting cross legged on the floor between the small square of linoleum that denoted where the kitchen started and the living room ended, and began to play.

Chapter Three

When he put the Dodge in park and killed the engine, Tiny sighed, staring up at the house. He hadn’t been home in years, and while it looked exactly the same as always, there were great differences that eventually became obvious. He had memories of his mother planting the shrubs out front. Now they were reaching the eaves on both side of the front stoop, trimmed away only where they might obscure the view from the living room’s picture window.

Things in town had changed, but in the same way as this house had. Trees were bigger or gone all together. Buildings he was familiar with were painted a new color, but he still remembered how it all looked the day he drove out of town, never to come back. Or so he thought at the time.

The Dodge’s door swung open and he stepped down to the paving stone driveway. The door shutting was exponentially loud on that quiet street and he could only imagine the snoopy neighbors shuffling to their windows to see what was going on. For November it wasn’t a bad day, but after his years in California he was glad he’d brought a zippered hoodie along. He shrugged it on now, casting eyes up and down the street to see what else had changed.

He was stalling.

The neighbor’s place had been repainted, and recently. The place across the street had a moving van in the driveway, and the house sported a new faux-stone siding. But no need to dwell on that place too long.

On his parent’s other side the house looked the same but there was a boat on a trailer up close to the house, nearest his parents’ place. Definitely new owners there, too.

The stoop sounded hollow inside as he approached the front. The screen door was rusted, the screen itself still aluminum. Man, that was straight-up vintage. Feeling weird about it, he knocked. Tiny had no idea if just walking in was okay.

“Coming!” he heard his father bellow somewhere behind the screen door.

Then the door opened and his mother stood before him, blinking up at him from her thin face, skin around her eyes looking paper-thin. “Andrew?” she asked, voice sounding shaky. She was close to tears. “Is that you?”

They’d been here before. Apparently he looked like an uncle he’d never met, his mom’s brother. He’d gone to war at age eighteen and hadn’t made it to nineteen, buried somewhere at sea in the South Pacific. But everyone else thought he looked like his dad.

“It’s Harlon, Mom,” he said, stooping down to kiss her cheek when she offered it. “How you doing?”

She looked startled. “Harlon? Oh, he’s in the bedroom. Come in. Are you the one that took down the tree in the backyard? I thought he paid you.”

Tiny followed her into the entryway; a cramped hall with a closet door to the left, the back of an entertainment center to the right. He looked down, saw that she was in stocking feet, and toed his boots off before following her around the walnut cabinetry and into the living room.

“Yeah, he paid me. Don’t worry,” Tiny mumbled, watching her perch back on the arm chair in the corner, hands clasped in her lap. She motioned to the TV across the room. Family Feud was on.

“This black fellow is so funny.”

Tiny raised his eyebrows, smiling. “Yeah?”

“Angelina, what’d I tell you about answering the door?”

Tiny turned at the sound of his father’s voice, and Harlon Gray Senior stopped short in the hallway at the sight of him.
This
was how Tiny felt he looked; like the man standing there in work pants—always with those heavy canvas things, even though he hadn’t touched a tool in years—and a Dallas Cowboys sweatshirt. He was brave wearing that in Bronco country.

“Dad,” he said, feeling awkward with how he was being stared at.

“Son,” his father said, warmly, coming forward and hugging him. Jesus, the old man was getting thin. He’d always had huge shoulders, arms and thighs like tree trunks. Fucking Paul Bunyan. Now Tiny could pick him up in one arm if he wanted.

“You’re looking well,” his dad said, clapping him on the shoulder.

“Thanks. You, too.”

His father waved that off.  “I look like shit.”

Tiny looked over his shoulder at his mother, but his father had an answer to that, too.

“She’s not paying attention. TV is about as much as she can follow. Come on in, grab a beer with me.”

He followed the much frailer man into the small but bright kitchen, sitting at the small table that was shoved up against the wall, two chairs at opposite ends. The window ledge was extended to accommodate a snarl of house plants. They were healthy but definitely out of control.

“So. What’s going on, Dad?”

He was handed an opened beer and he watched his father take a pull before sitting down. “It’s terminal. They can’t cut it out this time. And I can’t take being sick again. So I just want to take care of shit and then...wait.”

Tiny nodded. He was so in tune with that frame of mind.

“But first I gotta get this place ready to sell, and get your mom into the home. Those are my priorities. Selling the place should keep her in that place for a while.”

“I can help too, Dad. Don’t worry about Mom.”

His dad eyed him up, and now Tiny felt it when the old man’s eyes tracked the ink sliding up his neck, the ink on the backs of his hands. No doubt the rings drew attention. Heavy silver things that weren’t for decoration. Tiny took the scrutiny in silence, sucking back his own mouthful of beer.

“What are you doing these days?”

“Driving truck, Dad. Like always.” It wasn’t a lie. His biggest contribution to the Red Rebels was his commercial truck driver’s license and the rig that he owned outright. And he still took routes, just so the taxman was appeased every year.

“In Markham.”

“Yeah, I’m still in Markham. I’m an independent, though. No boss telling me what to do.”

His dad would get that. Tiny grew up watching the old man come home from three days only to take a two hour nap then head back out because his boss’s fuck up son went off on a bender and couldn’t take a load somewhere.

“You still in that club?”

Tiny wiped at his chin with his hand. “Yeah, I am.”

His father nodded, taking a drink and letting the bottle dangle in his hand. “That Beck girl is working at the hotel bar on Main Street.”

That Beck girl
. He wouldn’t say Mallory’s name either, but
Beck girl
was close enough that Tiny’s throat tightened a bit. “She’s still in town?” He tried to sound uninterested, casual. And probably failed.

“For about eight years now, yeah. Gained some weight.”

Tiny shrugged. “She was never a rail, Dad.”

  “No. She’s the type that gains weight in the right places.”

Tiny had to chuckle. His mom had always been round, but at her thinnest she still has plenty of hips and ass and a generous chest. That was the type the Gray men liked. “I bet she wears it just fine.”

“Yes, she does.” His father grinned back at him, and for the first time Tiny could see his own resemblance in the old man’s face. “Her father’s in the home your mom’s going to.”

Tiny’s chuckle died. “Her mom?”

“Passed away the year before. That’s what got me thinking.”

“Yeah?”

“Her old man caught the house on fire. Left something in the oven too long, forgot about it.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah. Can’t risk your mom living like that. And I uh ... I got about two months, son.”

He set the beer down, eyes on the way the condensation ran down the bottle and pooled under the brown glass. “Really.”

“That’s why I gotta put Mom in the home.”

It hurt when he cleared his throat. “What do you need me to do?”

“What you’re doing. Help me get this shit out the house, move Mom. I’ll keep what I need, wait until I have to go into the hospital and don’t come out. Then you sell this place. The cash goes to Mom.”

Fuck, life was just such a series of shitty events.

-oOo-

A life spent in one house accumulated a lot of shit. His old man had been slowly getting rid of long-forgotten refuse from the basement and garage, thank God. But they’d left a lot of stuff that Tiny “might want,” and he felt bad for it but there was nothing in that section of the basement he had any interest in keeping.

Other than the 1972 541-S Remington Sportster rifle.

He remembered his dad buying that thing secondhand and bringing it home. He’d learned how to shoot, got a youth firearm safety certification from the local wildlife federation, then from thirteen through eighteen most autumn weekends were spent hunting.

His eyes had gotten a little wet when his dad turned to him, the rifle extended like it could go to the pawn shop or with Tiny, either way it didn’t matter to him. That was after Tiny had declined lamps, a desk from his bedroom growing up, and collection of vinyl records. Maybe he’d been hurting the old man’s feeling with every “No thanks.”

He closed his hands around the stock and barrel, grip tightening as he fought down that sudden rise of emotion. “You sure you don’t want to keep this around?”

When he looked up the old man was studying him, and Tiny wondered what he’d done that was so out of the ordinary. Then the old man shook his head. “Nah. Can’t hunt, can’t do shit anymore. You want it, take it.”

He wanted it, very much.

Before long the bed of the truck was full of boxes destined for the secondhand store. It was one of those consignment places that donated their profits to Habitat for Humanity or something like that, so they helped the kid working unload all the stuff and promised they’d be back with more later. And when they got back his mom was right where they’d left her; in front of the TV. They actually startled her; she didn’t know they’d left.

By the time supper rolled around he was wiped. They ordered a pizza, had another beer while watching an ancient replay of Hollywood Stars, then his parents started making noise about bedtime. He knew they had another day of work tomorrow, so he didn’t begrudge them their rest even if it was only eight o’clock at night.

“I’ll head out and see the sights,” he said. “I’ll come in the back, won’t wake you up when I get home.”

His father smiled at him. “Enjoy your night. I hear the hotel bar has pretty good beer on tap.”

How the old man knew, Tiny had no idea. But that was exactly where he pointed his truck after saying good night to his folks.

Inexplicably, he was nervous. If Mallory Beck wasn’t here, it was a waste of his time. And he was hoping like hell she wasn’t.

Inside it was exactly what you’d expect from a small town hotel bar. The wood was dark and shined to a high gloss everywhere. There were brass rails at the bar for feet and elbows to rest on, the carpet dark and not really feeling like carpet anymore after years of tread and spills.

Seating was a mix of booths and small round tables. He parked it at the three-sided square bar, ordering a pint of draft and eyeing up the locals. The suspicion was mutual.

He wore no colors here, no need. But he knew he was a big, tough-looking bastard, and sometimes in these small towns there was an asshole looking to feel bigger and meaner than he really was. Going after a lone stranger was a pretty safe bet for cowards like that.

The gazes directed at him were wary but no one seemed to need to prove themselves yet. He accepted his beer, tipped well and eyed up the wait staff.

The three female waitresses were far too young to be Mallory. In his mind he had a very clear vision of her, but that was twenty-nine years ago. Heaven knew
he
looked different; he wasn’t sure how he expected to recognize her.

Both bartenders were male. He supposed there was always the chance that she was washing dishes in the back but that didn’t seem like a very
Mallory
job.

But who knew what the fuck a Mallory job
was
these days?

There was an appreciative whistle and some scattered applause in the room, and Tiny tipped his head to the left, seeing forms moving about on the stage in the half-light. A lanky kid sat his ass on a stool behind a drum kit and another guy was long shaggy hair was plugging in his base guitar. When the lights came on full the place erupted with applause—not thundering, but pretty loud given the number of people in attendance. A stunner of a redhead stepped up to the mic, and Tiny turned back to the bar to take a pull of beer. Great, live music. He picked the perfect time to be here.

“Good evening, everyone. How’s the beer taste tonight?”

Tiny froze, halfway to setting his beer down. He didn’t look to the stage, because he knew that fucking voice and it shot right through him—heart, gut and head—like a bolt of lightning. He closed his eyes as she chuckled at something a person in the crowd shouted.

“Yeah, fuck you too, Carl. Do you
ever
go home?”

The room laughed at that, and she laughed again, too. Tiny swallowed and it was an effort, like passing rocks down his gullet.

“As most of you sorry assholes know, I’m Mallory Beck, and together we are The Malcontents. Bottoms up, and don’t throw shit at us or I’ll kick your ass.”