Lemmon's Journey

Chapter Five

Marley Simmons was rounding up in his shop, getting ready to close for the night. His boys had left for home an hour ago while he remained behind to clean up and making sure everything was safe where it ought to be. It was almost eight; Sarah would get feisty if he didn’t make it in time for supper. Done with tallying up his sales for the day in his ledger, then locking it up in his desk drawer, he stood up and took a moment to crack his back muscles, careful not to shift his prosthetic leg carelessly. He switched off the light and locked his office door.

He double-checked on the back door before coming out through the front and locked the protective gate in place. Marley turned around when he heard footsteps approach and gave a startled jump when a shadow appear before him. The shadow came closer into the light and he exhaled when he realized it was Lemmon.

“Dammit, Lem!” he straightened his jacket, chuckling now. “You scared the be-jesus out of me.”

“Hey Marl, I’m sorry.”

Marley shook it off with laughter and put on his cap. “God, I thought you was the bogeyman for a second there. What the hell are you doing out here anyway?”

Lemmon pushed his glasses up his nose. His face was fervent with excitement ever since he’d ascertained the contents of his daughter’s letters. It was hard for him to contain his emotions. Marley was the only person he could think of right away to share the news with.

“Something’s come up, Marley. I found something earlier today, and all afternoon it’s been driving me crazy. It’s practically tearing me apart right now.”

Marley wrapped his scarf around his neck. He saw the anxious look on his friend’s face and knew something was really bugging him.

“All right, man. But save the excitement till we get home. Sarah is going to be pissed if she doesn’t see me in the next half hour, and you look like you can use some dinner in you.”

Lemmon didn’t have a car and had taken a taxi to get to his friend’s shop. They got into Marley’s truck and he kept his emotions in check as they drove to his home.

Sarah didn’t throw a fit when Marley returned home, though she couldn’t help chiding him for not keeping to his usual time. Her query being that he worked too damn hard and he ought to start delegating much of the work to his sons; after all, it wasn’t like he was getting any younger. She was happy to see he’d brought Lemmon home with him and asked how he was holding up. Lemmon reassured her that he was doing just fine; he obliged her with a smile, courtesy of his jumping excitement. During dinner, he opened up to them his business with Al Jobson, of getting rid of Abby’s painting stuff, though saying he’d kept back some of her unfinished paintworks.

“Is that a good thing, Lem?” she asked him. “Don’t that sound a bit hasty?”

“I’m not all happy with it, but her stuff was kind of crowding the house. And with Abby no longer around . . .” he stopped when his words appeared to choke up. Sarah patted his arm.

“I’m sorry, Lem. Please, do whatever it is you know will make you happy. We all loved Abby, and miss her every day.”

“Thanks, Sarah.” Off came his glasses and he wiped the lenses with his shirt, unable to stop his words from not sounding petulant. “Just about everybody in town has told me that. Not that I don’t appreciate it, but if there’s anyone in Sheffield who misses her the most, it’s me. I’m trying to hold things together with just me in that house. Not an easy feat, but I’m trying.”

“I know you are, Lem. We all pray for you every day.”

The rest of their dinner went well.

* * *

“So, what’s got you all jumping and crackling tonight? I can’t remember the last time I saw you look this excited since the Red Sox beat the Yankees.”

They sat outside on the porch, both of them sipping a bottle of Coors in their hand. Marley had his shirt open. He’d consumed just about enough for the night to last till noon tomorrow, he thought. All thanks to Sarah. He starched an itch on his left thigh. The evening wind was breezy and inviting; a quarter moon was all that shed light down on the world. Inside the house, Sarah watched a movie with her youngest son.

Lemmon composed himself while he sipped his beer. He had read the five letters over and over again since discovering them. Except for the first letter that bore his home address, the rest were addressed to a post office box, all to Abby. In the first letter, Gloria had specifically told her mom to open a box at the post office so she could be writing to her from there. Gloria’s intention was that Lemmon wouldn’t find out about their communication, and to his amazement, Abby had agreed to it. To confirm this, Lemmon had stopped by the Sheffield post office before heading to meet his friend and discovered his wife’s secret box. One of the keys he’d unearthed in her drawer had fit into its lock, though there’d being nothing in there waiting for him when he checked except several expired shopping pamphlets and coupon receipts. To say that Lemmon hadn’t being upset finding out about this was an understatement. He was bitter about it, but there was no one to take his anger out on. He didn’t even know whether or not to be angry. Instead of anger, all he had were nagging questions: why, for God’s sake, had Abby kept such a secret from him all this time?What reason exactly?

“My daughter is alive, Marl,” he announced to his friend. “Gloria is in New York, and she’s alive.”

Marley was taking a sip of his beer when he said it. He paused, then turned to look at him. His beer slipped from his hand but his reflexes were quick to catch it, staining his jeans with minor spills. Marley wiped the wetness off before returning to him.

“You f*****g serious?”

Lemmon nodded.

“My God,” Marley muttered, evidently floored by his friend’s statement. “How . . . but how is it possible?”

“Not just possible, Marley. It’s the truth I’m telling you.”

“My God, this is a miracle. How did you find that out?”

Lem took the letters out of his jacket pocket and gave them to his friend. Marley dropped his beer and held the letters, turning them over in his hand as if he couldn’t believe they were real.

“I found those in a shoebox inside my daughter’s closet today, all five letters. Abby must have hid them there so I wouldn’t stumble onto them. They’ve both kept in touch behind my back, and from the date on the first one, it’s being going on since last summer.”

Marley looked at him, totally lost for words. He raised the letters above his head to read out perfectly the addresses on the envelopes though had to screw his eyes to make them out with the light on the porch’s roof. He soon gave up.

“My eyes ain’t that good for me to read this. You mind breaking it all down.” He gave the letter back to Lemmon.

Lem took back the letters in their envelops and held them in his hand.

“Gloria told Abby to open a box down at the post office, not wanting me to know about it, and Abby did that. I never would have know about this if I hadn’t thought to look inside her bedroom closet today. She’s over in New York, doing some type of waitressing at a Starbucks shop. She talked about Randall, said he was doing good. She asked about me: how I was doing, and if I still worked at the meat company. The last letter was Gloria sent August last year.”

“I don’t get it. Why all the secrecy from you? What was so special about that?”

“That’s the point, Marl,” Lemmon grumbled. “I don’t damn well know. Abby’s gone now, so we’re never going to know. It’s frustrating to think that all this time I never knew what was going on in my house, the things Abby was doing behind my back. I feel mad even thinking about it right now. It’s almost as bad if she’d being out cheating on me, because looking at these letters, reading them all through this afternoon, it’s exactly what I feel. Like I’ve been cheated.”

“Calm down, buddy. All the anger in the world ain’t going to bring her back. Did Gloria by any chance leave any phone number in the letters at all? You think they called each other up somehow?”

Lemmon shook his head, drained by his sudden explosion. “There’s no phone numbers on any of them. Only means of contact was the address she mailed the letters from. It looks like an apartment in Harlem.”

“Harlem, New York?”

“Yeah, that one.”

“Jesus Christ, this whole thing is crazy and unbelievable. Wonder what she must look like after all these years,” said Marley. “How old do you think she’d be now?”

“Thirty this year,” said Lemmon.

“And her kid?”

“Randall ought to be eight now. It’s being seven years since they went away, a year after he was born.”

“I hate to ask you this Lem, but did you or Abby ever get to find the kid that gave her Randall?”

Lemmon shook his head. “Probably some punk kid she winked at in college, I don’t really know. She never really shared that information with us. We both asked, but each time it made it hard for her to trust us, so Abby and I gave up. Why stir the pot when the soup’s rotten already, know what I mean? Gloria was pretty fragile at that time, always picking fights with us. She thought we were ashamed of her, ashamed of what other folks might be talking about her. About what we might be telling them. That was the heart of why she ran away.”

“You both tried looking for her since she took off?”

“I wanted to, but Abby wouldn’t allow it. We kinda fought over it, night after night. Somehow, I think it was good we didn’t. Somehow we weren’t prepared to know, and Abby was distraught about knowing.”

“You both were bitter about the whole thing.” It came out like a statement, but Lemmon mistook it for a question.

“Hell, wouldn’t you if she had been your daughter, Marley?” he said irritably and regretted it. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have gone off like that. It’s being a long day taking in all of this.”

“It’s all right, Lem. We’re all friends here.”

“This whole thing is too mind-numbing for me. I’ve read each letter back and forth maybe ten or fifteen times already, and I feel like I’m going out of my head thinking through everything.”

“You’re thinking if Abby had the guts to hide these letters, what else she might have kept from you,” his friend voiced the concern he was having problem admitting. It felt refreshing knowing Marley wasn’t judging him over anything. If anyone needed to judge him for handling his daughter’s situation, it was himself and no one else. Abby wasn’t here anymore, thus it was just him to bear the cross.

“Yeah, something like that. I’m so mad thinking about her right now. I wish I could pull her corpse out of the ground and ask her why.”

“Put yourself in her position for a minute. What do you think Abby had in mind to do with these letters? She had a reason not wanting you to see them, no doubt.”

Lemmon had thought of that, too. “Maybe she was thinking about traveling to New York City to find her. Gloria didn’t want anyone coming to find her; she mentioned something like that in one of her letters. Maybe Abby was thinking about it then changed her mind afterwards, I don’t know. She was probably thinking a way around this without me worrying.”

“Man, you ought to be a detective or something.”

“Very funny. It’s just speculation, nothing more. A good thing Gloria’s alive. All these years, I was fearing the worse. Still, they both could have let me in one thing,” he gripped. “I’m still her father, for God’s sake.”

“Maybe she was worried you might react different. You never know with kids. Maybe she afraid, too, that others might find out.”

“I don’t care about none of that, Marl,” Lemmon argued. “I don’t care right now what anyone in this dumb, quiet town might think. She’s my blood. Her and Randall are the only blood I’ve got left in the world. I’m getting the feeling this is what my dream was telling me about.”

“What are you talking about?”

Lemmon drank his beer. He didn’t answer at first; his thoughts were struggling to contain his anger while he recalled the contents of his dream. It came to him fluidly: him looking all dressed up and floating above a dark highway. He’d being clueless what the dream signified, but now it came to him like a weird déjà-vu episode. It was too surreal and strange to imagine that all this time it was leading to this moment. To this decision he was about to take. Looking even further back to when he’d started his retirement, Lemmon wondered if all that too had added toward fueling this conspiracy. But regardless of that, from the moment he read the letters the first time, his mind already had decided on his next course of action.

“I’m going to New York City, Marl,” he said. “I’m going to go look for my daughter and my grandson, and I’m going to do whatever it is I can to bring them back here to Sheffield.”

If he’d expected his friend to talk him out of his resolve, he was mistaken. Marley looked at him, and knew without admitting it that Lemmon was going to perform this task without or without his agreement.

“If you’re going to do it, then you’ve got to do it,” his friend remarked.

“What do you reckon I should do, Marl?”

Marley would have wanted him to go, but not right away. He calculated that Lem was being too hasty. He would have preferred Lemmon wait a while and think things through, maybe even get pay someone up in New York to trace his daughter for him. There’s got to be government agencies or persons who specialize in finding people, not just people running from the law like crime the reality shows he often watched on TV. It’d be a lot easier for him that way than going to New York City and doing things himself. Marley wanted to say all of this and more, but couldn’t for fear of crushing his friend’s hopes.

“I reckon if Abby were here, she too would want me to do the same thing,” Lemmon continued.

“I believe you, man. Even I too want you to do it. It ain’t going to be easy, though. You reckon how long you’re going to be there?”

Lemmon shook his head. “I’m thinking maybe a week or two. A month at the most. Depends if she’s still staying at the same address, unless she’s moved elsewhere. Then I guess I’d have to start all over again.”

“You’re going to need money,” his friend suggested. “Plenty of it. I haven’t been to New York City in years, but I’ll tell you this, it’s nothing compared to Sheffield.”

“I know that. I still have enough in the bank, and then I’ve got my company pension—”

“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you, not yet. You’re going to need it when you bring Gloria and her boy back here. Besides, it’d probably take a lot of paperwork before you get your hands on it, and the looks of you tell me you want this done right now.”

Lemmon agreed. “You’ve got a point there. I really ought to think this through.” He finished his beer then got up and stretched. “It’s late already. I’d best be heading back home. I’m still trying to weight all the pros and cons of doing this.”

Marley rose to his feet and cracked his back muscles again. “You need me to give you a ride?”

“No, I’ll walk it. I need to clear my head and think stuff through. A walk would do me a whole lot of good. Say goodnight to Sarah and the kids for me.”

“Yeah, I will. Oh, Lem, one last thing.”

Lemmon had walked five feet from his friend’s porch when he stopped and turned to him. “What’s up, Marl?”

His friend gave a sheepish look like he was embarrassed already with what he was about to say. “Look, I’m not acting like some killjoy when I say this but . . . I know you going up there to look for Gloria and find a means of talking to her to come back home with you is a good thing, but something occurred to me just now. Ever thought what if you find her and she still don’t want to come back?”

Lemmon was stunned by the question. “I haven’t really thought of it. Best not worry about it for now. I’ll leave that till when I see her. Good night.”

Marley stood with his beer in his hand and watched his friend walk away. He didn’t feel like drinking his beer anymore. He emptied the rest of it on his lawn and picked up Lemmon’s empty bottle and stepped back into his house away from the cold night.