Lullaby Road by James Anderson

Author:James Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2018-01-16T05:00:00+00:00

27

Goodbyes to people you really care about don’t happen all at once. Maybe the words get said, but the goodbyes go on. I stood in my duplex and thought of her a few months ago asleep in my old brown recliner, her dress hiked up and holding her belly to relieve the weight, one baby wrapped inside another. For someone I’d known as an adult for such a short time, she was everywhere I looked. The duplex I now owned, my rig, my company, a few thousand dollars in the bank, taxes filed and paid, bookkeeping up to date—on a computer program no less—all this I owed to Ginny.

And I owed the long nights lying awake in my bed missing Claire being gratefully disturbed and somehow comforted by Annabelle’s crying from the other side of the wall. I would be saying goodbye to Ginny often and for years.

The small-capacity hot water heater in my duplex kept me from wasting water and taking long showers. I usually waited until the water turned tepid before I got out—five minutes or ten minutes tops. The hot water had gone to cold and I just let it run. The previous day and the slow, cautious drive back had taken up residence in my shoulders and bloodshot eyes. When I finally turned off the water I could hear knocking at my door. I pulled on the dirty denim work shirt I had been wearing and wrapped a towel around my waist.

By the time I opened the door Rod was pounding instead of knocking. “The women are off shopping. You and me need to have a man to man.”

He reached down to open the screen door and I got there first and set the flimsy hook. I knew it wouldn’t necessarily keep him out, but at least it sent him a message. I was thinking we were a man short for that conversation and I didn’t feel like talking.

“I’m not in a talking mood,” I said.

Rod pulled on the screen door handle and the lock held. “I’ll be damned if you’re going to keep me on your porch like a mongrel dog.”

“Then get off my goddamned porch.”

“Nadine told me the whole story,” he said. “We all know whose baby that is. Don’t try to deny it. You’re a sorry son of a bitch for taking advantage of a naïve high school girl.” With every word his voice grew louder. “Nadine and I are going to do right by her and the baby, even if you won’t. Aren’t you a sweetheart, letting her live next door. I bet you’re liking that arrangement just fine. But it’s over, and you’re going to at least take some financial responsibility.”

This was familiar territory to me. An almost forty-year-old single man cannot be friends with a single teenage young woman with a baby without a few tongues wagging. I usually let it go, except this wasn’t just a tongue wagging. True to form, Nadine fed him a lie to excuse herself and avoid telling him the truth.

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