Snowblind (21 page)

He finished the song to a smattering of polite applause from the table nearest the corner where he always set up. Everyone else in the place seemed to think the music must be coming from speakers somewhere. Up until the economy had bottomed out, Ella had done a robust Sunday-brunch business. Sometimes TJ had played and at other times he had arranged for various local musicians to come in. Jazz, blues, folk, and holiday music when the Christmas season rolled around. But people without jobs didn’t go out for Sunday brunch and that wasn’t going to change even if Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston got out of their graves to serenade them over Belgian waffles.

TJ glanced around and spotted his coffee on top of his amplifier. What the hell he’d been thinking by leaving it there he had no idea, but he retrieved it and took a sip. It had cooled too much to taste very good but he took another long sip anyway, then set the mug on the floor.

When he looked up, Grace had appeared beside him. She leaned against the wall, sipping pink lemonade and looking as adorable as always in black boots, leggings, a green top, and a white down vest with a faux-fur fringe on the hood. At home she still seemed like his little girl but out in public she liked to adopt a more sophisticated air. If this was what eleven years old brought, the idea of fifteen terrified him.

“Hi, sweetie,” he said, strumming the guitar and adjusting the tuning. “Did you have lunch?”

“Pot pie,” Grace replied, her nostrils flaring in distaste. “It’s dreadful.”

“You love the pot pie,” he said, bristling a bit. She’d been behaving oddly since breakfast. “I hope you didn’t say that to your mother.”

Grace fixed a disapproving frown upon him. “Of course not. That would be rude.”

“Good. I don’t know what’s gotten into you today, but—”

“Why do you do this?”

A shiver passed through him. He couldn’t have said why, but he certainly didn’t like the way she looked at him.

“Do what?”

He knew he ought to be playing another song, but it wasn’t as if the dozen people in the restaurant were paying much attention.

Grace gestured toward empty tables. “This. I just don’t know why you bother.”

“Hey. That’s enough of that.” He clicked off his microphone and gave her a withering look. “You know exactly why I’m here.”

“Enlighten me.”

Enlighten
her? He wanted to slap her face. If he had been the kind of man who would ever strike a child, he’d have done just that. On the other hand, he couldn’t deny that in the middle of his anger was a tiny spot of pride. What eleven-year-old used the word
enlighten
in a sentence? Grace could probably even spell it properly. Had Ella had that kind of vocabulary in the fourth grade? TJ surely hadn’t.

He took her arm, not hard enough to hurt but firmly enough to let her know he meant business. Her lips made a thin line but she did not complain or try to pull away as he drew her nearer, lowering his voice to a whisper.

“I get it, okay?” he said. “Things have been tense. Maybe your mom and I have been at each other’s throats a little, but we love each other and we love you. If we’re fighting, that doesn’t mean you have to choose sides and it damn well doesn’t mean you have to act out to get attention.”

“I’m not acting out.”

“You’re being rude and condescending to your parents and you’re only eleven years old. That’s not okay. Wouldn’t be okay if you were twenty or forty, either. We’re doing our best for you and for us as a family.”

TJ glanced around to make sure no one had taken an interest in the whispers being traded in the corner. “They’re lean times, kid, but not so lean that you didn’t get the whole outfit you’ve got on for Christmas. I’m here playing because live music is something we can offer that most local restaurants can’t afford right now. We can’t afford to have anyone else do it, so here I am.”

“It’s supposed to bring in customers,” Grace said, her eyes gleaming in the sunlight coming in the window behind them, the same rich chocolate brown as her mother’s.

“Exactly,” TJ said.

“Does it seem to you that it’s working?” the little girl said, sighing as if she were a teacher about to give up on her student.

TJ flinched. Another ripple went through him but this wasn’t anger; it felt more like embarrassment. He worked his jaw, tamping down the urge to snap at her.

“We’re doing everything we know how to do,” he whispered. “It’ll turn around.”

The Vault had cut back its hours so that it was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays and open for lunch only on the weekends. The landlord had cut the rent considerably, knowing that the chances of getting another restaurant into the space in difficult times were slim.

“Will it?” Grace asked, sipping her pink lemonade.

“I just said it would,” TJ barked.

A clink of silverware brought him around. He blinked and saw that half-a-dozen heads had turned and some of the customers were observing them now. He swore inwardly. Most of these people were regulars. They couldn’t afford to scare even one of them away.

“Listen,” he said, bending to get his coffee mug. “Do me a favor, all right? Go and get your dad a fresh cup of coffee.”

He held the cup out to her. For a moment Grace looked at it with disdain that bordered on a sneer and then, reluctantly, she took it from him with her free hand.

“Sure,” she said, starting to turn away.

TJ clicked his microphone back on.

“But … Dad?”

He glanced at her.

“She doesn’t appreciate it,” Grace said, tossing her head to get her hair out of her eyes. “You realize that, don’t you? You’re like the band that kept playing while the
Titanic
went down. You’re doing all you can to keep her dream alive, but she never spares a moment to wonder what happened to
your
dreams.”

The microphone probably hadn’t picked up what Grace had said, but it would catch his voice for sure. It took him a second or two of numb astonishment to react, and then he reached up to click the mic off again, but Grace was already walking away.

“This place is
doomed,
” she said.

She smiled, then, but it didn’t reach her eyes. They were grim and knowing, not cruel but brutally cold.

That is not an eleven-year-old,
he thought. And then he gave a dry, humorless laugh, knowing that must be what every parent thought at one point or another.

As he started into another song, his anger turned to worry. The ugliness between him and Ella had begun to tear their daughter up inside. What she’d said had some truth in it, and that hurt, but it hurt far worse for him to think of what they were doing to her childhood.

Something had to change, for Grace’s sake. He hoped that his marriage could be healed, but he thought the status quo would be even worse for Grace’s psyche than divorce.

He watched his daughter go up to the bar and offer up his coffee mug for a refill. Leaning against the bar, back arched in a confident, almost defiant pose, she looked over at him and gave a little shrug and toss of her head, as if to say,
Sorry, Dad, it’s just tough love.
When the bartender, Herbie, had poured a fresh cup of coffee, Grace touched his hand and mouthed a thank-you. Everything about the gesture—the look in her eyes, the way she stood, the small, knowing, confident smile—gave off the aura of a grown woman, not a child.

TJ lost his place in the song and faked it, repeating an earlier verse.

Nobody seemed to notice.
Or maybe it’s just that nobody cares.
He didn’t like to think that, but Grace’s callous pragmatism had rubbed off on him.

As she came back to him with the coffee, he watched her poise and gait.

Who the hell
are
you?

The thought startled and saddened him, haunting him for the rest of the set. It felt to him as if, when he wasn’t looking, some grown-up girl had replaced his baby. It happened to every father. He’d known the day would come but had never suspected it would be so soon, and now he was blindsided.

His little girl was gone.

Doug Manning stood near the foot of his bed, trying to pull on a blue cotton hooded sweater while conducting a phone conversation.

“Yeah, I’m watching NECN right now,” he said quietly, switching the cell from one ear to the other as he dragged the sweater over his head. “They just did the weather. Looks like it’s gonna hit us on Wednesday, twenty inches or more. Slow-moving. It’s a monster.”

A chill went through him that he knew a lot of people in Coventry would share. Watching the computer model of the storm churning in from the west, all he could think about was blinding snow, a city buried in paralyzing drifts of white, and the frostbitten cheeks of his wife when they’d finally found her and brought him in to identify her corpse.

This storm would be different, though. Instead of destroying his life it would help him build a new one.

“Looks like this is it,” Franco said on the other end of the line.

“Looks like,” Doug replied.

“Are you up to it? Second thoughts? You lose your nerve in the middle of this thing and me and Baxter maybe end up in jail. I can’t take the risk.”

Doug tamped down the anger rising in him. “You kick a dog enough and he can’t help biting you, man. I’ve been kicked enough over the years. I’m ready to start biting, and I’m gonna sink my teeth in deep.”

“What the hell you talkin’ about, man?”

“I’m ready, that’s all. I’m not going to screw this up. If the plan goes south it’s going to be one of you guys who blew it.”

Franco grunted. “Better not let Baxter hear you talking like that. You’ll get him paranoid about working with you.”

“Fuck Baxter. It’s happening this week, during this storm. I have one chance at really turning things around and I’ll do it alone if it comes to that. I ain’t doing this for fun and I sure as hell ain’t doing it for you and Baxter.”

Franco went quiet. A few seconds of silence passed between them while the sports guy reported on the Celtics’ latest winning streak.

“I don’t think of you as a friend,” Franco said at last.

“Feeling’s mutual.”

“No, listen up. I think of you as a tool—”

“Franco—”

“A tool is useful as long as it works,” Franco went on. “You don’t want to see your place in this, I can’t be responsible for what happens.”

Doug laughed softly, but loud enough for Franco to hear him over the phone.

“I’m no master criminal, that’s true,” he said, with a glance at the bedroom door to make sure that Angela hadn’t come back upstairs. “But this is my plan. My goddamned idea. Never mind that I’m the one who got us the house keys; I’m the one whose ass is on the line. Somehow I managed to give you the impression that I’m some kind of pussy, maybe because I haven’t been ripping people off since my cradle days the way you and Baxter have. But this is my gig, man. The keys are mine. The life I’ve been living since I lost my wife … if I’m gambling my life and my house and my freedom, that doesn’t feel like a lot of risk to me. So we’re either in this together, all of us, or I try to pull it off myself. You want to trade bullets over it, let’s go and do it. Otherwise, stop pushing me. You want me to bare my throat to you like we’re some dog pack, but it’s not gonna happen, Franco.”

Again, Franco hesitated. The anger churning inside Doug started to cool and harden into grim confidence when he heard that silence on the line. He felt good, really good, for the first time in so long. While Angela had gone downstairs to make them some lunch, he’d taken a shower and shaved and pulled on clean clothes. Watching the weather forecast had filled him with a peculiar excitement, a dreadful anticipation.

“You going to say all this to Baxter when we meet tomorrow?” Franco asked.

“I am.”

“All right, Dougie. We’ll see how that goes. You might regret asking to meet in the damn woods instead of somewhere public where he’d be less likely to snap your neck.”

“I guess we’ll find out,” Doug replied.

He ended the call without saying goodbye and tossed the phone onto the bed. He felt powerful somehow. Energized.

“Well,
that
was interesting.”

Doug looked up to see Angela standing in the doorway with a tray of grilled cheese sandwiches and coffee, which were just about all his kitchen had to offer at the moment.

He blew out a long breath. “How much of that did you hear?”

She arched an eyebrow. “Enough to know you’ve been a bad boy.”

Doug picked up the remote and clicked off the TV, trying to interpret her facial expression.

“You don’t seem all that troubled.”

Angela slid the lunch tray onto the low bureau. She started to speak and then her smile faltered and a terrible sadness seemed to descend upon her. Powerful emotion made her voice crack when she tried to speak, and she waved a hand in front of her face, mustering control of herself.

“Sorry,” she said, forcing a smile.

Doug took a step toward her, hands up, wanting to comfort her. “I didn’t mean for you to hear any of that, and I’m sorry, but I can’t apologize for any of it.”

With her sad smile, she put a hand on his chest, grabbing a fistful of his sweater. “I’m not looking for apologies and I’m not gonna judge you. The world owes
you
an apology, babe.”

Doug stared at her, having trouble processing her acceptance. They’d had a brief, torrid relationship several years ago. Angela had been just as broken and needy as he’d been and they’d abused each other emotionally, each forgiving the other. By nature she was loud and a bit crass and rough in the manner of young beasts who don’t know their own strength.

“Who the hell
are
you?” he asked.

Angela stepped in close to him, pressed her body against his and her lips to the softness of his throat.

“I’m the woman who’s not running away.”

“What I can’t figure out is why.”

With a soft kiss, she pushed him backward until he struck the bed and sat down, and then she straddled him playfully. They were both fully clothed and she made no effort to undress him or herself, just touched his face and gazed into his eyes with something like love. She couldn’t love him; Doug felt sure of that. They didn’t know each other well enough. But something in her eyes made his mouth go dry.