Love, Billy
But it sat under his door for more than a month, and Grace never seemed to manage to get away to retrieve it. So in time he took it back and threw it away.
? ? ?
Three lonely months after that, Felipe came to his door, and sat with him, and talked to him, and announced that he was moving in with Clara.
“It’s just that her apartment is so much nicer than mine. Bigger, and in a better neighborhood. And with both of us paying one rent, we’ll have a lot more money. Maybe even enough to get married. She’s putting herself through cooking school, did I tell you? She’s gonna be a chef. Not a lot of lady chefs. ‘Specially not a lot of Chicana ones. That’s a big deal, you know?”
They sat for a time.
Billy made a pot of coffee.
“I’m not trying to take the car. I know it belongs to all of us. If you want, I’ll leave the car.”
“What would I do with the car? I don’t even have a license.”
“We won’t be so far away. It’s like a fifteen-minute drive. I’ll come back once a week and take you and Mrs. Hinman to the store. I won’t let you down on that.”
“I know you won’t.”
He poured Felipe a mug of black coffee, and poured himself a mug with more than an inch of room for cream. He took more cream in his coffee now that he didn’t have to have his groceries delivered. A lot more.
“It’s not that I don’t feel bad leaving you here,” Felipe said. “I do. It’s just that…”
“It’s just that this might be the last train to happy. And you want to make sure to get on it.”
Felipe chewed that over for a moment.
“I guess. I wasn’t thinking of it like a train. But something like that. Yeah.”
“And you should,” Billy said. “You should get on the damn train.”
? ? ?
A lonely month after that, Billy bumped into Grace and her mom in the hallway on his way out to check the mail. They must have been coming in from school.
He was wearing his red-silk Jesse-pajamas, and his hair was uncombed.
Grace’s eyes lit up to see him. But they still didn’t look anything like Grace’s eyes before. When she was thriving.
“Billy!” she shouted.
“Stop talking to him,” Grace’s mother said, and steered her down the basement stairs by the arm.
Billy peered over the railing, and Grace looked up at him and waved sadly, and he waved back.
He locked himself into his apartment, made coffee, then realized he had never checked the mail, and had to do it all over again.
It was worth it, though, because he’d gotten a letter from Rayleen.
She said, among other things, that they had a foster kid now, that his name was Jamal, and he was only four, and his mom had just died from an overdose. But she said Jesse was working his famous Jesse magic on him.
“I don’t doubt that,” Billy said, out loud to his lonely apartment.
And, also, as both Jesse and Rayleen always did, she enclosed a letter to Grace, for Billy to pass along. If. If he ever saw her.
“Well. I saw her,” he said out loud.
He wrote a letter back to Rayleen.
“Dear Rayleen,” it said, among other things. “You’re a natural. This is the role you were born to play.”
? ? ?
Four lonely months after that, Mrs. Hinman passed away.
Billy hadn’t seen her in a day or two, but hadn’t thought much about it, because sometimes he saw her every day, but oftentimes he did not.
Then Felipe came over to drive them to the grocery store, and knocked on her door, but never got an answer. Felipe jimmied the lock on her mailbox and found about three days’ worth of mail, including her Social Security check, which she was notoriously careful about retrieving promptly on the third of every month.
Felipe called the super, Casper, on his cell phone, and Casper came over and unlocked the door. Neither Billy nor Felipe went in.
A minute later Casper came out and said she was in bed, just as if she were sleeping, and that it looked like she had died peacefully in her sleep.
“Well, that’s something,” Felipe said.
And Casper said, “Yeah, we all gotta go sometime.”
“Least she had somebody to take care of her right up to the end.”
“Yeah,” Casper said. “When did you guys get so close, anyway?”
But Billy didn’t like to talk to Casper, and Felipe chose not to offer the obvious answer.
Later, after Casper left to notify the proper authorities, Felipe asked if there was anything Billy thought they should do.
“No friends or relatives,” Billy said.
“So no memorial,” Felipe answered.
“Unless we have one ourselves.”
So they did, even though they had no idea what they were doing, figuring the intention was more important than the style in a case like this.
? ? ?
Then one morning Billy looked out his window, and it struck him that it was nearly spring again, and that all those lonely days and weeks and months had added up to a lonely year.
“So what did you think, Billy Boy?” he asked out loud. “That just this once they’d break with tradition and add up to something else?”