Promise of Safekeeping : A Novel (9781101553954) (20 page)

She glanced up at him as if she’d heard something in his voice she didn’t quite know how to gauge—and he realized: she knew what he was thinking even before he did. She loved the ring, and so he wanted her to have it, naturally.

She stuck her index finger through the ring band. “Looks like it’s a no-go.”

“That’s because it’s a man’s.”

“I don’t know any man who would wear a ring like this. Unless he was a drag queen.”

Will laughed. “In the early days, it was usually men who drove the cars.”

“I’m afraid I’m missing something here.”

“It’s a blinker,” he said. He couldn’t help it: he reached for her hand and gently slipped the ring from her finger to try it on his. It was a better fit. And then, to demonstrate, he mimed moving his hands on a steering wheel, then putting his left hand out an imaginary window and flicking the ring so it caught the light. “See? At night, the ring would reflect so you could let other drivers know you were turning.”

“That’s amazing,” she said. “But . . . what if you’re turning right?”

Will laughed. “You make three lefts.” He handed the ring back to her, basking in the warmth of her gold-taupe eyes, her sincere delight. “You have a nice smile.”

She ducked her head, not quite a blush. “Thanks.”

She slipped the ring back onto her finger, but her gaze stayed on him. She was considering him, thinking. And instead of shying away, as he’d originally done, he stood for it. He had the sense of being an artist’s model, waiting to learn what he looked like through another person’s eyes.

“I can see why you like this. Picking, I mean.”

“It’s addicting,” he said.

“I just don’t know how you part with all this cool stuff once you find it.”

He shrugged and prayed he didn’t give anything away. “It’s like with you and reading people. You read a person, think: Oh, that’s interesting. Then . . . it’s over.”

“Well, that’s one part of it,” she said.

“What’s the other part?”

She laughed nervously. “I don’t know. Self-preservation?”

He said nothing, but watched her.

“I don’t see anything else in here. We should go—”

“No. Wait.” He kept himself from reaching out and taking her elbow. He didn’t want her to move, not even to turn away. “What do you mean, self-preservation?”

Her lips pressed together. “You learn to read people because you have to, when people don’t really say what they mean.”

He looked down at her face, and what he’d once seen as sharp angles and a kind of haughty blankness was softening now. “Why are you here?” he asked gently.

“You mean in Richmond?”

“No. I mean, why are you here with me? Today. If you’d told me you weren’t coming anymore, you know I would help you anyway.”

“I know,” she said. “Because—”

“Right. I have a tell.”

She smiled shyly, bent her head, and walked a few steps away from him. When she looked back, even he could see that she’d decided to tell the truth.

“I like picking. And, also, you’re good company.”

He warmed under her compliment, but the feeling ebbed quickly. “Good company compared to your guy in Albany?”

“I don’t have a guy in Albany.”

“So you say,” he said. She might not be seeing anyone officially, but she was hung up on someone. It annoyed him. “Come on. I don’t think we’re gonna find anything here.”

He stepped over the threshold of a doorless frame. When he turned around, Lauren was still standing in the old garage, half in a slant of sunlight and looking down at the ring in her hand.

“You want that or not?” he asked.

“What would I do with it?”

“Not everything you love has to be practical.”

She turned it over, considering. “My brother would think this is really cool.”

He felt some slight disappointment, though he couldn’t say why. “Suit yourself,” he said.

Arlen carried Lauren’s note. All day long and well into the afternoon, it burned in his pocket like a hot coal. He knew that what he was about to do was wrong, but after Will had left for his latest expedition, Arlen had closed up the store and hopped a bus out of town.

Now he was tired. The bus ride had taken hours. He walked the long,
dusty roads through western Virginia, Lauren’s note heavy as if he were dragging an anchor along the ground. The gravel road crunched under his sandals, and startled chipmunks scurried into thickets of brown leaves. He walked until he couldn’t feel the ache in his feet anymore. He walked until he got hungry, and he thanked God for the first good luck he’d had in a while, when some local farmer had put a wooden bucket full of apples out on his front lawn with an honor box. He walked until the ache in his heart got to be so big that he felt as if the sun was going down inside his chest instead of the sky.

Finally, he came to his mother’s house—the house he grew up in. Its severely angled roof was still pointing like an arrow to the clouds, its two second-story windows arched as if surprised to see him. There was a calico cat sitting on the stairs, blinking sleepily. A wide porch swing caught the breeze. On it, someone had placed a book, the pages open, facedown.

His mother’s house. He’d inherited it when she died of uterine cancer, about four years ago. She and Will had been the only ones who hadn’t given up on him—Will had gone to her funeral but Arlen hadn’t been allowed.
Too dangerous,
the facility superintendent had said. And maybe he was right. Arlen had been angry that his mother was dying, but he was even angrier that he couldn’t be there to take care of her. He was the one who should have been changing her sheets and making her fried eggs for breakfast. If they’d let him out, they would have had a hell of a time getting him back in.

In lieu of a funeral, a lawyer had come with a document saying that Arlen was going to get everything—which was mostly just the house. And for a few weeks, Arlen had thought it was a dream come true. He had somewhere to go. The idea that his mother’s house was waiting for him to move back into it made his little cell more bearable—at least for a while.

Then came the notice about the taxes—that nobody was paying
them, that money was owed. He realized he couldn’t keep the house; either it would fall to the ground waiting for him to be released or the bank would take it back. He didn’t want to sell, but he had to. It seemed more respectful of his mother’s memory to sell the house than to lose it. He tried to find a Realtor to help him, but being in prison made the task daunting. Nobody wanted to work with a convict. In the end, the bank took the house away.

And yet, now, in the heat of a Friday night, he stood before it again—windows and shingles, posts and walls. Here was the house that he and his mother had called their own—where she had let him sift the flour when they were baking, and where she’d gone at him with a broom when she caught him smoking cigarettes in the old chicken coop out back. He knew he didn’t have much time—that if he didn’t move on, the house’s new owners might see him hanging around for no reason and call the police.

But he didn’t go. He’d come looking for answers—his mother’s advice. In a certain way, he hadn’t known where he was since the day he was set free. Of course, he knew he was staying at Will’s apartment. In Richmond. But he still didn’t know
where he was
in relation to things, to his old life. He wanted to see some part of it again, if only to prove to himself that it had happened.

The woman who let the screen door bang behind her was wearing a pink apron and flip-flops. She put her hands on her hips and scowled at him. “You here to see John?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” Arlen said.

“What’s your business?”

Arlen put his hands in his pockets and slumped his shoulders. “Nothing, ma’am.”

“What’s that?” The woman walked to the edge of the stairs. “Speak up. I can’t hear you.”

“Nothing, ma’am. I just used to live in this house, is all. When I was a boy. Me and my mom.”

“Well, you don’t live here no more,” the woman said.

“No. I don’t.”

Arlen knew that this was when he was supposed to turn and go. But his feet were like lead, and his heart was chained to the spot.

“How’d you get here, anyway?” the woman asked.

“Walked. From the bus stop.”

“You walked? All the way from Heyger’s corner?” The woman glanced up at the sky and shook her head, as if asking God to commiserate. But then, when she looked back to Arlen, her eyes had softened some. They were dark and almond shaped; her black hair was tied back under a colorful headband. She put her hands on her hips and sighed. “Well, my grandmother would turn over in her grave if I didn’t at least give you a glass of water before you head back. C’mon up here, now. We’ll take a quick walk around the place; then you’ll be on your way.”

“I appreciate it,” Arlen said. Then he held the door open for her before he followed her inside.

Most of the apologies Lauren had made in her lifetime were forgettable. When she stepped on someone’s foot in a crowded movie theater, she said
sorry
with the same instinct that made her say
bless you
when a person sneezed. If she accidentally swore in front of her mother, she followed up with a swiftly murmured,
Oops, sorry
, as her mother rolled her eyes. And when she was talking to a colleague in a crowded train station or conference room, she said
sorry
when she couldn’t quite make out what she’d heard.

It struck her that to say
sorry
was a kind of currency—a barter or trade. If she accidentally stepped in front of someone in a line,
sorry
would fix it, a little offering or sacrifice, before she moved to the line’s end. But she wasn’t entirely certain that the power of apologizing was a fair trade for what Arlen had endured. Prison life was no life at all. Arlen would have learned things he hadn’t wanted to learn. Seen things he never wanted to see. While other
people grew into adults by worrying about their jobs, their finances, their good friends—Arlen had not.

Lauren was looking out of the van’s window as Will drove her back to Maisie’s house. Today was Friday, and she’d missed five days of work. The more she thought of what it meant to make an apology, the less meaningful her offering began to seem. Perhaps Arlen was right not to see her. Perhaps she should take her cue from him, and simply go back home.

And yet, she still felt she had some business in Richmond, some reason for staying. She turned to glance at Will, and he smiled warmly. Her heart filled up with lightness and all her self-pity evaporated. Will was such an unlikely ally. He made her feel better. He showed her a different world—a place where castoffs were beautiful, where a person could stop for a milk shake in the middle of the day for no reason at all, where no amount of knowing which restaurants were trendy or which politicians were inviting her to their fund-raisers could ever impress him.

That was when she realized that
sorry
had an opposite—a balance.

Will glanced at her. “What are you thinking?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Just . . . 
thanks
.”

The house looked like Arlen’s old house, except not at all. There was the kitchen that connected to the parlor that connected to the living room where his mother had sat mending his clothes and watching game shows. And some of the furniture was even in the same place—the table in the dining room, the sofa against the wall—simply because the floor plan naturally dictated the position of certain things. But upstairs, Arlen could hear children playing and the sound of loud video games rumbling the floorboards. The
woman’s husband had lingered for a moment, quizzing Arlen to see if he really had lived in the house, before deciding he believed him and going back to the TV.