“No. Never.”
“I know that now, but here-you are drawing away again, keeping me at
arm’s length. What’s wrong?”
She chewed on her thumb. Like a little girl.
“Rebecca? ”
“I don’t know how to say it. I don’t know how to explain. I’ve never
had to put it into words for anyone before.”
“I’m a good listener.”
“I need a little time to think.”
“So take your time.”
“Just a little time. A few minutes.”
“Take all the time you want.”
She stared at the ceiling, thinking.
He got under the sheet with her and pulled the blanket over both of
them.
They lay in silence for a while.
Outside, the wind sang a two-note serenade.
She said, “My father died when I was six.”
“I’m sorry. That’s terrible. You never really had a chance to know
him, then.”
“True. And yet, odd as it seems, I still sometimes miss him so bad, you
know, even after all these yearseven a father I never really knew and
can hardly remember. I miss him, anyway.”
Jack thought of his own little Davey, not even quite six when his mother
had died.
He squeezed Rebecca’s hand gently.
She said, “But my father dying when I was six-in a way, that’s not the
worst of it. The worst of it is that I saw him die. I was there when
it happened.”
“God. How . . . how did it happen?”
“Well . . . he and Mama owned a sandwich shop. A small place. Four
little tables. Mostly take-out business.
Sandwiches, potato salad, macaroni salad, a few desserts. It’s hard to
make a go of it in that business unless you have two things, right at
the start: enough start-up capital to see you through a couple of lean
years at the beginning, and a good location with lots of foot traffic
passing by or office workers in the neighborhood. But my folks were
poor. They had very little capital. They couldn’t pay the high rent in
a good location, so they started in a bad one and kept moving whenever
they could afford to, three times in three years, each time to a
slightly better spot. They worked hard, so hard….
My father held down another job, too, janitorial work, late at night,
after the shop closed, until just before dawn. Then he’d come home,
sleep four or five hours, and go open the shop for the lunch trade. Mama
cooked a lot of the food that was served, and she worked behind the
counter, too, but she also did some house cleaning for other people, to
bring in a few extra dollars. Finally, the shop began to pay off. My
dad was able to drop his janitorial job, and Mama gave up the house
cleaning. In fact, business started getting so good that they were
looking for their first employee; they couldn’t handle the shop all by
themselves any more. The future looked bright. And then . . . one
afternoon . . . during the slack time between the lunch and dinner
crowds, when Mama was out on an errand and I was alone in the shop with
my father . . . this guy came in . . . with a gun . . .”
“Oh, shit,” Jack said. He knew the rest of it. He’d seen it all
before, many times. Dead storekeepers, sprawled in pools of their own
blood, beside their emptied cash registers.
“There was something strange about this creep,” Rebecca said. “Even
though I was only six years old, I could tell there was something wrong
with him the moment he came in, and I went to the kitchen and peeked out
at him through the curtain. He was fidgety . . . pale . . . funny
around the eyes .
“A junkie?”
“That’s the way it turned out, yeah. If I close my eyes now, I can
still see his pale face, the way his mouth twitched. The awful thing is
. . . I can see it clearer than I can see my own father’s face. Those
terrible eyes.”
She shuddered.
Jack said, “You don’t have to go on.”
“Yes. I do. I have to tell you. So you’ll understand why . . . why