BooksBarbecue
Back At Dawn
Chapters (39)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Dedication
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  39. Copyright

She nodded, looking at me with kind, unburdened eyes.

“Are you able to part with the bed?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Good. Now, a more important question: How big is your boyfriend?”

“My ex-boyfriend,” she corrected me. “And he’s not as big as you are.”

“I was really hoping you’d say that.”

3

I stayed for the duration of Carolyn’s shift. If Jimmy was drunk at four, then he was surely embalmed by seven. My father always was. I feared that Jimmy would show up. There was nothing I could do to change what had already happened, but I’d be damned if I’d allow any further harm to come.

The temperature had dropped considerably by the time we left. We huddled against one another waiting for the bus I thought would never come. It finally did and we took it down to the train, then the train up to Belmont, and we walked the rest of the way home.

“Home sweet home,” I said when we walked through the door. “For us both, I suppose.”

Carolyn smiled. I had hoped she would. If we were to live together, then why dance around the facts and call it anything other than what it was?

She went to the window and stared out. Above her on the wall, the hole that had been plastered over was beginning to show, small cracks on the surface, the entire circle turning tawny through the off-white paint. I felt embarrassed by it. Then Carolyn turned around, and I was happy she was here. The apartment felt far cozier than it ever had before. She had grown comfortable to me, and in that comfort there was beauty.

twelve

1

I’VE ALWAYS BEEN HABITUALLY irascible, or as my father often put it, “full of piss and vinegar,” but fighting, at least the technical half of it, didn’t come naturally. I had learned how to fight from him. He himself had picked it up while boxing for the navy in the three and a half years prior to being dishonorably discharged, the punishment received for stabbing a man who’d hustled him in a game of pool outside of a bar in Ansted, West Virginia. I didn’t learn of this last fact until it was brought up in a courtroom many years later, but considering what I then knew, I wasn’t at all surprised . . .