Chapter 7

Griffin

Getting out of the Lyft in front of Lee’s mother’s house was another moment of déjà vu. I’d picked Lee up here dozens of times, since he’d lived at home while going to nursing school. Usually, that green front door would’ve swung open and there would be Lee, dashing down the path and jumping into the passenger side of my old beater, laughing. Today, I walked up to the front porch and rang the bell.

Seeing Mrs. Robertson as she opened the door drove home the passing of time. Her red curls, once a match for Lee’s, had gone silver with the faintest copper sheen, and her face wore deep grooves suggesting pain. I wondered if she had chronic health issues, but of course she’d nursed her daughter over many years and lost her. That would age anyone.

“Griffin?” she said. “Oh, I’d have known you anywhere. Lee was so sad when you left. I’m glad you’re back.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Call me Ellen.” She pulled the door wider. “Please, come in. I’m so grateful you came. I used to be able to roll with the punches but I don’t know. Lately, every little thing seems like too much.”

“If your hands aren’t strong enough to turn a valve, that’s not about rolling with the punches.” Lee had texted me a bit more background on the drive over. “That just means you need someone with bigger hands.”

She patted my arm as she closed the door. “You always were a kind man. Come on, this way.”

I followed her into the basement, where steamy damp air and a patch of soaked drywall marked the leak. That valve handle was well and truly stuck, and I hoped I wouldn’t snap it. “Okay, that’s pretty jammed up. No wonder you couldn’t close it.”

“Lee showed me how he put the long screwdriver through the handle but I was afraid to try it.”

“I have a different method. You have a hairdryer?”

She tilted her head, reminding me of a curious Lee. “Upstairs.”

“Why don’t you get it and I’ll check your workbench for some tools.”

“That’s Lee’s workbench. I’m sure he’d want you to go ahead.”

I headed over to check the hammers. “Does he come over often?” He’d been very devoted to his family back when.

“Oh, he lives here.” She gave a kind of laugh. “He stayed to help me with Alice. You remember Alice?”

“Yes, of course,” I murmured. “So sorry for your loss. Alice was special.”

“She was. My beautiful girl.” Ellen rubbed her eyes. “It’s good to know other people remember her. Sometimes I feel like she’s slipping away out of the world and I’m the only one who cares she was ever here.”

“Lee cares.”

“Yes, of course. He’s a good boy. And after Alice passed, with all the things that needed doing, he stayed to help out. And then, well, this is a big house for one person, and he doesn’t have to pay rent. It just makes sense, right?”

“Of course it does.” Although I bet it made it hard to bring a man home for a little fun.

“Yes.” She nodded as if convincing herself. “Right. I’ll get you that hairdryer.”

With a little heat, WD-40, and a few taps from a muffled hammer, I got the valve loosened enough to turn. Once the water was off, I put on the replacement hose, muscling the washer away from the wall to get at the connector. “Right,” I told Ellen. “Open the knife valve first. Let’s make sure the other one holds.”

The rush and thump of water in the pipes wasn’t followed by any unwanted dripping.

“Okay. Now I’m going to turn this valve.” I went slow, but nothing leaked. After shoving the washer back into place, I grinned. “There. All set.”

“I’m so grateful.” Ellen looked at the washer full of half-done clothes. “Should I just start it again, you think?”

I was surprised at her tentative tone. Back in the day, she’d been competent and brisk, a practical working nurse Lee had admired. “That’s what I would do.”

“Right. Okay.” She fiddled with the controls, then the water started running in. We both watched for a moment but nothing sprayed. “What do you think about the drywall?” she asked.

“Put a fan on it to dry it, and then see how badly it’s warped. Might need to cut out a section and patch it.”

“That can be done?”

“Yeah, no sweat. I used to work construction, back when I was getting my start. Drywall’s pretty easy.”

Ellen sighed. “I feel like I used to know how to do things, and now it’s all so difficult.”

“You were a nurse. You didn’t need to know how to patch drywall.”

Her warm smile, so like Lee’s, was my reward. “Thanks. Come on upstairs. You can wash your hands and let me feed you some lunch. It’s the least I can do.”

“Thank you.” I usually grabbed lunch on the go between the two nursing homes, a plastic wrapped sandwich from a convenience store or if I had the appetite for it, fast food. I wouldn’t turn down something homemade, or, truth be told, the chance to learn a bit more about Lee’s life in the last twenty years.

Ellen sat me down at her kitchen table with a ham sandwich and a bowl of soup.

Despite the warmth of the day, that beef-barley smelled good. “Aren’t you eating?” I asked as she settled across from me.

“Oh, I don’t eat much in the middle of the day.”

She’d cut my sandwich in quarters and I gestured. “A quarter sandwich? This is more than my usual lunch, but I can’t pass up your soup.”

“Well, I suppose.” When I slid her a section on one of the paper napkins, she took a small bite, then eyed me sideways. “I have to say, I was surprised when Lee mentioned your name. Even more when he sent you over here. I thought you ran off to New York and Hollywood to be a star.”

“I kind of did. And I had some success. But I’m back here for a while.”

“A while? How long? Because…” She hesitated, then went on. “I said Lee was sad when you left, but it was more than that. He was crushed. He changed, after that. And yes, part of it was Alice and her health and, just, everything. But he’d been a happy boy, a positive young man. After you were gone, a light went out of his eyes.”

I set my spoon back in the bowl, the soup settling uneasily in my stomach. “I’m sorry.”

She gestured at me with her sandwich. “Sorry never changed anything. What I want to hear is that you won’t do that again. Won’t make my son think he’s important and then leave him behind like he’s not.”

I shoved a bit of sandwich in my mouth to stifle any defensive crap that wanted to emerge. Once I’d chewed and swallowed, I said, “If I could’ve had music and Lee, I’d have been deliriously happy. He wouldn’t come with me—” I held up a hand as she started to say something. “Yeah, I know, he had excellent reasons why not. But our split wasn’t just me. It was our lives intersecting at the wrong moment.” I set down the sandwich, my mouth dry, but I had to tell her. “You should know, the reason I’m here in town, and not just for a flying visit to deal with my mom’s affairs, is because I killed someone and I’m working off the sentence. I’m not a good guy and Lee should probably not get involved with me.”

Ellen tilted her head. “If you really killed someone, you wouldn’t be sitting at my kitchen table.”

“The judge gave me parole.”

“What happened?”

“I took my eyes way off the road while driving at sixty miles an hour. I fucked up and a woman died. I killed her.” My throat closed and I couldn’t say more. I bowed my head and squeezed my eyes shut. Brake lights ahead, the squeal of tires, the crash…

A soft touch on my hand made me look up. Ellen met my gaze. “If the judge gave you parole, then he felt you deserved to live your life. That suggests he saw a good guy inside you.”

“She. And I had a great lawyer.” But some of what she said was the truth. “Thanks.”

“Doesn’t mean you’re good for my son, though. I saw some of your music videos over the years, huge cheering crowds. I expect you’ll be headed back to the bright lights when you can.”

“I don’t know.” I rubbed my face. “If someone said, ‘Come on tour with us, play to big crowds, make some money,’ would I say no? I doubt it. At the same time, my last number-one hit was eight years ago. No one’s knocking on my door.”

“And if Lee asked you to stay?”

I bit my lip and repeated, “I don’t know. We’re not like that anymore. I don’t even know if he would want me to stay.” I wondered whether this time, Lee might come on tour with me, if I got the chance and asked. If we ever got that far again. But for all that his mom now seemed sharp as ever across the kitchen table, the texts Lee’d sent made her sound fragile. I shouldn’t even bring up taking Lee away from her.

“Eat your soup,” Ellen directed. “You won’t solve the world in a day. Just think about it. And Griffin?”

“Yes?”

Her expression softened. “I still appreciate you coming over to help me. I don’t get out of the house much, don’t have a lot of friends I can ask for a favor anymore. So thank you.”

“Anytime.” I picked up my spoon, and the homemade soup went down okay.

***

I waited on the sidewalk outside the front door of Rose Gardens at ten past five. Lee pulled up in an elderly electric-blue two-door Mazda and waved. He turned my way as I got in.

“Role reversal,” I said. “Although your beater’s even older than my beater was back in the day.”

“But it has more leg room.”

“Truth.” I buckled up and stretched out my legs.

Lee put his hand on the gearshift but hesitated. “Do you maybe want to go out somewhere to eat?”

“I could eat.” After my last hour going through family photos with an elderly man who was losing his mental way in life, confusing his daughter with his wife, I didn’t want to go back to my apartment alone. “What do you have in mind?”

“Chinese?”

“Sure.”

As he drove, Lee said, “Thanks for taking care of Mom today. That was a huge relief for me.”

“She seemed okay?” I let my tone make that a question. “Pretty sharp, actually.”

“Oh, crap.” He turned to me at a stoplight. “What did she say?”

“Just asked how long I was staying.” And basically told me not to break your heart again.

“And what did you say?” Lee returned his attention to the road as the light went green.

I was glad he wasn’t watching me fumble for an answer. “I, uh, told her I wasn’t in a great place right now and I didn’t know. That’s the truth.”

Lee blew out a breath. “Yeah, I suppose it is. And Mom does okay but she’s retired, not much to do with her time now Alice is gone, and I think she’s taking a breather from all those intense years. Doesn’t get out much or like to bother people. So I appreciate you helping us.”

Six years was a long breather , but Ellen’s situation was none of my business. “My pleasure. Brought back some good memories.” I couldn’t resist an appreciative scan of his sturdy frame, different from that young Lee I’d dated but just as appealing.

He apparently noticed because he huffed and shifted in his seat. “Hah, right. Now here it is. Let’s see how far away we have to park.”

The answer turned out to be a block and a half, but I wasn’t complaining about the walk at Lee’s side in the mellow warmth of the evening. The small hole-in-the-wall restaurant was only half full, and we were seated right away. I let Lee order since he had favorites, and once the server had headed toward the kitchen, I turned to him.

“You probably know at least something about my life in the last twenty years, but I don’t know much about yours. Just that you lost Alice, and somewhere along the way you went back to become a nurse practitioner, switched out of the ER care you’d planned on in nursing school…” I let my voice trail off.

Lee downed a slug of his water. “I did the ER for five years. By then, Alice needed more care and I’d been helping mom wrangle her medical team. She had a neurologist, a gastroenterologist, an endocrinologist, a cardiologist. Those guys could not the fuck talk to each other and her neurologist was a dickwad. He withheld a prescription one time until she came in for a recheck, when she’d had four days straight of migraine and couldn’t stand daylight.”

I winced. “That’s rough. Um, what was her diagnosis again?” He’d told me back when, but I’d remembered the impacts, not the name.

“A mitochondrial disorder. Usually inherited and poor Mom felt so guilty, but genetic testing showed Alice’s was a spontaneous mutation. I’m not sure Mom ever quite believed it wasn’t her fault.”

“Spontaneous means you’re not going to be affected, right?” I held my breath.

“Nope. Clean bill of health other than my doc wants me to eat better, lower my stress, and lose forty pounds.”

I chuckled with relief. “Don’t they all? So what did you do about the dickwad neurologist?”

Lee eyed me over the rim of his water glass. “What makes you think I did something?”

“You? Not try to solve a problem?” I scoffed, then paused to thank the petite server who brought us a pot of green tea and handleless cups. When she was gone, I poured us each a cup of fragrant brew.

Lee sipped his. “I like that you see me that way. And yeah, what I did was go back to school for my MSN and became a nurse practitioner. That way, I could prescribe meds myself if she was running low. I could call in a stop-gap prescription until we could get whatever specialist onboard.”

I lowered my voice. “Is that legal, prescribing for your family?”

“Yeah.” Lee didn’t seem worried. “A bit frowned on maybe, if you do it a lot, but as long as it’s not drugs of abuse, it’s okay. I wasn’t going to let Alice crash off her antidepressants when her psychiatrist refused her Medicaid and she had to find a new provider.”

“And you didn’t go back to emergency medicine?”

“Nah. Honestly, I was already burned out. That shit is intense. The money’s good, but the hours are terrible and the stress is real. We knew there was a good chance Alice would end up in a care home at some point, if she kept having stroke-like episodes. So I checked around, picked Wellhaven, and applied. The nursing homes are always desperate for good staff. I had my choice.”

“And you stayed, after she passed?” I flinched at saying the words, but Lee just nodded.

“They offered me the promotion to nursing supervisor. More money, less shit. And I felt committed to the place. Wellhaven did what we could for Alice her last two years, and there were other patients I’d come to know, and their families. Seemed like the right choice…” He stared off into space as if seeing something sad, then shook his head, and said in a different voice, “What about you? I know the big stuff, the number one hits and all. But what was it like?”

If he wanted to quit talking about his past and his lost sister, I’d go along with that. “It was a hell of a ride,” I told him. “Highs and lows like you would not believe.”

“Like what?”

“As high as getting up on stage in front of twenty thousand people screaming my name and killing it. Walking offstage so high from the music and the crowd I tripped over a cord and sprained an ankle.”

“Ouch.”

“At least it wasn’t a wrist. I could play sitting on a stool.”

“And the lows?”

He’d opened up about his personal dark times for my questions, so I said, “Lowest was probably a hotel room outside of Phoenix, watching my band’s drummer shoot up heroin, already high on meth. Wondering if I should call the paramedics, and whether he’d be dead by morning.”

“Was he?” Lee’s voice went soft and kind.

“Not that time.” That backup band had been put together by my label and they’d been deep into the mood-altering substances, from pot and ’shrooms to LSD and the hard stuff. I wasn’t the youngest in the room, but definitely the least experienced, so I’d sat back and kept my mouth shut. I had a few regrets about that. But when Rex did OD years later, we’d long since parted ways.

“Tell me the good stuff,” Lee requested as the server brought food. “Tell me all the reasons it was worth leaving.”

So over egg rolls and rice and an array of crunchy and saucy vegetables and chicken, I did. I told him about travelling to Paris with HeartTrap, climbing the Eifel Tower and watching the sun set on buildings a thousand years old. About performing with Pete Lebraun and Chaser Lost, the audience rocking out till I thought the roof would come off the stadium, and the pride of knowing I’d found and mentored a rising star. Or the time I was writing a new song while we rode a train winding its way up into the Rockies past clear turquoise lakes and snow-capped mountains. I wanted Lee to understand how everything I saw and felt in those days leaped into my brain and twined itself into melodies and lyrics.

“We were in London at this pub, and one of my songs started playing over the sound system and it was just surreal. Some of the patrons began singing along. I almost jumped up and said, ‘That’s mine!’ but even more, I wanted to just sit and watch people bob their heads and mouth my words and smile.”

Lee tried to pour more tea but the pot was empty.

I realized my voice was hoarse and I’d been talking for a while. “Sorry, I kind of monopolized things.”

“No, it was good. That was what I wanted. When you first left, I wanted you to come crawling back, like all you found was failure and misery. But once I got over that, I wanted your life to be awesome. Worth me giving you up for.”

“There were awesome times and I made a lot of good music, put out some albums I’m proud of.” I leaned his way and lowered my voice. “We won’t talk about Day Trip .”

“I thought that album did well?”

“It sold okay but honestly, it stunk. After King’s Road raced up the charts, the label wanted another album out fast. I told them I didn’t have the material, but there was a clause in my contract… Anyhow, half the songs on Day Trip were from my discard pile. They don’t all suck, but the ratio isn’t good.”

“ King’s Road though,” Lee said. “I couldn’t go anywhere without hearing the title track. Says something that I still like that song.”

“That’s an awesome compliment, thank you.”

Something hung between us, a moment of connection. Our eyes met. Lee’s smile slowly faded. Then the server came to ask if we wanted more tea and the moment was broken. We turned her down, and I made sure I left her a good tip for monopolizing the table so long.

Outside the restaurant, night had fallen. The soft air of a Midwestern summer was a blessing on my skin. We headed back to the car side by side, not talking. Lines of a song wanted to come together in my head, something about smoky whispers, hidden pain, a world made new, a loss and gain . I pushed the fragments aside for now. If they were meant to be, they’d reappear. For now, I had Lee beside me as relaxed as I’d ever seen him. His smile at me as he popped the car locks held no shadows.

I got in, buckled up, and laced my fingers together against the urge to touch him. I wanted to ask him to come home with me. That barren little rental would be a whole different place with Lee’s warmth in it. But I had no right to ask, and nothing I could promise. We were becoming friends again, and that was more than I’d dared hope for. If we ever went past friends, it would have to be Lee’s call.

He said, “See you tomorrow,” and “That was fun,” when he dropped me outside my building, but nothing more.

I stood on the sidewalk, my keys in hand, and watched the blue car disappear down the block. Might-have-beens lurked at the back of my mind, but for once, I thought about the future, and hoped.