Mel patted him gently on the back until the coughing subsided. She held back her tears with a supreme physical effort, knowing they would distress Cy.
“I’ll take care of her,” she promised. “Don’t worry.”
He nodded, unable to speak. His eyes, deep in their sockets, were filled with trust. “She’ll fight you,” he was finally able to whisper. “You know how independent she is. And you know she’s annoyed at me for not trying harder, not going for more chemo.” His eyes grew watery. “I’m just so tired . . .”
“No,” Mel said. “She’s not mad at you. She’s . . . we’re . . . we just don’t want . . .” She choked, then coughed, trying to dislodge the rock that felt like it was cutting off her airway. Don’t die, she wanted to cry.
“Chicky, she’s gonna have her some tough times. You try to help her, okay? No matter how hard she tries to push you away.”
“I will, boss.” Chicky was the nickname he’d given her the first day they met. Whenever he called her that, a tiny flower of warmth bloomed inside her chest. “I promise. I . . .” She stuttered, not knowing how to assure him any further that she’d look after Love. “I
promise.
” She would have done anything for this man.
It was almost three years ago now, the first week of January, that she drove into Morro Bay, more hopeless than she’d ever felt in her life. She’d quit the force on a Friday morning, spent the day aimlessly driving around Las Vegas, out to Hoover Dam, up and down the streets of Henderson, up to Mt. Charleston, where she drank hot rum toddies and watched skiers in their bright, geometric-print snow jackets and silly knit hats tumble down the powdery runs.
She ended up that night at a stale-smelling casino bar off the Strip. It seemed vaguely familiar to her, and she remembered after her second whiskey that when she was a rookie, she and her partner, an old-timer named Buzz, busted up a fight there between a black guy and a white guy over a bleach-haired cocktail waitress. Around ten p.m. she realized no amount of whiskey would wash away the scene with Sean that kept replaying in her head, a bloody nightmare loop that wouldn’t stop—his outstretched hand, face the color of concrete, the sound of the music box knocked over by his fall, the song, “The Entertainer,” a cruel joke.
She stumbled out of the casino and found her small white pickup. She started driving, flash-bang images of his empty eyes flitting through her head like a thousand wild bats. Her eyes and head throbbed with a pain that made her pull over in the middle of the desert and puke until electric stars dotted her vision.
When she stopped for coffee in a brightly lit McDonald’s outside of Barstow, she remembered Morro Bay. She’d gone there once with her handsome, black-haired father when she was ten years old. It was February, and they stayed for two days and nights in a motel called the Castoff Inn. They ate clam chowder, fried shrimp and stacks of hot, syrupy buttermilk pancakes. He bought her a huge bag of salt water taffy and a red sweatshirt printed with sea lions. They watched seals from a boat ride where, as always, he charmed the other passengers with his winning smile and seemingly impossible card tricks.
In her memories Morro Bay was a magical place, where her father said he’d one day buy them a little house with seashell wind chimes, and they’d live forever next to the ocean. He’d win custody of her, he told her. Her mother didn’t really want her, didn’t she know that? He put into words what she’d always suspected, that her mother didn’t love her but loved the child support. But that didn’t matter, because Mel and her dad were going to leave Las Vegas and live in Morro Bay. He would buy her a dog. A big, shaggy one named Ralph or Henry who would follow her everywhere and save her life if she fell into the ocean just like in the movies.
On the third day, they drove back to Las Vegas, and he dropped her off in front of the pink apartment where she lived with her mother, two blocks from downtown. It was late, and Mom was out as usual, probably dating the man who would eventually become her second of five husbands.
“Au revoir, Melina Jane LeBlanc,” her father said, flashing his devastating smile. He pulled a shiny silver dollar from behind her ear, bowed and presented it to her with a flourish. Las Vegas’s only Cajun magician was how he billed himself. “Be a good
fille
for your old papa.” He blew her a kiss and drove away. She never saw Varise Alphonse LeBlanc again.
“Best get over it,” her mother said when Mel moped around the phone for weeks, waiting for his call. “He’s a magician, little girl. Disappearing is what he does best.”
Her vague plan the morning after she quit the force and drove to Morro Bay was to go to the beach near Morro Rock, hopefully deserted that early, and use her .45 one last time. She’d make sure she was close enough to the water that the tide would take her body out to sea, where it would be picked clean by crabs. Even as she mentally planned this on the dark eight-hour drive across Nevada and California toward the ocean, she knew it was a fantasy. Bodies left for any amount of time in a lake or an ocean weren’t clean white bones. They were bloated and smelled like rotten fish mixed in a cesspool and were gnawed at and partially consumed by any number of hungry life-forms. But it wouldn’t matter, because she would no longer inhabit that body.
It all changed because of a chicken, a Silver Spangled Hamburg, she would later discover. She drove into town when the sun was still a rosy whisper on the horizon. She carefully maneuvered the foggy back streets, trying to find the beach, while her stomach twisted and heaved with the mixture of coffee and alcohol.
Out of the misty gray fog, what looked like a polka-dotted chicken with blue gray legs flew up on her truck’s damp hood and performed a clicky-clack, cartoon tap dance. Mel slammed on her brakes. The bird slid off, hit the ground and started running. Another chicken darted in front of the truck. It squawked so loud Mel could hear the agitated sound inside the cab. Another followed, its mouth open in a comical silent chicken scream.
Following them, cursing to beat the band, came a man, six two or three, about two hundred pounds. He was big-chested, had a bushy head of unruly chestnut hair and a full beard. He held up the flat of his hand to Mel, even though she was already stopped, and ran in front of her truck, slapping his wide palm on the right front fender.
“Need some help here!” he called.
Instinctively, she pulled the emergency brake, grabbed her keys and opened the door. It was her duty as a police officer to render assistance, even though she’d officially become a civilian as of noon the day before. She realized in that moment that turning off that part of her wasn’t just a matter of saying, “I quit.”
Despite the alcohol still in her system, Mel finally caught one of the escaped chickens. She held it under her arm like a football, a flapping, screeching, pecking football.
“What do I do with it?” she yelled to the man who’d managed to capture two and was holding a flapping bird in each of his hands.
“Pen’s inside!” He nodded toward the little red tongue-and-groove feed store that she hadn’t even noticed was there.
Inside, she managed to drop the hysterical chicken into the pen, whose open gate the man closed and latched. For the next hour she helped the man, who introduced himself as Cy, and his teenage employee, Josh, chase chickens. They were joined by a few locals, retired farmers out for their early morning constitutionals and familiar with the unpredictable ways of poultry. By eight a.m., two hours after Mel’s truck had been attacked by the Silver Spangled Hamburg, the frantic fowl were all captured.
The chicken posse was enjoying hot coffee and homemade donuts brought over by one of the neighbors when a bleary-eyed newspaper reporter from the
Morro Bay Post-Gazette
walked up and said someone had called him about a breaking news story on Harbor Street. The story, complete with color photograph, was the next day’s front-page news. The caption read, “Harbor Hens Run Amok.” The photo showed Cy, Mel and Josh, each holding a chicken, standing in front of the feed store. Love had been in Kentucky visiting her cousin Tally and never got over the fact that she missed the whole incredible sight.
“Say, Chicky,” Cy had said when Mel downed her third chocolate-iced French donut, the best food she’d tasted in months. “You’re quite the poultry wrangler. You looking for a job?”
Mel put down the wood-handled brush, remembering that moment like it was yesterday. She scratched Redeye on the spot near his withers that always made his eyes roll with pleasure. She never had a pet growing up, so she wasn’t naturally comfortable with animals. In the last few months, as she’d taken the baby steps in learning to ride, Redeye’s easygoing personality had wormed its way into her heart. She looked forward to the old horse’s nuzzling, amazed that an animal this large and capable of inflicting hurt on a human being could be so gentle. She’d slowly grown to love Redeye, the same way she’d grown to love Morro Bay, August and Polly, the feed store and the Buttercream, Love and Cy.
Yes, that moment with Cy almost three years ago was imprinted on her heart, like an orphaned gosling attaching to the first breathing thing it laid eyes on. That question whose answer would forever change her life. The answer that would
save
her life.
“You looking for a job?” His face had been hopeful.
She remembered taking a few seconds to contemplate what he asked. Then she took a long drag of that strong, hot coffee and replied, to her utter surprise, “Actually, I think I am.”
FOUR
Rett
B
rother Dwaine’s trucker friends took Rett the rest of the way to Morro Bay. Though she would never admit to anyone that she was scared, it was a big relief that she didn’t actually have to hitchhike across the country.
Jim, a truck driver from Spokane who had three daughters of his own, dropped her off at a McDonald’s in Santa Maria, about an hour or so from Morro Bay. He made a couple of quick cell phone calls and found another of Brother Dwaine’s friends who happened to be in Santa Maria visiting someone in the hospital. Rocky Sanchez agreed to drive her to Morro Bay, where he also lived. Though Rett’s trust in God’s people had gotten a little shaky in the last few years—the small-town county fair and gospel circuit could do that to a person—she had to admit that Brother Dwaine and his friends seemed pretty cool.
Rocky Sanchez told her he was a minister right off, so she gave him points for not trying to fake her out. He could have, because he sure didn’t look like any preacher she’d ever met. In the churches where she and her sisters had regularly sung before the the Son Sisters fell apart, thanks to her freakazoid older sister, Patsy, the ministers tended to wear baggy gray or navy blue suits with lapel pins of little gold crosses or American flags. Rocky had a shaved head, a tattoo on his right forearm of a bleeding red heart surrounding a greenish black crown of thorns, and a gooselike laugh that reminded Rett of Brother Dwaine’s truck horn. It made her smile, something her mom always complained she didn’t do enough.
On the drive to Morro Bay in an old Chevy pickup sun-faded to a pale pink, he talked nonstop, which she kind of liked, because it meant she only had to nod her head. She found out he was born and raised in Phoenix, Arizona, where he once sold drugs and served time in prison for various drug-related crimes. In prison, he found Jesus after seeing him in a dream and used the time inside to get his bachelor’s degree in pastoral care. He also worked in the prison barbershop. Two weeks after he got out, he met his wife, Magnolia Rosalina Fabrizio, at a casino in Las Vegas.
“I was passing out tracts at the old Aladdin,” he said. “Magnolia was the freebie headliner in the bar that night. Man, she could sing the hair off a dead man’s chest.” His laugh filled the truck’s warm cab. He swatted at the wooden cross hanging from the rearview mirror. “I fell for her like a lodge pine to a chain saw. Asked her out that night. We ate pancakes and sausage at Denny’s on the Strip. Been together ever since.” He smiled to himself, keeping his eyes on the road. “Thirty-one incredible years. We have two girls. Jade is twenty-nine, and Cheyenne is thirty.” Rocky looked over at Rett; his dark brown skin seemed to glow when he spoke of his wife. “She doesn’t sing in bars anymore, except on the third Wednesday of the month at the Rowdy Pelican saloon.”
“Why there?” Rett asked.
“For four hours, from six to ten p.m., they agree not to serve liquor. Then she sings all the songs that made me want to marry her the first moment I heard her. She won’t sing anymore while people are drinking, and her fans love her enough to honor her beliefs. That’s her picture there.” He gestured at a photo paper clipped to Rett’s sunshade. It showed a woman with curly, dark hair and a gleaming smile holding a red pancake spatula across her heart. Somehow the photograph made her look like she had a halo, which Rett thought looked kind of cool.
“Her best friend took that photo,” he said. “Really caught her personality.”
“Oh,” Rett said.
True to his profession, he did try to find out if she was in any kind of physical or spiritual trouble. But at least he wasn’t sneaky. He just flat-out asked if she needed any advice, then left her alone when she made it clear she was fine and didn’t want to discuss why she was coming to Morro Bay.
“Say,” he said, glancing at her banjo case. “Do you know ‘On the Rock Where Moses Stood?’ ”
“Sure.” His request impressed her. The old guy really knew his bluegrass gospel. Normally when people saw a banjo, they always asked her to play “Dueling Banjos,” like that was the be all and end all of banjo music. “Can’t play it alone,” she always lied. People were so lame sometimes.
She pulled out Dale’s . . .
her
. . . banjo and started tuning it by ear.
“Beautiful instrument,” Rocky said, glancing over.
“It’s a 1933 prewar Gibson Granada,” she said, pretending it was actually hers. “Who knows how many people have played it? It has all its original parts. And the rim has never been cut.”