Torch (25 page)

“I can’t. I’ve got to get into town.”

“What am I thinking?” she smiled. “I forgot all about school. In fact, you should be there right this minute. Come on up and I’ll drive you.”

“I want to walk, but thanks.”

Before she could say another word he began to make his way along the path he’d worn when he’d come here all winter to skip school.

“Do me a favor and come for dinner one night. All of you, the next time Claire’s up,” she called after him.

He waved one hand in acknowledgment, without looking back.

His phone rang the moment he turned it on, only this time it wasn’t the national anthem, but a sound that seemed to him what the wave of a magic wand would sound like if there were such a thing as a magic wand and it made a sound. It was Lisa.

“Where are you?” she asked.

He’d known her most of his life, and for most of it she’d been nothing to him, but now everything had changed. Now he got a certain feeling inside whenever he saw her or heard her voice, like a swarm of bees had been let loose in his stomach, like someone had walked up behind him and said
boo
.

“In town. Almost in town.” He stopped walking so he could get better reception. “I’m by the bakery.” He knew she assumed that he was in his truck, driving; like everyone else, Lisa didn’t know about the apartment.

“What are you wearing?” she whispered in a tone of mock seduction, and then burst into laughter. She was at school, using her cell phone, which was forbidden there, her head tucked into her locker so no one would see. Joshua could tell by the way her voice echoed.

“Come and meet me.”

“I can’t!”

“Behind the café. In five minutes.”

“Josh. Just ’cause you’re not in school.”

There was a for sale sign hanging on a metal frame a few feet away from him, rusted now after having hung there all winter long. He put his hand on it.

“Well then, after.”

“Of course,” she said. “Okay. I gotta go.
I miss you
.”

“Me too.”

“I love you,” she said, her voice husky and serious, almost sad with the weight of what they had between them now.

“Me too.”

He clicked off his phone and began to walk again. He hadn’t meant
to fall in love with Lisa, but now that he was in love with her he couldn’t believe he’d lived any other way, or that she had; that a couple of months before she’d been engaged to Trent Fisher. Lisa had been the one to start things up. She called him one night to discuss the assignment they had to do together for their class, but then after he told her he wouldn’t be doing it, that he’d dropped out of school, she didn’t want to hang up. She talked to him about an argument she’d had with her mom, about how she sometimes had to go to Bemidji to visit her dad’s parents even though she had met them only the year before, about whether she should go out for track or not. He was in his apartment when she’d called—she’d gotten the number of his cell phone from R.J.—and he lay in his sleeping bag listening to her in the dark of a Sunday night, which was really the wee hours of a Monday morning, well past when either of them should have been asleep. She told him that she couldn’t sleep when her mom was gone, that her mom was gone three nights a week, staying over at the house of her new boyfriend, John Rileen. His mother was gone too by then. In the hospital, two weeks away from dying, though he didn’t know it then. Lisa talked and talked that first night, roaming her house, taking the phone with Joshua on the other end of it wherever she went. She sat on the edge of her bathtub and shaved her legs while they talked. She played music and held the phone up to the speaker so he could hear her favorite parts of songs. By the time they got off the phone they were in love with each other, though they didn’t say it for weeks, until after they’d spent several evenings in Lisa’s bed together and Lisa had worked up the courage to break it off with Trent Fisher.

When Joshua entered the alley behind the Midden Café he saw from a distance that there was a note on his windshield. His face flushed, thinking that it was from Lisa, but when he opened it he saw that it was from Marcy, asking him to stop in and see her before he left. He went up the back steps of the café, pounded hard on the heavy door, and stood for several moments waiting. He went around to the front door, which was locked. He saw Marcy inside, removing chairs from the tops of the tables. He tapped gently on the glass, and she looked up and took two more chairs down from a table before coming to let him in.

“Lock it,” she said, walking away. “If you don’t, we’ll have someone trying to come in every other minute. We don’t open until eleven thirty now. Did you hear?” She looked at him for the first time, her eyes were hard, and then they softened. “We don’t do breakfast anymore. Not
enough people coming in. Everyone goes out to the Kwik-Mart now, ever since they put that breakfast buffet in and they got a cappuccino machine too. It’s all this prepackaged shit, but I guess that’s fine with people these days.”

He sat down at one of the chairs that Marcy had set near him. He hadn’t been inside the café since the last time he worked nearly four months ago, the night before he learned that his mother had cancer. Since then, he’d avoided the café and Marcy and Angie and Vern, the same way he avoided most of the people and places he knew before his mother got sick.

“I suppose you’re getting by,” Marcy said. Her eyes flickered away from his. “I mean, with … everything.”

He nodded and looked away from her, to the Ms. Pac Man machine in the corner, silently displaying its lights.

“Your friend still comes in every night to play,” she said. “R.J. Jesus, he loves that game. He’s not half bad at it, either.” She reached for her cigarette, burning in an ashtray on the counter. “You don’t want your job back, do you?”

“No, that’s not why I came—”

“I know, I know. I mean, I hope you don’t want it back because it’s gone. We would have had to lay you off anyways, with no more breakfasts. Your leave was good timing.” She took the last drag of her cigarette and crushed it out. “Oh, well. You won’t be needing this job anyway. You’ll be graduating and then you’re off to Florida.”

“California,” he said.

“California,” she echoed, looking at him meaningfully, like she was about to divulge a secret. Then she turned away and said, “Lucky you.”

Clyde Earle appeared in the front door, pressing his face up against the glass with his hands tented around it so he could see inside.

“We’re closed,” yelled Marcy, and then yelled it again, more vehemently the second time. But Clyde remained where he was until she went to the door and gestured in an exaggerated fashion to the sign that listed the new hours. When he left she came back to her place by the counter. “The Indians are on the warpath about us being closed for breakfast. They used to have their little gatherings here every morning. Never ordered anything but coffee, and then they wanted ten refills apiece. And now everyone wonders why.” She shook another cigarette from her pack.

“You got one of those for me?” he asked, though he had a fresh pack in his pocket. She slid the pack down the counter toward him and he took one and lit it up.

“So hi,” she said softly, sitting down on a stool.

“Hi.”

“It’s good to see you.” She reached up to adjust the clip in her hair. “I’ve missed you. My little buddy.”

“How’s Vern?” He’d despised Vern when they worked together, but now he felt a kind of longing for him, and for the feelings and smells and sounds of the café kitchen at dinnertime.

“We had to put him down to two nights, but at least summer’s coming and he’s got his things to sell at the DQ. It’s just me and Mom now. We can’t be paying anyone else.” She set her hair clip on the counter. It was brown and shaped like a butterfly. “Mom doesn’t come in until noon when it gets busy. Since it’s just us two we try to only have both of us here when we need it.”

“I could come in to help,” he said. “I mean, for free. If you ever need a hand.”

“That’s sweet, Josh.” She bowed her head and put the clip back in her hair and then picked up her cigarette again. They both sat silently with the smoke coiling around them, hanging blue in the air.

“How’s Brent and the kids?” he asked.

“Fine,” she nodded. Her arms were thinner than they had been, he noticed, her chest flatter. He realized now, after all those months of working with her, that he’d had a crush on her, though he couldn’t admit it until this very moment, now that he no longer did.

“I should get going,” he said, rising.

Marcy stood too. Something urgent flashed across her face. “Isn’t there something that … you have for me?”

When he looked at her curiously, she took the dishrag that hung on a hook and began to wipe the counter.

“Vivian Plebo,” she blurted, without glancing up. “She told me she called you.”

In the weeks since he’d begun selling for Vivian and Bender, he’d come to believe that he’d moved beyond being surprised about who used drugs in Midden. There were the people he’d always assumed, of course, but then there were those he’d never have guessed—Anita at the Treetop
Motel, Dave Collins, whose wife worked at the school, teaching fourth grade—but Joshua never expected to be selling crystal meth to Marcy. He hadn’t been able to bring himself to look at her as he’d taken it from his pocket, neatly rolled into a piece of plastic by Vivian the day before. He quickly set it on the counter, and just as quickly Marcy’s hand was on it, pulling it toward her, then she ducked behind the counter and zipped it into the inside pocket of her purse and gave him the money she had ready, folded in half.
What are you doing?
he’d almost asked, suddenly schoolmarmish, but instead he took the money, tucking it into his pocket. He pulled on the door, forgetting it was locked, and then unlocked it and let himself out, hearing Marcy’s voice behind him telling him not to be such a stranger.

Vivian’s car was parked in its spot when he pulled up in front of her house. No sign of Bender’s truck. He liked it better when Bender was home, though that was rare, because he was usually on the road, driving his semi to Fargo and Minot and Bismarck and back.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Vivian asked when she opened the door, already disappearing back into the house. He followed her down the dark hallway and into the living room. “I called a bunch a times. Did you get my messages?”

“Yeah,” he lied. It was Vivian and Bender who had given him the cell phone and paid for half the bill each month, so they could get in touch with him whenever they needed him to deliver or pick up. He sat on the arm of the brown plaid chair. “I got the one about Marcy and I brought it to her, but then that’s the last I had. I need to get more before I do the other stuff.”

“What other stuff?”

“The other deliveries.”

“There aren’t any,” she said, looking at him for the first time, a bitter smile coming across her face over having busted him. “I only called about Marcy. She was calling me every fifteen minutes and she didn’t want to call you directly—she was too shy or embarrassed or something. She’s always been like that, you know? As long as I can remember, like she was better than everyone else.”

“Marcy?”

“She’s stuck up,” Vivian said, as if there was nothing more to say about it, then opened a tin cookie container, took out four baggies of marijuana and another four of crystal meth, and tossed them in his direction.
They landed on the cushion of the brown chair. He picked them up and put them one by one into his jacket pockets. Some he would sell whole, others he would divvy up into whatever amounts people wanted. “You need to go by the oven factory when they let out for lunch. John Rileen wants one and Eric Wycoski wants another. After that you need to drive out to Norway to Pete and Autumn’s house. You know where they live at?”

He nodded. She looked at him for several moments, as if silently assessing whether he was telling her the truth and then, peaceably, she lit a cigarette. “You got my money?”

He counted the cash onto the coffee table between them, all of it, stacking it neatly into piles, and then he took back a quarter of what was there as Vivian watched, his cut of whatever he sold. It was good money, better than washing dishes, better than any job he could get in Midden.

“R.J. said you’re going out with Pam Simpson’s daughter,” Vivian said.

“And?”

“And I hope you kept our deal about keeping your mouth shut.”

“She wouldn’t tell.”

“Well, her mom sure as shit would. Trust me. You don’t want that getting around, kiddo. That Pam’s one to watch out for. I used to work with her and I know.”

“I didn’t tell anyone,” he said, trying to pacify her, though in truth he had told Lisa, at least a scaled-down version of what he was doing. “Plus her mom’s boyfriend buys weed from me. John Rileen’s her boyfriend. Did you know that?” he asked.

Vivian’s expression shifted, telling him that she didn’t know, though she didn’t admit to this. “That’s a different story. It’s the difference between your boyfriend doing something and your daughter doing something.”

“She doesn’t care,” said Joshua, though he didn’t know for sure whether Pam cared. Usually she let Lisa do whatever she wanted to do, like the two of them were friends, more than mother and daughter.

Vivian picked up a pizza box that sat on the floor, its bottom stained with grease. “Are you hungry?” she asked, holding it out to him.

He ate two slices of Vivian’s cold pizza while he listened to his messages in his truck parked in the parking lot of the oven factory, waiting for the
workers to be let out for lunch. The first message had been received early that morning, before he’d even left the apartment. He’d seen his sister’s number flashing across the screen and heard the familiar ring, but hadn’t answered it. Now he listened to her telling him that she would be coming home that night and would stay all weekend like she always did and she hoped that he would come home too. He deleted it, along with the three from Vivian telling him to go see Marcy at the café, and then listened to Bruce say almost exactly what Claire had said, only in a less direct, less bossy tone. He would go home so they would be happy and then they would leave him alone for a few weeks. They’d both been shocked that he possessed a cell phone, and even more shocked that he hadn’t told them about it or given them the number all those days and nights that his mother was sick and dying and they had no way to reach him. And then, when Claire had at last reached him, it had been too late. She’d thought he was out ice fishing, that he was spending nights in his ice house, and so on the last night of their mother’s life she’d driven out onto Lake Nakota to get him, but he wasn’t there. As she drove back, her Cutlass snagged on a tree that had fallen and frozen in the ice. It was only by coincidence that Joshua and R.J. had come across her just as the sun began to rise, uselessly revving her engine, her back tires wearing deep ruts in the snow. When Claire saw them approaching she got out and stood silently. She never so much as glanced at R.J. Instead she bore her eyes solely into Joshua. He called out to her, asking her what she was doing there, and in reply she screamed at him so loudly that he could feel her anger beating him like the wind, tearing into his chest and hair and face.