Charlie laughed to herself. The paradox was not lost on her that after unburdening to Sam her deepest, darkest sins, Charlie felt that the most important thing Sam could take back home with her was the knowledge that their father had been a good man.
“Charlotte?” Jimmy Jack Little blended in well with the cons. He had more tattoos than most of them, including a sleeve that he’d gotten during a prison stint for bank robbery. His black fedora put him in another place and time. He seemed perpetually angry, like it was to his utter disappointment that he was not one of the good guys being corrupted by a bad doll in a 1940s noir novel.
“Thanks for coming.” Charlie hugged his neck, something she had never done before and probably would never do again. “Dad would’ve been happy you were here.”
“Yeah. Well.” He seemed overcome by the physical contact. He took his time lighting his cigarette, restoring his sense of macho toughery. “Sorry about the old shit. I expected him to go down in a blaze of bullets.”
“I’m glad he didn’t,” Charlie said, because her father had been stabbed two days ago. Being shot to death was too close a possibility for her to joke about.
“This Adam Humphrey punk.” Jimmy Jack picked some tobacco off his lip. “Not sure I got a bead on him. Could be he was buttering her biscuit, but kids today, girls and boys, they can be friends without the boom-chicka-wow-wow.” He shrugged away the inexplicableness the way he would shrug off self-driving cars and Tivo. “Now, Frank Alexander, him I know from a couple years back. Guy had a DUI that Rusty helped disappear.”
“Dad worked with the Alexander family?” Charlie realized her voice was too loud. She whispered, “What happened?”
“Pay-as-you-go as far as ol’ Russ was concerned. Nothing unusual about their interaction. What happened was, Frank was burping his worm in the wrong mole hole. Got a little sauced with the gal at the no-tell motel, then came home to the wifey stinking of another chick’s perfume. Or tried to go home. Cops slapped him with a DUI Less Safe.”
Charlie knew this meant Frank Alexander’s breathalyzer had been below the legal limit, but he was still charged with the DUI because the officer deemed his driving was impaired.
She asked, “The girlfriend, was she a student?”
“A real estate agent, a lot older than the wife, which doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, because why? I mean, she’s got money, sure, but chicks ain’t classics, like cars. You want the soap at the end of your rope to be fresh, am I right?”
Charlie did not want to open up a discussion on the finer points of cheating. “So, what happened to Frank Alexander?”
“He did some community service, went to DUI school. The judge rolled the charge off his record so he could keep his teaching license. I’ve got some sources saying that the real problems were back home. Wife wasn’t too happy about the old girlfriend. I mean, shit, why go older?”
Charlie asked, “Was there talk of divorce?”
Jimmy Jack shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t have a choice. DUIs are a rich man’s game. The legal bills. The cash money for the drunk classes. The fines. The fees. You know that shit sets you back eight, nine grand easy.”
Charlie knew that was a lot of money for anybody, but the Alexanders were both schoolteachers with a young child. She doubted they had that kind of cash lying around.
Jimmy Jack said, “Nothing says ‘I love you’ like realizing you’re gonna be eating ramen noodles for the rest of your life.”
“Or maybe they love each other and they wanted to work it out because they had a kid?”
“That’s real pretty talk coming from you, doll.” He’d smoked his cigarette down to the filter. He tossed it into a planter by the door. “Guess it don’t matter now. Rusty’s not gonna pay me to track down this shit from the grave.”
“Whoever takes over the case will need someone on the ground.”
He winced, as if the thought caused him injury. “Dunno if I got it in me to work for a lawyer who’s not your dad. Present company excluded. But shit, lawyers don’t pay their bills and they just basically suck as human beings.”
Charlie did not disagree.
He winked at her. “All right, dolly, go back to listening to these dirtbags. Those dickholes inside didn’t know your dad. Not good enough to hold a cup of his piss if you ask me.”
Charlie smiled. “Thank you.”
Jimmy Jack clicked his tongue as he gave her a wink. Charlie watched him work his way through the crowd. He slapped a few backs, did a few fist bumps as he made his way toward the doors and, presumably, the open bar. He tipped his fedora to the woman who had gotten her kids back. She put her hand on her hip, and Charlie got the impression that neither of them were going to be alone tonight.
A car horn beeped.
They all looked out at the parking lot.
Ben was behind the wheel of his truck. Sam sat beside him.
The last time a boy had beeped a car horn at Charlie, Rusty had put her on restriction for crawling out her bedroom window in the middle of the night.
Ben beeped the horn again. He waved Charlie over.
She made her excuses to the group, though she assumed that many of them had at one point in their lives run toward a truck idling in a parking lot.
Sam got out, her hand resting on the open door. Charlie could hear the truck’s muffler belching from thirty feet away. Ben’s Datsun was twenty years old, the only thing they could afford after the canceled trip to Colorado. They had sold his SUV for the loan pay-off. A week later, the buyer was not amenable to selling it back to them. Rusty and Lenore had offered to let them keep the loaned money, but Charlie couldn’t bring herself to do it. The clinic in Colorado had refunded the wire within days. The problem was the other bills: the flight and hotel cancellations, surcharges on their credit cards for cash advances, then the post-miscarriage hospital bills, surgical bills, specialist bills, anesthesiology bills, radiology bills, doctors’ bills, pharmacy bills and a ton of co-pays and an avalanche of no-pays. At the time, the debt was so crushing that they’d been lucky they could afford to pay cash for the piece-of-shit truck.
They had spent an entire weekend scraping the giant Confederate flag decal off the back window.
Sam said, “Ben offered to help me escape. I couldn’t take being in that crowd for much longer.”
“Me, either,” Charlie said, though she would rather congregate with known felons than suffer through what she assumed was Sam’s lame attempt at matchmaking.
Charlie had an awkward moment over the gearshift, which jutted out of the hump in the floor. She started to hike up her dress to straddle it, but Ben had made it clear the other night that he did not want his knob between her legs.
“You okay?” Ben asked.
“Sure.” Charlie ended up sitting sidesaddle, knees clenched together, legs at an angle, like Bonnie Blue Butler before the fall.
The door groaned on rusty hinges as Sam pulled it shut. “A spray lubricant would alleviate that noise.”
Ben said, “I tried some WD-40.”