“They loved you that much,” Ellie said, oblivious to the fear he’d felt when he turned around at the dock that day and his mother was already gone. He looked at his granddaughter’s wide, imploring eyes, and it hit him. Ellie wanted a different version of her parents’ abandonment. Time and again, she had reached for the cross and asked for another story about his long-ago life in Ireland. “Your mother loved you so much, Grandpa,” she often said. “She loved you enough to give you away.”
One evening, after one of their talks, Wayne had decided to hang the cross on the wall next to Ellie’s bedroom door. She had noticed it right away the following morning, and raced to hug him in the kitchen without saying a word. Every night before bed, she touched the cross and he could hear her whisper his mother’s name. “Good night, Evelyn Joy.” The first time he saw her do that he had to walk away.
Ada was wrong about one thing: He had always loved Ellie.
He touched the cross again, and this time Sheba whimpered and slowly rose to her feet. He tapped on the door and heard the springs of Ellie’s bed creak. She cracked open the door, and the sight of her red, puffy face weakened his knees. Sheba stuck her nose through the doorway and thumped her tail against his calves.
“Can I come in?”
Ellie nodded and walked across the room, facing him with her back pressed against the window. Wayne sat on her bed and patted the spot next to him. “I won’t bite.”
She pulled her cardigan tight around her. “I know, Grandpa,” she said, sniffling. She walked over to him and sat down. He glanced at the two feet of distance between them and smiled. Ellie crossed her arms and stared straight ahead.
“Your grandmother’s worried about you, you know that. She’s worried that you’re going to run off with that McGinty boy.”
“I’m not running anywhere, Grandpa. I’m still in high school. I’m going to graduate.”
“Well, that’s good,” he said. “We want you to graduate. We want you to have a better life.”
“Brick wants to graduate, too, Grandpa. And he wants to go to college.”
Steady, Wayne warned himself. Don’t get too excited.
“Brick’s going to college?”
She looked at him with a patient smile. “Everybody says he’s going to be Jefferson High’s first basketball star to go to college.”
“Is that what Brick wants?”
Ellie nodded and started picking at threads on her quilt. “He talks about it all the time.”
“College. Well, how ’bout that. Any other secrets you want to share with me?”
“I’d like to go, too, Grandpa,” Ellie said, slowly. “I’d like to go to college and become a nurse.”
“What do you need that for? Grandma has always said you were a born mother. It’s only a matter of time before you’re married and giving us great-grandchildren to spoil.”
“Lots of women go to school and become nurses. Mrs. Lammer, for example. She works with Dr. Lammer.”
Wayne nodded. “It’s the family business for them.”
Ellie pulled her sweater tighter. “You don’t have to be married to a doctor to work with one.”
Wayne stood up. “Well, Brick going to college solves our immediate problem, doesn’t it?”
“Your problem, you mean,” Ellie said, looking up at him. “He’s coming back for me, Grandpa. We’re going to build a life together, Brick and me.”
Wayne held out his hand and pulled her to her feet. “Of course he will, Ellie,” he said. “Only a fool would let a girl like you get away.”
Brick took a long drag on his cigarette and lifted his face, blowing smoke at the moon. It was early March, still the dead of winter in snowbelt Clayton Valley, but spring was flirting. For two days now, the mercury in the thermometer outside the kitchen window had crawled into the mid-sixties by afternoon. Happened every winter. You started the day stomping ice off your boots and by midafternoon you were counting crocuses peeking out of the snow. The warmth hovered just long enough to get everybody’s hopes up before another snowstorm buried them.
We never learn. Brick took another drag on his cigarette. Town full of suckers.
The sun had gone down more than two hours ago, taking the tease of warmth with it. He’d been sitting for more than an hour on his cold patch of ground that offered no mercy, leaning against the shed as the wind played with his hair.
He squinted into the moonlight. Who up there might be watching him? An alien on the moon seemed more likely to be real than any God he could imagine. His mother had believed in God all her life. Look what that got her.
Brick looked down at the envelope in his lap. He ran his fingers again over the embossed return address:
Carl R. Swartz
Kent State University
Varsity Athletic
Kent, Ohio
He touched his name: Mr. Richard P. McGinty.
Mister. That was a first.
He stared at the envelope until the cigarette singed his fingers. “Shit,” he said, throwing the butt. He watched the ember as it hissed in the wet grass and died. His dog, Patch, wedged against his thigh, groaned from the interruption and snuggled closer, burrowing his head into Brick’s lap. The feathers of his thick brown fur fanned across the envelope, hiding it from view.
“Not you, too, Patch,” Brick said. “Don’t tell me you don’t want me to leave, either.”
What would happen to Patch if he went away to college? He scratched the dog’s head before tracing with his finger the thin, furless scar where Patch’s left eye used to be. Another victim of Bull McGinty. Brick’s throat tightened at the memory.
Brick had been twelve years old, on an errand for his mother, when he found the abandoned puppy in the parking lot of Thompson’s Dry Goods. He had scooped him up and named him Lucky by the time he’d carried him home. “No, no, no,” Angie said when he walked into the kitchen, but her resistance was no match for the look on her son’s face. “Well, every boy needs a best friend,” she said, scratching Lucky’s head. “But he’s your responsibility.”
About a month later, Lucky mangled a tin of Bull’s chewing tobacco that he’d left on the back stoop. Brick saw it all happen. Lucky dropping the tin, the outline of his mouth speckled with bits of tobacco. His father, red with rage, screaming at the dog. Lucky cowering as Bull picked up a fist-size rock and threw it straight at the puppy’s head.