keep her in boyfriends.
But this Gracie following a tall man with black hair slick with mousse and a cashmere topcoat down to the rink-side seats was more elegant and beautiful than I had ever seen. Her auburn hair tumbled over a charcoal turtleneck. She carried a fur coat over one arm. She seemed straighter, taller, less mousy. Maybe it was the turtleneck. Or the fur.
The man, who also wore a turtleneck, stopped and turned with a suave smile and an offer of his hand. She took it and edged into her seat, laying the fur across her lap and fluffing her hair as she settled in. She looked more like a Grace than a Gracie. I tried to keep an eye on her, but the fans behind her kept jumping to their feet and blocking the view. At the end of the second period I went to the men’s room and when I returned to my place against the wall, she was gone.
“Why didn’t she just have a kid?” I asked Darlene.
She just looked at me.
“OK, dumb question. Hard to bring up a kid in a Zam shed.”
“Which was really her point,” Darlene said. “She kept saying, ‘I fucked up my life, I fucked up my life, and I can’t fix it.’ ” She nodded at the baby shoe. “I think I know what that is.”
I picked it up and turned it over. “You do?”
“You really want your prints all over that?”
“What do you think it is?”
She set her chin atop her fists and fixed her eyes on the pillow in front of her. “She had an abortion.”
“When she was downstate?”
“If she’d had one here, we’d all know about it by now, wouldn’t we?”
“I suppose. She didn’t tell you?”
“Not in so many words. But every now and then, she would talk about kids, and, you know, she’d get all misty and after a while she just stopped making sense.”
“Would she have had it recently? Or a long time ago?”
I was thinking of Soupy. But I wasn’t about to bring him up. I wanted to ask him about it before the police did, if they hadn’t already.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know if she actually had an abortion. I just have this feeling. Whenever she got into one of her little crying jags, she’d always be saying something like, ‘Don’t ever give up what you got, because you can never, never get it back.’ ”
“Wait,” I said. “Why would she have a shoe if she had an abortion?”
“Come on, it’s Gracie. She might’ve gone to Kmart and bought one.”
“Just one? Where’s the other one?”
“Gussy… I don’t know.”
“You know, Darl, maybe she actually had a baby and adopted it out.”
“Do you think she’d go through that? Nine months? No drinking?”
I didn’t have to think much. “No,” I said.
I watched Darlene staring into the pillow. I felt for her. She and Gracie went back as far as Soupy and I did. As little girls, they’d combed each other’s hair, painted on each other’s makeup, worn each other’s clothes. When Gracie was on one of her extended stays at our house, she’d often go next door to sleep at Darlene’s. I could still picture them sitting knees to knees in their one-piece bathing suits on the dive raft in front of the house, the last of the day’s sun bathing their tan shoulders, them waving their arms, leaning back to giggle, chattering about whatever they chattered about.
I thought I knew what Darlene was thinking: if only Gracie had never left Starvation, maybe she would have been all right.
But how could Gracie not have gone? It was late in her senior year of high school. In my junior English class, room 211, we were discussing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest when we heard a shrieking in the hallway that every one of us immediately recognized as Gracie McBride. “Oh God, oh God, oh God, it’s so cool, so so cool!” Our teacher dropped his book and rushed out to see what the commotion was about, and five or six of us got out of our seats and followed. We saw Gracie spinning her way down the hall, the orange plaid pleats of her skirt whirling out from her hips.
“I’m going to college,” she sang. “I’m going to college.”
An anonymous donor had offered to pay Gracie’s full tuition, room, and board, so long as she attended Wayne State University in downtown Detroit. The donor, whom everyone in town assumed was a Wayne grad, had made the gift in honor of Gracie’s father, who had been awarded the Purple Heart posthumously after Vietnam. Gracie’s mother raised a brief stink about being entitled to some of the gift, seeing as she was the one who had lost her husband. No lawyer would touch it.
That fall, Gracie left for Wayne. It was September 1980. Almost eighteen years would pass before Gracie walked Main Street again. Not once in those years did she even visit, and most folks in town forgot about her. Except Darlene, who called her now and then and visited downstate once or twice. And my mother, who spoke with her each month on the twenty-second, the anniversary of Gracie’s father’s and my father’s deaths.
“What the hell did she do in Detroit?” I said. “How did she survive?”
“I don’t really know,” Darlene said, and I could tell it hurt her. “She was always vague when I asked her, or she made jokes: she was dancing in a strip club, she was selling coke. For a while she worked as a secretary somewhere. A real estate company, I think.” She nodded toward the shoe box on the table. “That’s why I dug that out.”
“She never graduated from Wayne.”
“No.”
I slid across the bed and placed my palm lightly on Darlene’s shoulder. She reached up and touched my fingertips with hers.
“Speaking of out-of-towners,” I said. “When were you going to tell me Jason was back?”
“Who cares?”
“Have you seen him?”
“Nope. Don’t care to either.”
“I saw him. He looks good. A lot better than he did.”
“I really don’t want to talk about him right now.”
She twisted around to see the clock on her stove. “Crap,” she said. “Lunch is way over. Dingus is going to be p.o.’d.”
I waited on the bed while she put her uniform back on, fitted the hat on her hair. She grabbed the shoe box and came to the bed, standing over me. She leaned over and kissed me on the neck.
“You were sweet today,” she said.
She was almost out the door when I called after her. “Hey. How about I make you spaghetti tonight and then we can go to the Rats game?”
“OK,” she said, and she was gone.
nine
A soggy dishrag lay on the bar at Enright’s. Somewhere a faucet was running. The air tasted of mustard and pickled eggs.
At the far end of the long, whiskey-colored bar sat two regulars, both men, one stool between them, always one stool between them. They nursed their longnecks and lit cigarette after cigarette, never saying a word, just staring into the rank air in front of their unshaven faces, their eyes drifting up to the soundless television behind the bar.
Taking my own seat a few stools away, I considered for a second whether they might be contemplating where their lives had taken that wrong turn, how they had wound up spending every afternoon in a dive on an anonymous Main Street, shoving their last balled-up dollar bills across the bar. But they were more likely wondering how they were going to get out of splitting that pile of logs their old ladies had been bitching about since New
