Chapter 9

Griffin

Officer Daniels eyed me across his desk. “How are you settling in? Got your transportation worked out?”

“Everything’s fine,” I told him. “Between buses and Lyft, I get by.”

“Your reports from the nursing homes look good. You’re powering through those community service hours. Over a hundred down already.”

“Thanks.” I shifted on the hard plastic chair across from him. “What do you think about me doing Rocktoberfest? I know it’s out of state, but that pay’s going to be a big chunk of this year’s income. I swear I’m not any kind of flight risk.”

Officer Daniels tapped his fingers on the desk. I had a feeling he liked the idea he had power over someone he thought of as a rich rock star. He’d said those words a couple of times in our weekly meetings. I’d failed to convince him that I hadn’t made that much money in the first place, and had given most of it away now. “We’ll give it another month,” he said. “Stick to the terms of your parole, keep your nose clean, and I’ll approve the travel.”

I gritted my teeth because I wanted to give the event organizers a decent heads-up if I wasn’t going to make it, but said, “Yes, sir. I can do that.” Do not antagonize the man who holds your life in his hands for two years.

“Right.” Officer Daniels stood and reached over for the obligatory handshake. “Same time next week.” I gave him some credit for not trying to crush my hand with his grip, despite arms the size of Easter hams. In my travels through the justice system, I’d met other men who didn’t hold back.

I’d taken the whole morning off for this meeting, because a couple of times Daniels had been running late. Now I was looking at four hours till my afternoon commitment, and nothing I needed to do.

Four hours would be enough to take a look in that storage unit.

I shoved the idea aside. I’d been headed for the storage that I’d had movers fill with Mom’s stuff after she died when I’d dropped my fucking phone while going sixty. Since then, the thought of making that trip turned me queasy. Well, in honesty, I’d been dreading it before the accident. I’d spent four years paying the rental fee from a distance and pretending I’d get to it “when I had time,” while making sure I never had enough time. Now I was stuck here in town, and I had no more excuses.

Except maybe, Four hours isn’t much time, when you include lunch and travel.

There, a perfectly solid reason to put the task off another day.

I could head to Wellhaven instead, knock off another service hour or two. The farther I got through my obligations, the more likely Daniels was to agree to Rocktoberfest. Right? Catching a glimpse of Lee was just icing on that cake.

The bus ride to Wellhaven used up half an hour, but that gave me ninety minutes I could still credit. I checked in with Kashira and headed for Mr. Harrington’s room to help him with his crossword. In the hall near his room, I almost ran into Lee coming out of Carol’s door.

Lee grabbed my shoulder to steady us. “Oops, sorry.”

“My fault. I wasn’t paying attention.” I didn’t move out from under his hand.

For three breaths, his warm fingers gripped my arm and his hip brushed mine, then he let go and stepped back. “Didn’t you have today off?”

I liked that he knew my schedule. “Yeah, had a meeting but it went super-fast and I figured I’d come on in and knock off an hour or two.”

Lee laughed. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”

I found myself saying, “Yeah, I guess, but I couldn’t get up the nerve to do it.”

He sobered. “Why do you need nerve?”

“I have to go through my mom’s stuff in storage.” I shook my head. “Five months stuck here, a lot of it in deadly do-nothing boredom, and I’ve still never gotten round to opening the locker.”

“That’s rough.”

“We didn’t get along. She would come out to visit me in LA and tell me everything I was doing wrong with my life. I never came back here the last twenty years. But now everything she owned is waiting for me to do the sell-keep-pitch routine and…” I laughed at myself. “I don’t wanna. Waaah. Woe is me.”

“Hey. Don’t be so hard on yourself.” Lee fixed a kindly gaze on mine. “Family stuff is hard. Death is hard.”

“I guess you see a lot of that in here,” I deflected.

“A fair bit.” He kept his tone soft. “We get some younger short-term rehab patients who’ll get better and go back to their lives, but the majority of our residents will pass away either here or after leaving us for a hospital.”

“Do you get used to losing people?”

“After a fashion. It’s less of a shock over time, but it’s always a grief. Your mom passed four years ago, right?”

“Yeah?” My rising tone made it sound like I didn’t know, but I was watching for his reaction.

“A rough time for that.”

“Wasn’t COVID. She had a stroke and hit her head. They said it was probably real fast. But there were travel restrictions and everything was shut down. I didn’t come back when I heard. I was sheltering with a friend with an elderly father, and there wasn’t anything I could do for Mom at that point.” I realized I was justifying my decisions, my choices, to Lee the same way I had to myself so often over the years. “I did things remotely, had her cremated. Had a mover come and pack up her whole apartment and put it into storage, and, um.” I shuffled my feet against the carpet. “I had her urn with the ashes put in there, with her things. I said when life settled down, I’d come deal with that. But when I did, well, everything turned to shit.”

“I’m so sorry.”

I ran a hand over my face. “I was on my way to the storage facility when I hit Linda Bellingham. And then, even when the worst of the trial was over, I couldn’t make myself go deal with Mom.”

“You’ll be here another what, two years almost?” Lee managed not to sound judgmental. “You have time.”

“I’ve had lots of time. I’m just procrastinating.” I squared my shoulders, jerked up my chin. “I’ll go on Saturday. You can hold me to that.”

“I can do better,” he suggested. “I’ll come with you, if you like.”

Really? I closed my eyes in relief at the thought of not having to do that alone. Except. “I can’t ask you to give up one of your days off to pick through old furniture.”

“You didn’t ask, doofus. I offered. Only if it would help.”

“So much,” I told him. “Are you sure?”

“Positive. When?”

“You’re doing me the favor. You decide.”

“Pick you up at nine a.m.?”

“Perfect,” I told him. For most of my life, nine a.m. had been the break of dawn, given the night-owl lifestyle of a performing musician, but now I was used to normal hours. “Thank you. And, oh, you might want to wear older clothes. At the very least, there’ll be four years of dust on everything.”

“I can handle a little dust.” Lee peered closely at me. “You good now?”

“Fine, thanks to you. I’ll see you Saturday. Well, I’ll probably see you here tomorrow, right? But then Saturday.”

Lee grinned and hurried off down the hallway, leaving me feeling like a fool but also lighter at heart than I’d been in a long, long time.

***

“So.” Lee stood beside me, eying the jam-packed storage behind the door I’d just rolled up. “Where do you want to start?”

By closing it back up again and running away? I took a steadying breath. “Finding Mom’s ashes, I guess. I don’t want to, like, pull out a table and drop her unexpectedly.”

“What does the urn look like?”

“A ceramic thing in pink marbled enamel.” Not my tastes at all, but I’d figured Mom had to live in it for eternity, so she should like it. Since I’d be the one looking at the outside, my logic had perhaps been scrambled. “I don’t really know how big it is.”

“Should be easy to recognize. Unless your mom kept pink marbled ceramics sitting around her house?”

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” I muttered. Mom loved knick-knacks of all kinds. Somewhere there’d be a giant case of Precious Moments figurines and an even bigger one of glass.

“Shall I start on the left and you start on the right?” Lee gestured.

“Sure.” I stepped forward. As I reached the compartment where a kitchen chair stood on top of the hallway end table with a cardboard box underneath, I stopped dead. A faint waft of rose potpourri combined with a musky perfume and stale dust hit my nose. So familiar. Mom’s place had always had that scent. It was both a comforting part of my childhood and the smell of Mom’s expectations, of trying to please someone who could never quite be pleased.

“Crap.” I braced my hand on the end table, seeing my fingers leave smears in the dust. I wrote my name, then a star, watching the dust float in the air, the polished wood revealed.

“You okay?” Lee paused and turned toward me.

“Fine. I just didn’t expect things to be so familiar. Mom didn’t want me to go on that first tour with HeartTrap either. She thought I was a fool to pin my hopes on making a success in music. After all, I was already thirty-six and over the musical hill. I’d never made it out of Iowa for more than a festival here and there. I was clearly not star material. We said things.” I’d yelled at Mom, tearing her to shreds up and down, taking out the pain of losing Lee on her. He had a right to put me second to his family, but she was supposed to be my family.

“Well, she was wrong.”

“I guess, yeah. At the time, it felt like the last straw. I told her I never wanted to see her again. We made up some, later, enough for her to visit me.” And take my money. “But I never came home. I thought more would’ve changed.”

“My mom still has all the old furnishings from when I was a kid. Hell, when I pulled my childhood bed out of my room to put in a king-sized, Mom acted like the old bed was some sacred relic. And she still makes breakfast sausages in the same pan she used when I was too short to see the top of the stove.”

My mom had only cooked breakfasts on Sundays, but yeah, I’d almost forgotten, sitting on my chair while Mom slid a pancake and bacon onto my plate. That’s one good memory, anyhow. “I’m really glad you’re here,” I told him.

“Happy if it helps.”

“You have no idea.” Although I shouldn’t read too much into his presence. When Mr. Rogers said, “Look for the helpers,” he could’ve pointed to Lee’s picture in a dictionary.

Lee turned away and scanned the stacked furnishings. “Not seeing anything obvious. Was the urn put in here first or after everything else?”

“Shit. Probably first.” I’d paid a neighbor of Mom’s to sign for delivery from the funeral home and put the urn in the unit. “I bet it’s in a back corner, behind all this stuff. Shit.” I rubbed my eyes, then squinted and rubbed again as the right one stung.

Lee grabbed my wrist. “Stop. You’re getting all that dust in your eye.”

“Fuck.” At least I had an excuse for the water on my cheeks.

“Here, let me.” Lee pulled a packaged wipe out of a back pocket and ripped it open. He put a hand under my chin. “Hold still.” Carefully, he swiped the damp wipe around my eyelids, then took my hand and cleaned my fingers. “Better? I have eye drops in the kit in my car if you need them.”

“Of course you do.” I managed a shaky laugh. “I remember when you kept a packet of lube in that back pocket.”

“Ah, the good old days.” He chuckled and put the dirty wipe back in the foil. “I barely recall.”

I tried to catch his gaze, despite the watering of my eye. “I do.”

For a moment we stood there, a couple of feet apart. Close enough to touch. I saw his pupils dilate. His hand under my chin could’ve become a touch on my face. We could’ve leaned forward till our mouths met.

It has to be Lee’s choice.

For several breaths, I hoped, but then he took a step back and tucked the open packet away. “I figure you have two choices here. We can work through the stuff carefully, bit by bit, figure out what you want to do with each item till we get to the back. Or you can haul it all out fast and find that urn.”

“Third option,” I suggested. “I can call a charity and give all that stuff to them. Ask them to find and keep the urn for me and make good use of the rest as long as they haul it away.”

“Don’t you want any keepsakes?”

Do I? “No, not really. Anything here is something I’ve lived without for the last twenty years. I’ve moved a lot, kept my belongings lean, and I don’t need to load myself down now.”

“Travelling light so you can get the hell out of Dodge when you’ve done your time?” Lee watched me closely, like my answer mattered.

“Even if I were to live right here in Iowa forever,” I told him. “Anything in this unit will just make me think of Mom and our fights. That’s a habit I managed to break in the last twenty years.”

“Ah. Okay, fair.” He seemed to relax.

“Is there anything in here you think Wellhaven could use?”

“Maybe, but worth digging around in your old memories? Nah.” He stepped back and I reached high for the cord to pull the unit door downward.

The heavy metal shutter rolled along its tracks and hit the floor with a muffled thud, hiding the detritus of my mother’s life from view. I felt better already as I locked the door.

Lee said, “I can hook you up with a company that will sort through her things for a low fee, box up photos and personal letters, and deal with the rest. They sell off the valuable stuff, which is how they make their real money, then send the rest to the appropriate charities with a donation slip for you and get rid of the trash.”

“That’s a thing? Really?” Handing Mom’s stuff off to someone else would be such a weight off my mind.

“Yeah. We get a lot of people whose relatives need care and they suddenly have a house full of stuff to deal with and no time. Phoebe, the resident coordinator, has all kinds of resources. We can get those for you on Monday.”

“You’re awesome!”

He pretended to buff his nails on his shirt and blew on them. “You noticed.”

I notice everything about you. Instead of saying that, I grinned. “We did that chore in record time, and I have a whole day unplanned. How about you? Can I interest you in…” I scrabbled to think of something Lee might enjoy. My throat felt dry and thick from that dust. Maybe… “A cat café?”

“Cats? I could hang out with a few cats.”

“I pass this new place on the bus every day,” I told him. “Let me look it up and I’ll buy you the biggest caramel mocha whipped cream whatever as a thank you.”

Lee rubbed his stomach, the gesture seeming almost unconscious. “I don’t think I need whipped cream.”

“Listen to me.” I moved in close and captured his gaze. “You deserve the things that make you feel good. Now, if you don’t want it, your choice. If you’re watching your calories for your health, I’ll even skip the whipped cream in solidarity. But if you think you’re not one hot, desirable bear just the way you are, big arms and nice soft tummy and all, then you need to get out to the clubs again. You’d have a hoard of twinks after you.”

“Bletch,” Lee said, although he didn’t look displeased. “I had this willowy blond guy call me Daddy last time I went to a gay bar. I am not interested in being a Daddy.”

I grinned at him. “Good thing I’m not looking for one, then, right?”

For a moment Lee paused, and heat flared between us again. Then he stepped back. “You promised me cats and whipped cream. Lead the way to that paradise.”

Has to be his choice. His call. At least I was pretty sure that heat hadn’t been just on my part. “Kits & Cups. You drive, I’ll navigate. Paradise awaits.”