“You got to be Addy. Hello,” Betty said, giving our parka-encased guest the once-over.
“I must be. I’m surprised Van has mentioned me. Congratulations on your new place.”
“I’ll exhale when it’s still standing in the morning. I’d forgotten how wild the Hill can get.” Betty turned to me. “Maurice is taking over the taps.”
I shook my head. “He made me a deal. He’s on the door. I close up.”
“Big Mo doesn’t frighten off drunks. Dickless wonders keep cruising past and hollering shit at the clientele.”
“That’s harassment. Can’t the police help?” said Addy.
Betty and I both looked at her.
“Or is that a foolish question?” Addy finished, eyeing me.
She knew enough of my personal history to predict my opinion. Being raised by my grandfather, a professional thief and onetime armed robber, had lent me a different true north on my personal compass. Betty had suffered her own challenges with the cops, like pretty much anyone black and queer and raised in poverty. Maybe that shared suspicion toward the rest of the world was why she and I got along.
“I’ll take care of it,” I told Betty.
“Don’t forget about Cyndra,” Addy said. “Tomorrow morning. And we’re not done talking about this.”
Betty offered me a penlight to use when checking licenses. “No one paying you for conversation here. Go scare somebody.”
I retrieved my jacket and gloves from the back room.
Addy wanted to know what had been bothering me since my return. She’d assumed it was my ex-girlfriend, Luce, tying the knot earlier that month. Wrong guess, Addy. Thanks for playing.
I had made some choices in Oregon that I couldn’t ignore, or walk back, if I had cared to try. I hadn’t. Living day by day had been tough enough these past weeks without worrying about something as ephemeral as atonement.
On my way out into the cold, I reflected that the basketball fan had been dead wrong, too.
Someone could learn to be mean. Start as young as I had, and there was no limit.
Two
One night just before the start of the school year, Cyndra had found a movie on cable about young women competing in roller derby. She used her own money to buy a digital copy that same night and pasted her nose to the screen, watching the film six more times before Monday rolled around.
Within a week her skateboard had given way to quad-wheel boots. Cyndra would have worn the skates to bed if Addy had allowed it. They found a junior league team called the Screaming Mimis. When I arrived at Addy’s on Sunday morning to pick up Cyn for practice, she was already outside in the cold, gear bag over her shoulder for added weight as she did calf raises on the porch step. She heard my car pulling up and sprinted to meet it.
The Mimis’ derby league was flat-track, meaning the skaters competed on smooth concrete. Parents had arranged a fund drive to have a new floor poured in an old cinder-block warehouse near Northgate. I’d handed Addy a short stack of cash to donate. She knew better than to ask where the money had come from.
At fourteen and undernourished much of her childhood, Cyndra weighed about as much as a loaded sack of groceries. But what she lacked in size she made up for with speed. She was a favorite jammer among the newer players, the fresh meat. Jammers scored points by making it past the opposing team’s blockers, who did their level best to knock the jammers on their asses. Sportingly.
I sat against the sage green blocks of the warehouse wall, watching Cyn lean into the curve, picking up velocity, angling for the inside, and then suddenly juking right to find daylight between two blockers who hadn’t linked arms. She whooped elatedly. A fraction too early, as her skate caught another player’s and she fell, skidding two yards, her plastic kneepads and wrist guards rasping harshly on the concrete. I winced. But Cyndra popped back up as if the impact had been a cool breeze.
Speed, and guts.
The instructor, a slim woman with a dark braid and a band of tattoos spiraling up her right arm, blew her whistle to bring the girls in for a lesson. They gathered with a clomping of wheels like pony hooves on hard dirt.
I turned my attention to the stack of mail Addy had given me. My old house, the home I’d shared with my grandfather Dono as a boy, had been up the block from Addy’s. Mail still trickled in at that address. The family that had bought the property and built their own house on the land left anything sent to the Shaws under Addy’s welcome mat.
Grocery fliers and tool catalogs made up most of the stack. One expiration notice of union membership for nonpayment of dues, forwarded by a mailing service to Dono—or, more accurately, one of Dono’s aliases. My grandfather had always maintained a couple of identities. Handy for emergencies, and for purchasing items unavailable to people with felony rap sheets.
I nearly missed the last envelope, which had been tucked into a bulk-mail magazine of coupons. I glanced at the handwritten address. And then stared at the name.
Moira Shaw, it read.
My mother.
My mother had died when I was six years old. A distracted driver tapped the wrong pedal at the wrong moment and jumped the curb in downtown Seattle. I wasn’t there. My daycare worker brought me to the hospital. No one had really told me what was going on. Not until Dono arrived. He took me to his home that same night, and there I stayed.
Moira Shaw. I barely remembered her. Dono hadn’t kept pictures. Hardly ever spoke of his only child. Seeing her name again, for the first time in I couldn’t remember, felt like I’d swallowed a small but very sharp icicle.
I headed outside, ducking under the rolling door the Mimis kept partway open to allow some ventilation in the airless warehouse. Drizzling rain, a near-constant in December Seattle, coated my face and hair. I opened my car to sit in the driver’s seat.
The return address at the top corner of the envelope was a stick-on label with a Christmas theme, green holly and candy canes. From a John and Josephine Mixon in Redmond. Our house address had been handwritten on the envelope in purple ballpoint.
I opened the envelope and removed the single sheet of paper. Only the salutation and a phone number at the bottom had been written with the same purple pen. The rest of the text was a typed copy.
Dear Moira,
I hope this note finds you! We are just starting to plan the Emmett Watson High 30th Reunion (WOW!) for sometime next summer, and would love to include you. Please call me at the number below to let us know!
Go Paladins!
Sincerely,
Jo Mixon (Gerrold!)
Just a form letter, sent by someone so far out of the alumni loop that she hadn’t even heard Moira Shaw had died almost a quarter of a century before.
I had only a few sparse facts about Moira’s life. Her own mother, Dono’s wife, Finnoula, had also died while Moira was still young. The Shaw women traveled tough, short roads. Moira had gotten pregnant and left Dono’s house a few years after that.
So far as I knew, she’d never spoken a word about who had knocked her up. Out of shame, or maybe to keep Dono from murdering the guy. Probably the latter. That secrecy had driven a wedge between father and daughter.
Cyndra’s practice was about to end. I tossed the letter from Jo Mixon on the passenger’s seat and stepped out into the cold mist.