CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE | RORY
It was a Friday night and, for the first time since I had moved back to Hartford, I had the apartment all to myself. Charlie had been invited to a slumber party with a few of her new friends from school, and she had already packed up Frozen pajamas and toothbrush into an overnight bag before I even had a chance to say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’
I wasn’t sold on the idea, but after an entire evening of puppy-dog pouts and pleading, I had finally given in.
Besides… Charlie wasn’t the only one with big plans for Friday night.
I checked the time on my watch. 6,30 p.m., on the dot. I climbed out of the Challenger and tapped the locks, then I strutted towards Marcy’s Diner.
As soon as I pushed through the door, I was greeted by the sticky stench of waffle batter and bacon grease. Grease that, most likely, had been caked on the fryer in the kitchen for at least thirty years. And that’s probably a generous approximation.
A waitress in a retro blue smock was hunched over the hostess station playing Candy Crush on her iPhone, and she didn’t bother glancing up at me when I stepped inside.
“Sit anywhere,” she said, waving a hand at the room full of empty booths and tables.
I aimed straight for a booth at the back of the restaurant. It had been over a decade since I had last visited Marcy’s, but that booth hadn’t changed at all, the benches were still covered in faded red vinyl, and the glass orb-shaped light hanging over the table still had a crack running all the way up one side.
I slid into the booth and made the mistake of resting my elbows on the table, only to discover that they were coated in some sort of sticky residue.
I guess we’re really getting the full Marcy’s experience tonight…
The metal chimes on the front door twinkled, and when I glanced up I saw Des stepping into the restaurant.
She was wearing a little white sundress and a denim jacket. Her black hair was damp and tousled into a messy mane of curls.
It didn’t matter how many times I saw her… she took my breath away every damn time. And when I thought about the way I’d devoured that sweet pussy in the swimming pool, I felt my cock rise to attention, too.
Her eyes landed straight on my booth in the back. Well, technically it was our booth. Des and I had a history with Marcy’s Diner… with this booth, in particular.
“Hey stranger,” she cooed as she sauntered towards me. “You come here often?”
“That was supposed to be my line,” I grinned back, keeping my eyes locked on her as she ducked down onto the vinyl bench across the booth from me.
“God, I haven’t been here in years,” she said, glancing around the diner. “But somehow, it’s exactly the way I remember it. Isn’t it funny how some things change, and some things stay exactly the same?”
“I’m starting to realize that, yeah,” I said as I plucked up a pair of laminated menus that were wedged behind a paper napkin dispenser and syrup bottle at the edge of table.
“A menu?” Des raised her eyebrows. “You mean… we’re not ordering the usual?”
“Good point,” I conceded, dropping the menus back behind the napkin holder. “Double order of cheesy fries and a chocolate malt?”
“Two straws,” Des grinned. Her cheeks turned a soft shade of pink and she pressed her lips together to stop herself from smiling.
“It’s ok to smile sometimes, you know,” I teased. “Especially when it’s a good smile, like yours.”
Des bit down harder on her lips and her dimples popped in.
“Ditto,” she said. Then she nodded at my Sisters of Mercy t-shirt and added, “Mr. Always-Wearing-Black.”
I let myself smile at that, then I stood up from the booth and walked to the bar to place our order. When I got back to the table I slid into the vinyl seat and grinned at Des, stroking my chin through my beard.
“So… what do you remember most about this place?” I asked.
“What do I remember most?” she repeated thoughtfully as she gazed around the old diner. Then her face got serious, and she lowered her eyes to stare at the sticky tabletop.
“I remember that night,” she said. “The night I found my mom.”
I didn’t say anything. I just listened, hands folded on the table in front of me.
“We were in middle school,” she said. “It was winter time, and I had spent an entire week using the computers in the school library tracking down the phone number and address of every single person with my mother’s name in the United States…”
From the diner’s kitchen, I could hear the bubbling hiss of fryer grease and a blender whirring, but other than that the restaurant was totally silent. It was just the two of us; just Des and I.
“I wanted to call each and every one of them, until I found her,” Des continued, “But I couldn’t use the phone at my dad’s house. I knew he’d figure it out once he saw the phone bill… so I decided to use a payphone. And the only payphone in town…”
“...was the one right over there,” I finished for her. I pointed to the opposite corner of the diner, where a glass phone booth had been built next to the bar. The phone was still intact, and a frayed old copy of the Hartford Yellow Pages was zip-tied to the wall of the booth.
“You tried to talk me out of it,” Des said.
“I didn’t want you to get hurt.”
“I just wanted to find her…” Des shook her head, eyes glazing over as they locked onto the booth. “You thought it was a bad idea, but you still came here with me. You brought a Ziploc bag full of quarters for the phone, and you sat here and waited while I dialed every number on the list…”
“There must have been dozens and dozens of phone numbers, and they were from all over the place, California, Arkansas, Maine, New Mexico, Oregon…” she shifted her eyes down towards her hands. “Every time I called a different number, I imagined a different version of my mother. I imagined my mom eating guacamole with movie stars on the beach in California, or living on a farm and baking apple pies in Arkansas, or being married to a fisherman and working at a lobster shack in Maine--”
The waitress in the mint-blue smock stomped to the edge of our table and thunked down a frosted shake glass filled with thick chocolate malt.
“One chocolate malt, two straws,” she barked, dropping a pair of paper-wrapped straws on the table between us. Then she turned on her heel and left us alone again.
“There was one thing that every version of my mother had in common,” Des said. “They all wanted me back.”
I swallowed heavily because I knew what came next. Des did, too. She sighed, reaching across the table for the straws. She tore away the paper wrapper and stabbed the straw into the malt, then she brought it to her lips and tried to suck. Nothing happened.
“Too soon,” I teased gently. “You gotta let it thaw, first.”
Des sighed, pushing the malt away.
“You sat right here,” she said, pushing the malt away. “You waited for me while I stuffed quarters into the payphone and dialed number after number…”
Des wrapped the paper straw wrapper around her fingers, looping it over and over until she cut off the circulation and her fingertips started to turn white.
“Some of them just hung up on me. Some of them got angry and threatened to report me to the cops if I tried calling them again. Some of them just laughed…” her voice was growing softer and softer. “But I didn’t care. None of them were my mother.”
I reached across the table and snapped the straw wrapper, breaking the hold it had on her fingers. The blood supply immediately returned to her fingertips, and I wrapped my hand around hers and held onto it.
“I was getting closer and closer to the bottom of the list, but I wasn’t ready to give up. I knew she was out there, somewhere....” Des continued. Her brow wrinkled together and her eyes remained cast downward, locked on our interwoven hands. “It was a Virginia phone number. Waverly, Virginia. I still know the phone number, by heart, but I’m sure she’s changed it by now…”
I squeezed her hand, and her eyes pinched shut as her frown deepened.
“As soon as she said ‘hello,’ I knew it was her. Which doesn’t make any sense, because I was just a baby when she left. I was too young to remember the sound of her voice… but somehow, when she picked up the phone that night, I just knew it was her.”
“I immediately starting crying and I forgot everything that I had planned on saying. The only thing I could say was ‘Mom?’”
I tightened my grip around her hand and rubbed her knuckles with my thumb. Des was silent for several seconds as she waded through the emotions resurging inside of her. Then she licked her lips and continued,
“She didn’t ask me how I was doing, or if I was happy. She didn’t ask anything about me. She just wanted to know where I was calling from, and whether or not my father knew that I had found her.”
A single tear bubbled through her eyelashes and rolled down her cheek, leaving a silvery trail that she didn’t bother brushing away.
“Then her voice got very flat. There was no emotion… she was just calm. She told me, ‘Desiree, you can’t call this number again. You can’t try to contact me again.’ She made me promise… and then she hung up.”
Des sunk back into the booth and sighed. She blinked her eyes open and gazed up at the water-stained ceiling tiles, and the crack in the glass light fixture…
“I started sobbing in the phone booth,” Des recalled. “My knees gave out, but you caught me. You wrapped your arms around me and you carried me back to this table. You sat by my side, and you held onto me until I had cried every last tear I had.”
“You offered to walk me home, but I didn’t want to go,” she sniffed. “So we sat here all night. That bag of payphone quarters was the only money we had… and it was just enough for a double order of fries. We had to split the chocolate malt; two straws.”
After that night, it had become a tradition. We would walk to Marcy’s after school or sneak there late at night. Every time, our order was exactly the same, fries and a chocolate malt, always paid for in spare change.
“I still remember the number, you know,” Des said, chuckling through the tears that glistened in the folds of her eyes. “After all of these years… I still remember that fucking phone number.”
“Did you ever try calling it again?” I asked.
“I thought about it,” Des admitted. “But I didn’t want to hurt her. She was obviously still terrified of the life she left behind in Hartford… of my father.”
Des sighed, pressing her lips together sadly.
“After he passed away, I thought about trying again,” she said. “Sometimes I would even get as far as dialing the first few digits of her phone number into my cell… but I always chickened out. I didn’t see the point of trying again.”
Still, as Desiree’s eyes traced back to the phone booth in the corner of the diner, I saw a flicker of curiosity ripple through her face.
I reached into the pocket of my Levi’s and fished out a pair of quarters, then I dropped them on the table.
“Do you want to try?” I asked.
Des glanced down at the shiny silver quarters, then back at the phone booth.
“No,” she said softly, shaking her head. “It’s taken me nearly my entire life, but I think I’ve finally made peace with it. My mother ran away because she was scared and didn’t know what else to do. Leaving wasn’t a choice… but staying away was. She chose to stay away. She chose to give up on me, and I have to accept that.”
“You could say the same thing about me,” I said, squeezing her hand.
Her eyes flicked up and met mine, and she stared at me sincerely for several seconds before shaking her head.
“You never gave up on me, Rory,” she said without taking her eyes away from mine. “You came back.”
The waitress scuttled back to our table and dropped a plate piled high with greasy, golden french fries drenched in neon orange liquid cheese between the two of us.
“Careful, it’s hot,” she mumbled.
Des wrinkled her nose and smiled down at the heap as the stench of hot grease and canned cheese wafted up from the mess of fries.
“This is absolutely disgusting,” I chuckled.
“No,” Des shook her head. “What’s ‘absolutely disgusting’ is that we used to polish off this whole damn plate.”
“In that case, we better dig in. We can’t head to our next stop until this plate is clean.”
“Next stop?” Des repeated, frowning. “We’re going somewhere after this?”
“Oh yeah,” I grinned. “We’ll be making a few stops tonight, actually…”
***
The sun was starting to set by the time we finished our french fries and chocolate malt, and the streets of downtown Hartford were already crowded with Friday night foot traffic. Pedestrians shuffled in and out of restaurants and bars, and the warm air was flooded with the smell of food and beer.
Des and I walked hand-in-hand down the sidewalk, and nothing had ever felt more right in all my life…
Well, almost.
There was still a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach that I couldn’t ignore. It had nothing to do with Des… but it had everything to do with me, and what I was about to do.
After walking several blocks, we had gotten away from the hustle and bustle of downtown. The restaurants and bars were behind us, and we had reached a dead zone; a cluster of offices and government buildings that had closed their doors at 5 p.m., and would remain shuttered until Monday morning.
I knew that Des had to be curious about where I was taking her, but she didn’t ask any questions. She just held my hand and walked by my side, holding me steady as waves of emotions tried to drag me deeper and deeper away...
I hadn’t seen this place in over eleven years, but the building was burned into my memory like a cattle brand. I recognized it immediately. The walls were sterile concrete, and the windows were long and narrow rectangular slits. It looked like a prison… but in reality, it was something so much worse than that.
We were still half a block away when I stopped us on the sidewalk and turned to face Des.
“I was thinking about what you said the other night,” I said. “About how I always kept things hidden from you.”
“Rory, I--”
“You were right. You always shared everything with me -- like that night at Marcy’s Diner. But I couldn’t do the same. I always tried to keep my pain hidden from you.”
I glanced up at the building.
“That’s the courthouse,” I explained. “That’s the last place I ever saw my mother.”
Des was silent, but she squeezed my hand supportively and swayed closer towards me so her body pressed into mine.
“There was an emergency hearing the morning after her arrest, to decide what was going to happen to me,” I said, closing my eyes as I remembered the scene from that day. “For whatever fucked up reason, the social worker assigned to my case thought it’d be a good idea for me to be in the courtroom when my mother sat in front of the judge.”
I clenched my jaw, fighting through the chaos of nerves and pain that was exploding inside of me. I had buried this memory a long time ago, and digging it back up was like drilling a hole into a volcano and letting the molten lava spill out…
“I was sitting in the back of the courtroom when they brought her out. She didn’t even see me,” I continued. “She was wearing an orange jumpsuit, and she had handcuffs around her ankles and wrists. She looked so pale and sick. Her skin was grey and purple from all the bruises…”
My voice was growing strained from the unearthed emotions, and Des tightened her grip on my hand.
“We don’t have to do this,” she whispered.
“You deserve to know the truth about me,” I told her. Silently, I added, You deserve to know what you’re getting yourself into…
“She was facing charges… definite prison time,” I said, drifting back to that morning in the courtroom. “The judge asked her what she wanted to do about her son. My mother had her back to me, but I saw her shoulder rise. At first I thought she was crying… but then I realized that she had laughed.”
A scowl dug its way into my forehead and I felt my muscles stiffen with anger.
“The judge asked her why she was laughing. I’ll never forget what she told him. She said, ‘Why the hell should I care? Why don’t you just send him to live with his father? That’s what I should have done years ago.’”
“Oh my God, Rory…” Des sounded horrified. She threw her arms around me and, even though she was only half my size, she somehow managed to pull me into her chest and hold me tight.
“That morning, she signed over any legal right she had to me,” my voice went flat; numb. “She wasn’t my mother anymore. Not in the eyes of the law… and not in her own eyes, either.”
Des didn’t let go of me. For several minutes we stood there just like that, just a tiny woman holding onto a giant hulk of a broken man, on the street outside of the Hartford Courthouse.