Maddy Grayson was teetering between overweight and corpulent, the rowdy smile she’d worn in most of the pictures replaced with one that seemed to drain a second after it appeared.
“It was Steph, my daughter, who found him. He was on his knees in front of the couch, but his right elbow was still on the couch? Like he’d got up for a drink or a piss and that’s when it took him. He’d been there at least a day, maybe two. Steph had gone around to borrow some money because, well, Lee could be a soft touch on his drinking days. But outside of that, he wanted to be left alone. What he liked to do on his days off was drink decent whiskey, smoke cigarettes, and watch old TV shows. Never new ones. He liked stuff from the seventies and the eighties—Mannix and The A-Team. Miami Vice.” She turned on the bench slightly, excited. “Oh, he loved Miami Vice. But the early ones, you know? He always said the show went to hell when Crockett married the singer. Said it got hard to believe after that.” She fumbled in her purse and came back with a cigarette. She lit it and exhaled and followed the smoke with her gaze. “He liked those shows because things made sense back then, you know? World made sense. Those were good days, sensible days.” She looked around the empty park. “Not like now.”
Rachel was hard pressed to imagine two decades in her lifetime that made less sense to her than the seventies and the eighties or two that seemed less stable or compassionate in general. But she didn’t think there was much point in mentioning that to Maddy Grayson.
“Did he ever want anything?” she asked.
“How do you mean?” Maddy coughed into her fist.
“Like to become, I dunno, something?” Rachel regretted her choice of words as soon as they left her mouth.
“Mean like a doctor?” Maddy’s eyes grew hard fast. She looked angry and confused and angry about the confusion.
“Well, I mean”—Rachel stuttered and tried for a friendly smile—“something besides a bartender.”
“What’s wrong with being a bartender?” Maddy tossed her cigarette to the pavement in front of her and turned her knees toward Rachel. She matched Rachel’s desperate smile with an iron one. “No, I’m asking. For more’n twenty years, people went to Milo’s because they knew Lee was behind the bar. They could tell him anything and he wouldn’t judge. They could come to him when their marriages went tits-up, they lost their jobs, their kids turned into assholes or druggies, fucking world went to shit all around them. But they could sit in front of Lee and he’d serve them a drink and hear them when they talked.”
Rachel said, “Sounds like an amazing guy.”
Maddy pursed her lips and reared back, as if she’d seen a cockroach climb out of her pasta bowl. “He wasn’t an amazing guy. He was an asshole a lot of days. I couldn’t live with him in the end. But he was a great bartender and a lot of people were better off for knowing him.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.”
“But you did.”
“I’m sorry.”
Maddy pushed a breath through her lips that managed to be both derisive and melancholy at the same time. “The only people who ask questions like ‘Did he want to be something besides a bartender?’ are people who can become whatever they want. The rest of us are just Americans.”
The rest of us are just Americans.
Rachel recognized the grubby self-aggrandizement of the line as well as the faux modesty. She could already hear herself quoting it at cocktail parties, could hear too the laughs it would garner. But even as she heard the laughs, they shamed her. She was guilty, after all, of success, a success that stemmed from birthright and privilege. She took hope for granted, saw opportunity as her due, and had never really had to worry about vanishing into a sea of unseen faces and unseen voices.
But that was the country her father had inhabited. The country of the unseen and the unheard. And, upon their deaths, the unremembered.
“I’m sorry if I offended you,” she said to Maddy.
Maddy waved it off with a freshly lit cigarette. “Honey, your shit don’t mean shit to me.” She gave Rachel’s knee a friendly squeeze. “If Lee was your flesh and blood, then good. I hope it brings you peace. Woulda been nice for you, I guess, if you’d known him.” She tapped the ash of her cigarette. “But we don’t get what we want, just what we can handle.”
She visited his grave. It was marked by a common granite headstone, black sprinkled with specks of white. She’d seen the same granite in the kitchen countertops of at least two colleagues. They’d used a lot less granite on Lee Grayson, though. It was a small stone, no more than a foot and a half tall and twenty inches wide. Maddy had told her Lee had purchased it on layaway around the time his own folks passed away, paid it off about three years before he died.
LEELAND D. GRAYSON
NOVEMBER 20, 1950
DECEMBER 9, 2004
There had to be more to it. There had to be.
But if there was, she couldn’t find it.
She’d cobbled together the thumbnail of a biography from what Milo had said about him, what Maddy had said about him, and stray bits both had recalled others had said about him.
Leeland David Grayson had been born and raised in Elkton, Maryland. He’d passed through a kindergarten, a grade school, and a high school. He’d worked for a paving company, a trucking company, a shoe store, and as a driver for a florist before finding work at Milo’s in East Baltimore. He’d spread his seed at least once (or so it seemed), married, divorced, remarried, and divorced again. Owned a house that he’d lost in Divorce #1. Rented a smaller place from then on. Over the course of his life, he’d owned nine cars, three motorcycles, and one dog. Died in the same town where he was born. Fifty-four years on this earth and, to the best of anyone’s recollection, he’d expected little of others and gave about the same in return. Wasn’t an angry man, though most got the sense it would be foolish to push him. Wasn’t a happy man, though he liked a good joke when he heard it.
Someday all who had reason to remember him would pass from the earth. Judging by what Rachel had seen of the ways people looked after their health in Lee’s circle of friends and acquaintances, that someday would come sooner rather than later. Then the only person who would know his name would be whoever mowed the grass near his headstone.
He didn’t live his life, her mother would have said, it lived him.
And in that moment, Rachel realized why her mother had probably never told Lee about her or her about Lee. Elizabeth had seen how his life would play out. She had known his wants were small, his imagination limited, his ambitions nebulous. Elizabeth Childs, who’d grown up in a small town and chosen to live in a small town, had despised small-town thinking.
Her mother had never told Rachel who her father was because to admit she’d given her body to him in the first place would have been to admit that some part of her had never wanted to escape where she’d come from.