Maggy's Child (29 page)

It was good just to be with Nick.

“Tell me what you’ve been doing over the past twelve years,” Maggy ordered as she bit into her pizza.

“Besides pining for you, you mean?”

Maggy laughed. “Yes, besides that.”

Nick told her. He had joined the service, done his
stint, gotten out, gone into business for himself. Basically, he said, that about covered it.

“What branch of the service?” Such a bare-bones description of how he had spent the time they’d been apart was not like Nick, with his prodigious memory for detail and gift of gab.

“Navy.” He answered briefly and took another bite of pizza.

“You were in the navy? I bet you looked cute in one of those white uniforms.” Maggy twinkled at him.

“Must have. You’ve heard the old saw about sailors having a girl in every port? With me, it was at least three.”

Because she knew he was teasing, she kicked him under the table and went on with her meal, unperturbed.

“So what exactly do you do for a living now?” Maggy asked with growing curiosity as she watched him devour the last slice of pizza.

Nick took a swallow of beer. “I buy nightclubs that are losing money, turn them around, then sell them again for more than I paid for them.”

Maggy glanced at him suspiciously. She’d known Nick a long time, and she knew when he wasn’t being up-front with her. His answers were too brief, too glib. What was he hiding?

“Truth?” The single word came out automatically, and Maggy felt a flicker of surprise as she heard herself utter it. Then she thought with an inner smile that in Nick’s presence she was reverting to childhood again. It was a question they’d often posed to each other as kids, and they even had a never-to-be-doubted oath they’d sworn in response.

“You don’t believe me? Why on earth not?” His glance at her was wary. And he, at least, seemed to have forgotten their oath.

“Because I know you, Nick King, and that doesn’t sound like you at all.”

“I’m thirty-two years old, Magdalena. I’ve changed.”

“When pigs fly,” she said cheerfully.

He laughed and took another large bite of pizza.

“Will you believe me if I tell you that I’m financially comfortable? I’m not rich, but I make good money. Enough to take care of you, and me, and your kid, and put a little away for our old age at the same time.”

“I’m not interested in money anymore,” she said with perfect sincerity. “Take my word for it, I’ve learned the hard way that money does not buy happiness. The last twelve years I’ve had more money than we ever dreamed of having when we were little, and I’ve been miserable. It’s been a nightmare.”

“It’s over now.” He was chewing the last bite of pizza, but his eyes were suddenly keen on her face. “You’re never going back there again.”

Maggy sipped her Coke.

“How come you’ve never married?” She was genuinely curious about this, but she also wanted to change the subject. Her future was something she didn’t even want to think about at the moment. Even considering going back to Lyle made her stomach tighten with fear and her skin crawl with revulsion, but David was the stumbling block. She could not, would not, abandon David. And Lyle would never let David go. But she wouldn’t think about that now. Later, a few days from now, a week, she would have to calmly consider her options, and weigh them, but not yet. She wasn’t ready yet.

“Now why do you think, Magdalena?” Nick shot her a wry glance, chugged the last few ounces of beer, and signaled for the waitress.

“That’s not an answer.”

“Because I never met another woman who could fill the hole you left in my heart.”

It was charming, but, “Truth?” she asked again with a flickering smile.

“Cross my heart and hope to die, may dogs chew on my bones if I lie.”

There it was, the answer. The oath they had sworn as children whenever something was the absolute, unvarnished truth. Maggy stared at him as he handed the check and a twenty-dollar bill to the waitress, who came up just as he finished speaking.

He hadn’t forgotten the oath. So there was something he was not telling her about his employment. Maggy thought about it, uncovered a stray hope that he wasn’t a thief or a con artist or worse, and then decided that it didn’t really matter very much after all. If she did find a way to divorce Lyle, she could always get a job. Twelve years ago, she’d been the best waitress the Harmony Inn had ever had.

What mattered was that for richer or poorer, better or worse, honesty or deception, what she wanted was to spend the rest of her life with Nick. Too bad she hadn’t come to that realization twelve years ago. She would have spared them all a lot of grief.

“Ready?”

Maggy nodded. Nick stood up and waited for her to precede him out the door.

The dusty Ford pickup truck that had been the only vehicle left at the farm awaited them in the parking lot. Link had apparently taken the Corvette, and Nick had muttered a string of irate animadversions on his brother’s character when he discovered the loss. Fortunately, the key had been in the truck’s ignition, or they would have been condemned to eating burned steaks after all.

The truck’s cab was so high off the ground that Maggy had to literally climb onto the bench seat. She winced as she bent too far forward and a pang of discomfort sliced across her rib cage, but fortunately the pain subsided as soon as she sat upright. Pulling Nick’s coat closer around her shoulders as protection against the chill in the truck, she slid across the blue vinyl upholstery to unlock the
driver’s side door for Nick, who had already slammed her door and was walking around the cab. Mission accomplished, she scooted back toward the passenger door as he swung up behind the wheel.

“Whoa.” He stopped her in mid-scoot with an arm dropped around her shoulders and a roguish smile. “Haven’t you noticed how couples ride in pickup trucks around here? People’ll think we’re not natives if you go hugging the door.”

“We wouldn’t want them to think that.” Given the fact that there was not a soul in sight, and she knew perfectly well that Nick wouldn’t have cared what anybody thought in any case, it was a ridiculous argument. But she was perfectly content to be pulled back over to sit next to him. After he fished one end of the seat belt out from where it had slipped into the crack in the seat, she fastened the thing. By the time it clicked into place the truck was in motion. The heater blasted out warm air almost instantly, and Nick turned it down. Nick’s body put out a heat of its own, and soon Maggy was too warm. She discarded his coat, throwing it over the back of the seat between herself and the door. Without the coat, she could feel Nick’s right arm as it brushed hers every time he turned the wheel.

Maggy found that she thoroughly enjoyed the contact.

“Want to go for a ride?” he asked.

“Where to?”

“Oh, down memory lane.”

“If you want to.” She didn’t know what he was talking about, and he didn’t explain, but she didn’t care. She was perfectly content to go wherever Nick took her. They hit the interstate, then crossed the bridge into Kentucky in companionable silence. It was only when he pulled off the Algonquin Parkway exit that she realized where he was heading.

“Parkway Place.” She hadn’t been back there for years, not since she had moved her father out of the projects.
She had never wanted to go back, because to do so would be too painful. Not because of all that she had suffered when she lived there, but because of all she had lost when she left.

“I drove by here when I first got back into town. It hasn’t changed a bit.”

“I haven’t been back in ten years.”

Nick glanced sideways at her. “Roots, Magdalena,” he said softly. “Sometimes you’ve got to get back to your roots.”

She said nothing, but with growing eagerness searched for familiar landmarks. There was one, the Church of the Assumption on the corner, where Father John had once presided. The windows were boarded up now, and what was left of the roof was blackened and open to the night. The small wooden spire that had once served as a neighborhood beacon was missing entirely.

“Oh, look at the church,” she caught his arm, pointing. Nick looked and shook his head.

“Burned out.”

“I’m surprised they haven’t fixed it—or torn it down.”

“Not here, baby. You’ve been living in the white-bread world too long. Things don’t get fixed down here.”

It was so true that Maggy couldn’t refute it. Looking out the window, she was jolted back into the past by the sights that met her eyes. Shacklike houses were jammed in next to factories, stores, and warehouses. Many of the buildings appeared to be deserted. A few, like the church, bore signs of having burned. More were boarded up. The smell from nearby industries permeated everything, even managing to waft through the rolled-up windows of the truck. Green space was at a precious minimum, and what little there was was jealously guarded by rusty chain link fences. Uneven sidewalks ran the length of the streets, but though it was only about nine o’clock, there was no one out. This was a high crime area. Only shadowy types scurried about in the darkness, back away from the streets
where the chances of being seen were less. Prudent folks stayed inside, out of harm’s way.

Maggy had forgotten what it had been like.

Suddenly, ahead and to the left, loomed Parkway Place. Maggy’s eyes widened as she took in the barrackslike cluster of buildings. Built around a small courtyard that then had managed to grow only the scraggliest of grass, the yellow-brick buildings were even grungier than she remembered. The boxlike structures were adorned with ugly aluminum windows, a few of which sported battered air-conditioning units jutting from their sills like blunt metal noses, and tired-looking concrete stoops beneath drooping V-shaped roofs. The residents had gained more parking since Maggy had resided there: the concrete around the buildings was all encompassing now, with not a blade of grass nor, God forbid, a tree in sight.

Sharp popping sounds from the direction of Seventh Street Road caused her to stiffen instinctively. The sound was familiar, though she had not heard it in years: gunshots. Exposure to not-too-distant gunfire had once been an unremarkable part of her existence.

From the next street over came the rumble of semis. That sound, too, was part and parcel of her childhood. If one lived in Parkway Place, the constant noise made by the big trucks was an inescapable fact of life.

A stooped old man pushing a grocery cart full of unidentifiable items emerged from between the buildings, staring blindly down at the sidewalk in front of him as he made his way up the street. About fifty feet behind him followed three teenage boys in denim jackets and backward baseball caps, poking each other in the ribs and laughing.

It didn’t require a lot of imagination to guess that somewhere farther along the street, perhaps in front of a closed warehouse or an abandoned store, a confrontation would take place, with results that might prove disastrous to the old man.

“There’s your apartment.” Nick had turned into the complex and was pointing. Maggy looked up at the three pairs of lighted fourth-story windows behind which she had passed her childhood and felt a shock of recognition. In a sudden explosion of long-forgotten emotion, she remembered in exquisite, excruciating detail what it had been like to be a child in this place, remembered how it had felt to have her father passed out on the floor and no food in the house, remembered being cold and hungry and alone, remembered being scared.

But she remembered good times, too, when her father was sober. And most of all, she remembered Nick.

“Your apartment’s over there.” She pointed across the complex. Lights blazed from the windows of his former residence, too. In fact, lights shown through nearly all the windows. The apartments were poor, and dingy, and small, but they also had a crucial redeeming feature: they were unbelievably cheap, with rent based on the tenant’s ability to pay. Her own father had been committed to the ridiculous sum of five dollars a month. She was sure the amounts had gone up some since then, but not much. As a result, Maggy doubted that a single unit was empty.

“It hasn’t changed much, has it?” Nick spoke ruefully, his expression almost sad as he took in the concrete wasteland in which they had grown up. “When I was a kid, I couldn’t wait to get out of here.”

“Me either,” Maggy said. They were both silent as he circled the parking lot and headed back to the street.

“There’s the ball field.” Nick nodded off to his left. “Remember when you used to come watch me play ball?”

“Remember how none of you guys would let me play on your team because I was a girl?” There was half-humorous accusation in her tone as she poked him admonishingly in the ribs. “I could hit as well as most of the guys, too, and I ran faster than all of you.”

“That’s why we didn’t want you to play,” Nick said,
grinning. A yellow-and-red neon sign loomed up on the right.

“Oh, look, the McDonald’s is still here,” Maggy squealed. Like everything else she had seen, the restaurant where she and Nick had first met as children was a little dirtier and looked a little more dilapidated, but was basically unchanged. A large blue Dumpster still claimed pride of place in the back. A skinny black mongrel nosed hopefully around its base.

“Wonder if that’s the same Dumpster?” Nick had spotted it, too.

Maggy shrugged. “Surely not. This one’s got a lid.”

“Good thought. Keep hungry little girls out at all costs.”

Maggy sobered at the thought. “I wonder if there are very many hungry children around here tonight.”

She thought of David, her brilliant, beautiful, beloved boy, and shuddered. Whatever evils had resulted from her actions, and they had been many and varied, at least her child was not growing up in the grinding poverty she had once known. The cost to herself had been great, but she had saved him from that.

Maybe what she had done had not been so hideously terrible after all. Oh, it had been wrong, she knew that now clear through to her bone marrow, but maybe it was not completely unforgivable. She had done what she felt she had to do at the time to provide for her child. And she
had
provided for him. David had had the best of everything, always. Even love. Lots of love, from his mother and grandmother and even Lyle. David had never lacked for anything in his life.