All the Roads That Lead From Home by Anne Leigh Parrish Page B

hit her, though she’d hit him for cheating on her with
their downstairs neighbor. Before Toby was Pat, and Pat had blackened her eye
when she wouldn’t get him another bottle of beer.
    Kevin
looked at the piano. He asked her again about selling it because now Ramon was
pressing him for the two thousand he owed. Kevin’s father was out. The last
time Kevin called his father said, It’s time to face facts. All the money in
the world’s no use to you. And when are you going to get rid of that
slut? Angie didn’t think that was the word his father would have used, and
that Kevin had chosen it for effect.
    “I’ll get
on it,” she said. She thought of the ad she’d seen, and of the piano returning
to a church, going back where it came from, like ashes to ashes and dust to
dust. She laughed softly, then with a harder edge. Kevin went on watching her
with his blue marble eyes.
     
    ***
     
    Ramon sat at the far end.
Angie waited for Noreen to get him, but it wasn’t Noreen’s station and Noreen
knew it, so she let him sit.
    He had the
fidgets. One thick tattooed arm jiggled on the bar, one leather-clad boot
danced on the bar rail.
    “Hey,”
said Angie, and put a clean square napkin down in front of him. “Where’s Kev?”
    “Thought
you could tell me.” He pushed his sunglasses to the top of his head.
    “He said
he had a job interview.”
    “Not
likely,” said Ramon.
    “No,
probably not.”
    He asked
for a scotch and soda. She mixed it and brought it to him. He stirred it with
the red plastic stick she’d dropped in.
    “When you
see him last?” he asked, looking at her tits. She saw herself in his eyes. The
blonde dye she put in three months before had slid down and left a wide cut of
black. Her pink tank top and the cold in the bar brought her nipples up like
two ripe olives. Kevin’s words, not hers. Angie had never eaten an olive in her
life.
    “This
morning. Why?” she asked.
    “He owes
me money.”
    She leaned
over the bar. “You’ll get it.”
    “I
better.”
    He drank
his drink and she pulled back, towel over one shoulder, held by what he was
about to say. And when he did she didn’t have to agree. That’s how it worked
when you were there for the taking. Nothing had to be said.
     
    ***
     
    “Ramon says he’ll drop it
to a grand and call it even,” said Kevin. Angie went on washing the dishes. In
the dark window over the sink he stood reflected, hands on hips. He was a
handsome man, with a fine square jaw, not at all like Ramon. Ramon’s nose was
broken, his skin was pocked, and his nails were filthy, but he trembled when he
held her, even once cried out her name, and then talked of bad dreams, bad
things remembered.
    “That’s
good,” she said, looking at the tall image behind her.
    “I just
don’t get it, though. He was so hot for me to pay up.”
    “I know.”
    “He even
went looking for me, down where you work.”
    “I was
there.”
    He shifted
his long, lean weight. She had to move fast, before he added it up. She turned
off the water and rubbed her wet fingers on her worn-out jeans. The blood
rushed in her ears, down her back, all the way to the soles of her feet. She’d
crossed more than half the distance between them by the time he caught her by
the shoulders. They made it all the way into the bedroom with her mouth pressed
into his.
     
    ***
     
    Kevin had a plan. He knew
two things: where Ramon kept his money, and where he kept his coke. “Cash in a
coffee can, right there on the shelf. And the coke’s sitting loose in an old
box of laundry soap.” Ramon also had a gun which he kept in his bedside table
drawer, and another one in the kitchen, inside an empty fruit bowl on the top
of the refrigerator.
    “Sounds
risky,” said Angie.
    “Only if I
get busted, so I don’t lift the coke. The cops won’t ask about the money if
they find it on me.”
    “Still.”
    “Come on,
he’s got at least a couple of grand. Plenty to go somewhere new. By the