Gin Palace 02 - The Bone Orchard

her train. I knew I would stand there and watch her till she got aboard.
    “What?”
    “I said, is he a relative of yours?”
    Somewhere on Elm Street someone sounded a car horn. I heard silence from the other end of the phone.
    “Yeah,” I said. “In a way, yeah.”
    Winter was coming, and days passed faster than I could keep track of, or even cared to. During the first week of December I found a bank to loan me the money to buy a secondhand taxi from a cab company in the city and went into business with Eddie. We formed a cab and car service, and I drove six days a week, twelve hours a day, and in my first week I took home fifteen hundred dollars. I made four runs to JFK in three days at a hundred and fifty dollars a pop. Tina put the house on Little Neck Road up for sale and left my apartment over the Hansom House and moved in with Lizzie’s parent’s house across town. I got her to see that she needed a family and that I couldn’t be enough for her. I would, as Augie’s will specified, be her legal guardian, as well as the trustee of the nearly quarter of a million dollars his life insurance paid to her, until she reached the age of eighteen. As close as we were, and as much as we understood each other now, she could not live with me under the same roof. Our town was just too small for that kind of thing, and anyway what kind of life was this for a girl like her?
    Less than a week before Christmas I ran into Gale in the grocery store in town. She was wearing a dark wool coat over her nurse scrubs. Her cheeks were red from the cold and by her eyes I could tell she was tired. She seemed tense and had very little make up on.
    We left the store and went to a café on the corner of Nugent and Main for coffee. We got service from the woman behind the counter and then picked a table by the window. The first thing Gale asked me when we sat down was how my shoulder was.
    I shrugged. “It’s fine. I took the stitches out myself. Thank my doctor for me.”
    She said nothing to that. She held her cup of coffee in both hands for the warmth. She looked out the window for a while, at nothing in particular, I guessed, before she finally spoke.
    “I was kind of hoping I would never see you again,” she said.
    “I’m sorry I put you on the spot like that.”
    “No, it was okay. I thought of calling you a hundred times, to see if you were okay. But I figured if something happened I would have read about it in the paper, that or Eddie would have told me. I figure I would have heard somehow.” She looked at me. “I’m sorry about Augie. I wanted to go to the funeral.”
    “Why didn’t you?”
    She looked down. “I just didn’t think it was a good idea.” She wouldn’t look at me. “How’s Eddie?”
    “Eddie’s fine.”
    “I hear the Chief is in a real fight for his life, career-wise. He’s firing cops left and right, trying to look good for the FBI. I guess if anybody can squirm his way out of this kind of trouble it’s him, right?”
    I looked at her for a moment, then said, “What’s wrong, Gale?”
    She shrugged. “There’s nothing really wrong, Mac. Who you are and what you do, they’re the same thing. With you, what you see is what you get, and for some reason I just can’t stop thinking of that.”
    She glanced out the window at the people passing on the sidewalk and said, “So I seem to have a problem. And I don’t know exactly what to do about it.”
    I wasn’t sure what to say to her, so I said nothing. I looked at her for a long time. I thought of those long-ago nights in the hospital, when she was all I knew, when her presence was all I hoped for. Then I thought of her in her black turtleneck and lavender panties, of her lying beside me.
    I wanted to reach out and touch her hand but didn’t. Finally, I nodded my head once and said, “I’m not going anywhere, Gale. I’m not going anywhere.”
    She smiled at that. We sat there and drank our coffee and said nothing. She reached across the table and took my hand for a minute.
    The next afternoon I went to the house on Little Neck Lane to help Tina move what was left into storage. I found her in the basement, surrounded by boxes and boxes of her father’s things. She was sitting cross-legged on a fragment of rug on the cement floor, going through papers. Around her lay envelope after envelope of surveillance photographs and her father’s notebooks. Beside her right knee was an old photograph album. It seemed older than I.
    Tina