* * *
Betty Huckleston followed Bernice’s instructions to a small house in a new subdivision, and we did indeed find a large trunk sitting on the front porch of the nondescript house. We loaded it up and headed home. It was just as easy as Betty said it would be.
In town, I backed the car up the gravel drive to the shop, and we unloaded the trunk. It looked like an ordinary trunk—covered with little girl pink and sparkly cartoon stickers and labels on the outside, but ordinary just the same—and we put it on the floor of the shop underneath one of the work counters to keep it out of the way of the work crew until it could be retrieved. I decided I’d be optimistic about the nephew picking it up in an expeditious manner.
As we closed up the shop, I could hear Patsy Cline in the backyard jumping in excitement at the gate. That reminded me of her thievery of the night before, and that thought led to the realization of no leftover barbeque, and that thought led to how hungry I’d suddenly become. I suggested that we change clothes and walk down to my favorite eatery for an early dinner, and Betty agreed.
The young evening was a bit cooler than the hot day, and it was pleasant to walk through the red-brick industrial neighborhood. A few store fronts along the street had been renovated— their tall, wood-framed windows revealed under years of siding and awnings—allowing trendy new shops to show off their wares. Others remained as they were: a car repair garage, a lumber yard, and a boot and shoe shop that still had a cobbler, who saved worn out boots with new soles. We brought Patsy along; mainly to keep her out of trouble, and me from worrying about her deciding to get out of the yard. But I could see that Betty had a distracted frown on her face and wasn’t enjoying the walk as much as I was.
She looked at her watch and said, “Hannah’s probably back in Greeley by now.” She sighed and spoke out loud her anxieties. “I know, I worry too much. But I do worry about her! Young people have so much to deal with these days. So much pressure. That poor Shannon, too. Suicide—so young. They don’t know things will get better.”
“Do you worry that Hannah—”
“No, not really. I guess I don’t, not about that, and that’s a relief! Hannah’s pretty level about things, goes with the flow. I know Joe’s good for her, too, but—
“Hey, look at this. Let’s stop a minute,” Betty interrupted herself distractedly.
We were walking past the community-supported farm across the street, staffed mainly by volunteers like Shannon, who had started a youth harvest crew the summer she was in town. I waved to the owner Jake Biccam, working in the cool evening on the long neat rows of vegetables. He and his wife Deanna lived next door to the garden plot in a converted machine shop and had made their space an oasis in a dilapidated area. I was glad for their green and lively presence on the street, but when Betty wanted to stop and buy yet more vegetables for us, I reminded her how hungry I was and promised we’d come back for a visit before she left.
There was a ringing from Betty’s purse and she frantically grabbed for it, rooting around inside the voluminous interior. She stopped and pulled the bag up close to her body so she could plunge her whole arm into it to recover the trilling instrument.
“Oh, hi, honey! I’m so glad you called!” she almost shouted into the phone. I knew it was Hannah, checking in from Greeley. We kept walking as Betty gaily chatted with her daughter, until she nudged me in the ribs, pantomimed a hysterically laughing face, and pointed to the façade of the building we were passing. It was the Brew Bucket, one of the last unreconstructed dive bars in town. As we passed the open door, the moist smell of stale beer and re-circulated air poured out of the dim room. Betty and I had played many a pool game in the Bucket, and she had always beaten me, usually on heavy bets. That’s what she’s ribbing me about, and she will never let me forget it, I thought. I should have known not to play against someone who had her own cue and personalized case.
We turned in at Hammett’s, a third-generation diner of the Georgopoulos family. The original catchy name, Town Cafe, was changed when the present owner Jean’s young father Stannos returned from a stint in the back lots of 1930s Hollywood. While working as a gaffer on a movie set, he met the novelist Dashiell Hammett slumming then as a screenwriter. Legend goes that Stannos was one of the writer’s many drinking cronies, and ended up with a The Thin Man signed first edition, as Hammett’s payment for a round at a bar. I doubted if Stannos had read it, but he thought enough of his buddy to name the family diner in the hinterlands of Colorado after him. These days, his daughter Jean had the book under lock and key, displayed in a dusty glass case by the cash register.
Although I was a big fan of Dashiell Hammett, I had another connection to him: I was named after his paramour of thirty years, the writer and playwright Lillian Hellman, a hard-drinking, hard-smoking, complex woman, who was no angel, either. Yes, I was named for the writer and not, how cute!, the flower, of which I was constantly being accused. How cute that you’re a gardener and your name is Lily! It was just too much to try to correct people’s misconception on this, so I usually let it ride. There was just too much ’splaining to do, as Ricky Ricardo might have put it.
I pulled open Hammett’s heavy wood and beveled-glass door, and Betty and I headed for a booth near the front plate-glass windows. Vicki Sinclair soon sauntered over to detail what Randy, the night cook, was experimenting with that evening and to twirl down onto the table a beer for Betty and a tall ice tea for me. She was a pro and was as much a part of the place as the long, beat-up mahogany bar that took up half the dining room. She’d worked at, and lived above the diner in an eclectic apartment since as long as I had known her, and Betty had been in the diner so many times with me that she and Vicki Sinclair were old pals, too.
After the menu explanations, Vicki’s face took on a look of sorrow. “I saw the funeral announcement in the paper this morning … about Shannon Parkhurst.” Guess I wasn’t the only one fooled by that! I thought. “I’m sorry, Lily, I know she worked for you and …”
“Yeah, the news was a surprise. I was sorry, too.”
“My sister’s girl told me about it first, though.” She nodded her head at a late teen girl picking up an order at the window. I’d seen her around the diner helping Vicki, but didn’t know her very well. “She saw it on Facebook, and—”
“What?”
“Kelsy, hon? Come over here and talk to Lily a minute, would you?” Vicki called. The teenager hung her head, not wanting to talk to adults; but after delivering her order, she reluctantly shuffled over to our booth. Kelsy had known Shannon from when they both hoed corn that summer at Jake’s farm, and she told us a mutual friend had texted her about Shannon’s suicide. The friend said it was posted on both Shannon’s and her boyfriend’s Facebook pages the day after her death. That seemed pretty fast, considering the shock of her suicide, I wondered out loud. Kelsy just shrugged.
“On Shannon’s page, there are photos …” Kelsy looked embarrassed. She had her aunt’s auburn hair, and as she tucked a stray strand behind her ear, she looked down at the floor and scuffed her feet.
Vicki ran a hand through her own ginger locks, now with a few strands of grey at the temple, and put an arm around Kelsy. “Go on, baby. You can tell her. It’s all over the universe by now anyway.” Kelsy told us there were Facebook photos of a drunken Shannon at a party Kelsy had also attended in Frederick a few weeks before; it sounded like the same party Hannah Huckleston had last talked to Shannon.
“I didn’t know her that well. You know, like, she was older than me. But I saw her there. It was way crowded, and so hot that everybody was outside, and uh, you know, a party, not much more than that …” Kelsy paused, and looked out the window into the street. Relief crossed her face when Vicki was called to the order window. It dawned on me that Kelsy was underage at a party where it sounded like the booze was free flowing. She wouldn’t want to admit that in front of her aunt.
“Just between us, Kelsy, was it a pretty wild party?” I asked before Vicki co
uld return.
“Totally awesome! Biggest party of the summer for sure!”
“Tell me about it. You saw Shannon? Did you talk with her?” I asked.
“Didn’t get to talk to her. I’d just gotten there when I saw her go off with some dude, guess it was her boyfriend. She couldn’t walk very well. Later I heard him tell a bunch of guys that she was passed out somewhere. They all laughed about it.” Kelsy frowned, and shoved her order book into an apron pocket. “Pretty sick. Guys’ll make fun of anything. He seemed like a nice guy, though. Helping Shannon and everything.”
Vicki arrived with our dinner and bustled around the table, moving glasses and silverware out of the way. Kelsy clammed up and drifted back to the long, dark bar where, in a corner, Marilyn Monroe’s signature was scratched into the wood. I knew this to be an old fake—to add to the idea that the place had a Hollywood connection—but over the years we all pretended that Marilyn had actually leaned against that bar, and carved her voluptuous autograph on it. Kelsy ran her finger over the indentations of the name, slowly tracing the loops to the final e, as she stared absently out the door of the dining room, through the kitchen, and into the alley. She went back into her world that did not include adults.
Betty Huckleston dug into her plate, heaped with locally-made sausages and mashed potatoes, pooled in butter. My dinner was perfectly-made souvlakis—a specialty of the house—but I could only poke at it. I hadn’t wanted to hear that Shannon Parkhurst spent her last days drunk. I guess I was wrong in thinking Shannon would hold on to her sobriety. Even though I didn’t want to dredge up the past, my thoughts took me back down the narrow lonely road I had experienced in my final drinking days.
Betty put down her fork and wiped her mouth on a wadded-up paper napkin. As I turned from gazing out the window, she was staring at me, and eyeing my still-full plate. I shrugged and suggested that I take it home since I’d lost my appetite. It was time to go.
Outside, Vicki had placed a bowl of water for Patsy that the energetic dog had sloshed all over herself and the sidewalk. And even though we had been inside for not-too-long of a time, she acted as if it had been days since she’d seen us, and started tugging on the leash like a stable bound horse. The sky was deepening into apricot hues as we walked home, and we could hear the willows down by the river rustling in the slight breeze. Patsy joined us in the backyard as we settled in, and Betty and I took off our shoes to feel the cool grass on our feet. We wiled away the rest of the evening, listening to Memphis Slim’s boogie woogie, and doing what we did best for each other: telling stories and making each other laugh, and thereby, feel better. Patsy, of course, didn’t tell many stories, but I’m sure I saw her laughing at ours.
CHAPTER THREE