“The other babe with Gracie?”
“Onions raw or grilled?”
I looked out the window again. Darlene was ascending her stairway two steps at a time. “Goddammit,” I said, and rushed out the door as Belly yelled again, “Raw or grilled?”
She was already coming back down the steps when I arrived at the landing. She stopped when she saw me. She had a shoe box under one arm.
“Hey,” I said, trying to catch my breath.
“Hey.”
She saw my look at the shoe box.
“They’re just letters,” she said.
“Are you taking them in?”
She looked down at her boots, trying not to cry.
“Darl,” I said. She turned and went back up the stairs.
She finally stopped sobbing.
I stroked her hair as her tears dried on my chest. Her bedroom was silent but for the rumble of an occasional pickup passing on Main Street.
When we’d entered her apartment, Darlene had dropped the shoe box on her kitchen table and shoved me up against the refrigerator. She brought her lips to mine and kissed me hard, unbuttoning my shirt, her deputy’s badge digging into my rib cage. Then she grabbed me by the waist of my jeans and dragged me into her bedroom, though I did not have to be dragged.
We had made love twice before either of us said a word, Darlene crying in between and afterward in whimpers and shuddering sobs. “Ah, Jesus,” she finally said. She turned to face me, propped her elbows on my belly. The imprint of her sheriff’s hatband was still on her hair. She didn’t like the hat, thought it framed her face in a way that made it look fat, but she kept it on when she was on duty so nobody would take her any less seriously than any male cop.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She settled her face into the heels of her hands and rubbed her eyes, then let her chin fall to my chest. “If she had just killed herself, maybe I wouldn’t be crying. Maybe I’d just be angry.”
“Gracie was Gracie,” I said. “Hard to account for anything she did, without getting into her head.”
“She didn’t like people messing around in there.”
“Did I ever tell you about the prom?”
“What prom?”
“Senior year. The prom. I wanted to take you.”
“You were probably too chicken to ask.”
“Not exactly,” I said. I shifted in the bed so that Darlene straddled my left leg. I liked the feel of her skin warm around my thigh. “You were sort of on and off with that football player.”
“Pete Klein. God, he was gorgeous. But really, I was just trying to make you jealous.”
“You succeeded. But still, as you say, I wasn’t really sure whether to ask you. So I went to Gracie.”
“No.”
“Oh, yeah. I figured, she’s your best friend, she’ll know your deal, she’s a romantic, she’ll level with me. Big mistake.”
“What did she say?”
“She said-and I quote-‘What makes you think you’re good enough?’ ”
Darlene giggled.
“What’s so funny?” I said.
“You said you wanted her to level with you. What did you expect?”
“I thought you’d be on my side.”
“I am. Now. But… it doesn’t matter.”
“What?”
I waited.
“Gracie told me.”
“Gracie told you what?”
“That you might ask me.”
“Yeah, right. So stay away from your phone, eh?”
“No,” Darlene said. “She said I should go with you.”
“She did not.”
“Yes, she did. Anyway, you didn’t ask me.”
I sighed. Darlene let her head fall to my chest and we lay quietly for a few moments. Then I said, “I did a little snooping at the rink.”
Darlene lifted her head. “Gus. That’s a crime scene. I hope you didn’t touch anything.”
I didn’t reply.
“Oh, God. You’re going to get me fired.”
“I thought you wanted me on this, Darlene. The town would love to smack a suicide label on it and get back to building their rink.”
“Did you or did you not-wait. Your voice mail. Why did you want to know which shoe Gracie was missing?”
“The left one, yes?”
“Why?”
I rolled out from under her and dug the baby shoe out of my coat pocket. The hairbrush was there too but I reflexively left it hidden away, as I would have when we were stealing the brush from one another years ago. I laid the baby shoe on the sheet next to Darlene and sat on the bed. The cheek under Darlene’s left eye twitched once. I saw tears welling again.
“You want me to put it back?”
She bit her lower lip, put a hand on my forearm, squeezed. “That’s what she was saying.”
“Gracie? When? What are you talking about?”
“The other night. At Riccardo’s. She kept talking about how her life was a failure because… because…”
“Because why?”
She shook her head. “She wanted a kid.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Can you imagine what a disaster-”
“Shut up. She was serious. She said her time was running out.”
Maybe Gracie should have considered that when she was partying away her body, her mind, her heart, the men who took to her. But then I did not really know what her life had been like all those years in Detroit. Even though we had lived in the same town for a long time, we rarely took any trouble to seek each other out, apparently content to live in our separate worlds, mine a submersion in newsprint and sources and late-night calls from phone booths, hers I had no idea what. At my mother’s insistence, I tried to call Gracie once in a while, but I couldn’t keep up with her ever-changing phone numbers and finally gave up. I wish I could say that I felt bad about it. There were no calls from Gracie, after all.
I saw her once, or thought I did. I was at Joe Louis Arena watching the Red Wings in a playoff game against the Chicago Blackhawks. A woman I was dating from the Detroit Free Press was supposed to join me but had to work late so I bought myself a standing-room only ticket and went alone. I stood with a twenty-four-ounce cup of Stroh’s with my back to the wall along the aisle between the lower and upper bowls of seats, watching Roenick and Larmer and Chelios trample the Wings’ hopes for a Stanley Cup. At a stop in play I looked to my right to check the scoreboard for the shots on goal and there she was.
At first I didn’t recognize her. Gracie had always been cute. The boys liked the way her sharp cheekbones set off her languid blue eyes, the narrow gap between her front teeth, the barely discernible overbite that imbued her smile with a hint of secret mischief. Her body, taut as a guitar string, and her willingness to share it had helped
