“Joey remembered very little about them because he was so young, but he talked about eating a lot of meals outside, and crowding onto a couch with his brothers and sisters and listening to their dad play the trumpet and read Bible stories. And Joey said that he remembered being a happy kid, but that his happiness was very short-lived. When Joey was maybe three or four, his father died suddenly. Joey never got the whole story, just that after his father was gone it became impossible for his mother to keep all those kids around. Financially, I’m guessing. So all of them went back into the system, scattered like chaff, you know, and that was the extent of Joey’s experience with family.
“After that, he was bounced from one foster family or group home or juvie center to another. I don’t know why no one else ever stepped forward to take him in. Maybe he was a difficult child, or maybe he just wasn’t a lily-white newborn, which is apparently the hot commodity in the adoption market, sad to say. For whatever reason, after those first few years he fell straight through the cracks. Imagine if your only threads to family, your only memories of what we call home, only lasted as long as your preschool years. It’s tragic.”
Lydia was wearing a silver pendant of the Monopoly dog that David had given her after they’d decided to wait a few years to get a pooch of their own, and as Lyle spoke she zipped it nervously up and down the chain. Lyle continued.
“By the time I met him, most of the damage was done. This would’ve been eight or more years ago now, when Joey was maybe twelve years old, and I’d come across him once in a while at this musty old bookshop near the basilica on Colfax. When I would try to say hello, he would ignore me. Not the most socialized teen, but he was born to read. He generally preferred little bookshops to the public library, maybe because he was trying to avoid truancy officers, or maybe because he just liked the vibe. A few times a week anyway our paths would intersect, and every time, just before he left, I noticed that he’d put the book he was reading back on the shelf, pull a black permanent marker from his pocket, and write something small on the back of his hand. After seeing him do this a few times, I asked him what he was writing, and maybe because I was familiar to him by then, he held up his hand and showed me. There, on the skin on the back of his hand, was a series of small black numbers, a dozen or two, most of them fading but a few fresh and dark, and the numbers were divided into four or five even columns with a letter or two up top. I was thinking it had to do with the lottery, or numerology, or some Fibonacci sequence—the type of mathematical illumination that I would later associate with Joey’s wonderful peculiarities—but alas, it was far more mundane, and far more sad: he was using the pen to keep track of his page numbers so that the next time he came to the store he would remember where he’d left off. The columns marked the different stores he visited, or possibly the different titles he was reading. Maybe both. I don’t recall. What I do recall is that Joey had no money to buy a book, even a used book. One dollar? Two dollars? Four? The boy had nothing.”
Lyle stared at the exposed brick wall that flanked their table.
“Is that when you—started?”
“Helping him out? Yes, I guess it was. He left the shop that day and I bought the book he’d been reading—Crime and Punishment, I believe—and chased him down the sidewalk to give it to him. Joey stood there for the longest time with his hands tucked into his black sweatshirt pockets, looking at me from inside his hood with those crazy green eyes of his, refusing to take it, as if whatever strings I’d attached to it were enough to strangle him. Of course there were no strings, but he obviously had issues with trusting me. So I placed it on the sidewalk by his feet and left. When I saw him again a few days later, reading a different book in the store—The Metamorphosis, I think—he didn’t exactly thank me, but he did smile, or at least showed me a tooth or two.
“From there, I began to see him around town. I assumed he was going to school somewhere but I had no proof. Once I helped him at the library because he was having some difficulty getting a card because of his age or address or something, maybe just lack of official identification. Sometimes in the spring I’d see him smoking by the lake at City Park, and once in a while I’d buy him a book, or if he wasn’t drunk or high I’d stick five bucks in his palm for lunch, or just ask him if he needed anything. We talked a little bit back then, usually about what he was reading, but for the most part we stood silently together, side by side, or roamed the streets with some half-assed destination in mind. An ice-cream cone or a bowl of chili or a pair of winter socks. I thought for a while that Joey had Tourette’s syndrome or some kind of involuntary tic because every so often he would release these little whimpering bursts that almost sounded like a neighing horse. At first I would ignore it, you know, or I’d ask him casually if he ever went to the community health clinic for a checkup, or if he had any prescriptions I could help him refill, and then one day I realized, with complete embarrassment, that when he made that sound he was crying. He had this way of covering it up, of making it seem nasal, or like a stuffy cough, but it was tears.”
“I know the sound,” Lydia said, thinking about the times she’d heard it while passing Joey slumped in a chair, his face buried in a book.
“Anyway, despite the four-plus decades between us, we began to spend more time together. He seemed to be between different group homes quite a lot, taking this bus or walking that way, in different parts of town. Sometimes I wouldn’t see him for a week or two, but when I did see him he’d come right up to me and catch me up on his recent finds. The kid drank too much, and I knew sometimes he was trying to score this or that hit, this or that fix, but he respected me enough to keep all of that separate from me. Then one day he just disappeared. I visited all of his haunts but the kid was just gone, and I realized that I had no one whom I could ask. I didn’t know where he lived, if he even went to school, whom he was reporting to, if anyone, and it occurred to me that if I knew so little about him, if he could disappear from me, then imagine how utterly absent he was from the rest of the world. It broke my heart, Lydia. He could’ve been facedown in the Platte or left for dead in a Five Points alley. I promised myself that if I saw him again I would take better care of him. I’d try to give the kid some self-worth, you know? Anyway, I didn’t see him for a long, long time.”
“About two years, I’m guessing,” Lydia said.
Lyle nodded. “A little over. So he told you about prison.”
“He did.”
“He was not a violent person,” Lyle said, somewhat defensively.
“I know.”
“He made a mistake,” Lyle said, arching his brow, “and he learned from it.”
“I know, Lyle.”