Torch

  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 hi
m 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.

  R.J. had turned back by then, off to the ice house to get a shovel, which turned out to be of no use, and then he walked to the shore, to Bob Jewell’s, to ask him to come out with his tractor and a chain and pull Claire’s car out. Joshua had waited with Claire while R.J. was gone. They sat in the front seat and ran the heat and she told him in a maniacally calm voice that their mother was about to die. He reached over and put his hand on her shoulder and he could feel the way her body was as hard as a board.

  “We’re going to get the car out and then we’re going to drive to Duluth and then we’re going to see her,” Claire said like a zombie. She said it over and over again, no matter what he said to her, no matter that he said he was sorry about not coming home or going to the hospital or being at the ice house when she thought he was. When she was done repeating it they sat together in silence. He thought of his mother, of parts of her he had never thought about before, of her lungs and her brain, her heart and her hands. He thought of the parts of his mother lying on a bed he’d never seen in a room he’d never entered in a hospital in Duluth where he hoped he’d never have to visit.

  “So how is she?” Joshua asked, after a long while.

  “How is she?” Claire asked quietly. “How. Is. She?” she said, as if each word were a new discovery. “How is she?” she spat savagely. She turned her entire body to face him. She wore a hat that their mother had knitted, red, with a white star and a white pompom that wasn’t there anymore. She took the hat off and looked at it in her hands, then looked back up at Joshua, her eyes bloodshot and glassy and rabid. “Dying. Dying, okay? Do you understand that? She’s not ever coming home.”

  “We’ve got to keep up hope,” he whispered.

  “I hate you,” she whispered fiercely back, still looking directly into his eyes. “I’m going to hate you for the rest of my life for leaving me alone through all of this.” And then she sobbed, making horrible yipping sounds like a pack of coyotes after they’ve made a kill, and he cried too, the way he always did, seeping and silent.

  After several minutes she reached over and put her hands on his cheeks and pulled his face to hers, and he reached up and held her face too.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “Mom’s going to get better.”

  She let go of him and blotted her face with the hat and looked out her window. There was nothing in sight but the snow on the lake and the trees half a mile away on the shore. “Josh, Mom’s not getting better. You need to understand that.” She handed the hat to him and he pressed it to his face and wiped his tears away.

  “But we have to keep the faith,” he said. “She’s not going to die. She wouldn’t do that. I know it for a fact.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes,” he said, believing that he did. That whatever he decided firmly to be true would be true. That their mother would not die, not now, or ever.

  “Promise?” Claire asked, like a child, turning to him.

  “I promise,” he said, then buried his face in the hat again.

  John Rileen tapped his fist against the hood of Joshua’s truck and then went to sit in his car, parked in the corner of the lot. After a few minutes, Joshua walked over to John’s car and leaned in the window like they were talking, though in truth they were trading money and marijuana. Joshua had dozed off in his truck as he waited and had been startled awake by John, so the exchange had a dreamlike quality from which he didn’t entirely emerge until he was at Pete and Autumn’s house in Norway.

  It was nearly three by the time he got back to Midden. He parked his truck in the alleyway that bordered the school’s property. He parked here at this same time almost every day, pulling in just as the yellow buses began to line up, so that kids could purchase whatever they wanted once class let out. A couple of days a week, one of the bus drivers ambled over to Joshua’s truck, under the guise of taking a stroll, and bought a bag. The alleyway bordered the football field and the baseball diamond and the narrow dirt path that circled around each of them, where the track team practiced. At 3:05, Joshua watched Suzy Keillor escorting the special-ed kids to their buses, as she did most days. Every time he saw her, he remembered that he hadn’t returned the pan she’d given him with the scalloped potatoes.

  His cell phone chirped like a cricket: Claire.

  “Hey.”

  “How are you?” She sounded like she had a cold, though he knew without asking that she didn’t, that she’d been crying.

  “Good.??
?

  “I was thinking about how your birthday is coming up in a couple of weeks. Are you getting excited to be eighteen?”

  “Not really,” he said. She remained silent, wanting him to say more. Talk to me! she’d recently shrieked. “I mean, I suppose it’ll be cool,” he said, “being an adult and everything.”

  “Yeah,” she said remotely, as though he had said something profound, and then they were silent together for almost a full minute. Joshua watched the drops of water on his windshield turn to rain, making jagged streams down the glass.

  “So, what’s new?” he asked at last. She didn’t answer, but he sensed that her silence was distracted and occupied. “What are you doing?”

  “Sewing,” she said very carefully, as if at just that moment she were threading a needle, and then her attention shifted back to him. “I found these amazing buttons in Mom’s sewing cabinet. I don’t know where she got them—they’re sort of Asian-y. They have this kind of tarnished copper gold color and then there are these little engravings of temples. Anyway, I’m putting them on my jean jacket.”

  “I thought you were coming up.”

  “I am. I’m leaving as soon as I’m done. I just wanted to call and see if you’ll be home tomorrow.”

  “I will,” he said. He watched Suzy Keillor run through the rain to the school.

  “I’ll make dinner.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I want to,” she said sharply. “Won’t it be nice to have dinner?” Her voice trembled, as though she might burst into tears.

  “I suppose,” he said. “Is David coming up?” Claire had not brought David home with her since their mother’s funeral. Joshua had never been very close to him, though he’d liked him well enough.