“But you didn’t—”
“I haven’t said anything to them,” he said reassuringly, “and I’m avoiding them to make sure I don’t, but at some point they’re going to look me in the eye and explain.”
“Avoidance is probably a good plan. For now, anyway.”
“Are you around later today?” Raj said, sounding frail. “Irene is hoping to have the files couriered to me late this afternoon. Speaking of, I might need to borrow some money. I’m sorry, I just had to have it rushed, and there were all these fees, and I can’t ask my folks—”
“We’ll figure out the money,” she said. “Or maybe you’ll have to get a real job.”
“Not all of us can be booksellers,” he said.
“Truer words have never been spoken.”
Raj laughed. Lydia’s hands were cold, and a bad taste stained her mouth, but hearing his laugh made her feel better. Out the gas station window, a pickup truck with a happy hound in its bed parked by the pumps. She knew she should hang up and get back on the highway, but she didn’t want to be alone with her thoughts, so she was glad that Raj kept talking.
“Lydia? I know you need to go, but you don’t have a picture of him, do you? Of Joey?”
“I don’t, Raj. I could ask around the store, maybe Lyle or Plath, but I kind of doubt anyone would. He wasn’t really the spotlight type. Why?”
“I still don’t even know what he looked like. Did he look like me?”
With his green eyes and tawny skin, his black hair and lanky frame, Lydia had always been ready to assume, with little to no consciousness, that Joey was Latino. And learning his last name, Molina, probably only shored up this assumption. But in retrospect, he could just as easily have been almost any flavor of American, a kid whose portrait—dressed in black, standing on a Denver street with the Rockies in the background and bits of leaf in his hair—might have found a home in a National Geographic coffee table book, something called A Day in the West or The Americans. He could’ve been anyone, from anywhere.
“He looked like Joey,” Lydia said. “That’s just how I think of him. I know that’s not helpful.”
“I guess I’ve just been feeling bad,” Raj said. “I mean, if Joey had been living here in Cowtown all these years, I probably walked right past him on the street a dozen times, and I guarantee you that I didn’t offer to buy him lunch or dump some change into his palm. The kid was my brother, you know?”
“You probably never even saw him, Raj. He was born to disappear.”
“That’s exactly the problem.”
Lydia could hear Raj drawing air on the far end of the phone, and she realized he was more upset than he was letting on.
“Irene asked me if I wanted a photo of him from his police record,” he said, “so that will be in the files she sends. But you know, I just keep thinking how awful it is that I only learned about him after he killed himself, and that my only photos of him will be of his body bag or his mug shot. What’s wrong with the world if those are the only images we have of this kid? Where’s his baby book, you know? I could’ve been his big brother, Lydia, for real. Instead of this.”
Lydia didn’t know what to say, so she sighed in agreement.
“I’m just glad he met you,” Raj continued. “That before he died he had a chance to know you the way I know you. That helps some, Lydia, just knowing that you were there for him. You were, weren’t you?”
“I think so.”
“That helps, Lydia. See, I just . . .”
Raj trailed off, and she wondered if he was crying. She wished she was there next to him, but in a way she was glad that she wasn’t.
“Raj?”
“I’m fine,” he said after a bit. “Just come see me when you get back to town. I won’t do anything until you get here. My fucking parents, man.”
“I’ll get there as soon as I can.”
Lydia let the pay phone receiver crash into its cradle. She stood there for a minute, eyes wandering over the gas station’s rock candy and elk jerky, its belt buckles and butterfly knives. Before heading out, she retrieved her father’s wad of brown paper towel from her satchel and rested it quietly atop the pay phone. The woman behind the register looked up and yawned, then returned to reading her romance.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
After her shift at the bookstore, Lydia called Raj and agreed to meet him on the sidewalk in front of the Terminal Bar & Cafe, a slouching brick dive a few blocks north, where he rented a tiny apartment above the bar. On her walk over, she was thunked by a fat, cold raindrop, and soon more drops spotted the cobblestones and concrete. When she arrived, Raj wasn’t out front, but she soon found him sitting on a trashed vinyl bar booth in the alley, ignoring the rain. He was watching a pair of damp workmen carry an etched mirror out of the bar and slide it into the back of their truck. One of them gave Lydia a quick once-over as she approached, but otherwise the mood was funereal.
“Another one down,” Raj said, but he didn’t take his eyes off the workmen gutting the bar beneath his home.
Lydia understood. The Terminal was an epic dive with an epic history—Cassady, Kerouac, Waits—and the rumor among her comrades was that it would soon ditch the Coors taps and wonky pool table and be reborn as a sleek seafood bistro. A massive dumpster was parked against the curb out front, and it overflowed with the Terminal’s discarded bar stools and vinyl booths, its kitchen mats and condiment dispensers—all of the artifacts the new owners didn’t want.
“It won’t be long before we’re all evicted, anyway,” Raj said. “Used to be no one wanted to live down here, now everyone does. How are you?”
“Wiped. Still no courier?”
“He must be running late,” Raj said. He explained that the courier was supposed to deliver the package of files from Irene by five o’clock, but he hadn’t called or shown up yet. “Do you mind waiting out here with me? I just don’t want to miss him.”
The orange vinyl wheezed when she plopped down next to him.
A faint ribbon of tangerine light glowed above Union Station, but otherwise the dusk was dark and cloudy. Soon the air had chilled enough to change the rain into a wet snow. Lydia and Raj scooched the booth closer to the alley’s brick wall. The workmen took one look at the sky and called it a day.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Raj said, “if Joey’s files verify that he’s my brother. I don’t know how I’m going to face my parents. How could they not tell me?”
“Let’s just wait and see, Raj.”