Page 15

15

MACK

When the girl said Leo worked there, I was stunned into silence, but then I stuttered out a response and asked if he was there now. She told me to hold on and I heard her ask someone. Her voice came back on the line and she said she guesses he’s not there now.

“I don’t ever see him, so call back on the day shift,” she said. I was ready to tell Billy to go on home—and that I would sit at Pop’s Grill all night and wait. From what the GPS read, the place was back toward Rivers Crossing anyway—just thirty minutes outside of town, and he could drop me there, but then the call from Clay came and we rushed to Shelby’s. Clay was asleep at her mother’s and not answering, so I had Billy drop me off at her house. After the police finally left her place it was close to midnight, but she insisted on sleeping at the hospital so we both went. I slept sitting up in a padded window seat with Shelby’s head in my lap, stroking her hair and thanking God, again, that she’s okay, and angry as hell that this could happen again.

Now I’m two nights sleep-deprived, and I can’t think clearly. I called my neighbor, Sandy, and asked if she could take Nugget and Linus last night. I’m home after leaving the Oleander’s, and more police questions, and Leo finally turning up, and the pups aren’t here, and it all feels so surreal. There are no clicking nails on the hardwood, no relentless barking, and the silence echoes. My heart aches. I turn on the TV to fill the void. Dr. Phil is telling some poor old man that he’s being catfished and has given his life savings to some scammer in Nigeria and I don’t have the energy to walk over and change it to the news, so I listen to the man denying it’s true. He promises Dr. Phil that Jenny Smith loves him and when she can access her million-dollar bank account, she’ll pay him back and they’ll finally be together, and it’s so brutally sad and also annoyingly exploitative, and then I think: that’s me. How am I any different? I’m a fool. Imagine what he’d be saying to me if I were sitting there on that stage—how did you not see the warning signs? There must have been something!

I start a pot of coffee and listen to the machine gurgle to life, sitting on the window seat in the kitchen nook as I wait for it to brew, and the tears begin to fall.

“Stop,” I say out loud to myself. No, I’m done doing this. It would be so easy to pick up the dogs next door, order a pho soup from The Wok, and curl up in front of the bedroom fireplace for the next forty-eight hours with a couple of bottles of wine and a marathon of The Great British Bake Off , but I can’t. That would signal the beginning of a downward spiral for me, and a depressive episode will not be helpful right now. So instead I take a scalding hot shower, dress, pour my coffee into a travel mug, and head to Pop’s Grill…where my once- millionaire entrepreneur husband apparently works flipping hamburgers next to a truck stop and a discount liquor depot.

When I pull up to Pop’s it’s afternoon, and the sky is low and overcast. It’s dark enough for the streetlamp to be illuminated in the snowy parking lot where there are only a few cars parked. The Pop’s sign blinks in red neon above the building and a Hamm’s Beer sign buzzes electric in the diner window. I sit in the car and look at it for a few minutes, trying to understand what double life he could have been living that would bring him here. How would he even find this place? What possible reason could there be for him working here? I mean, I would be certain it was all a mistake, but Leo Connolly isn’t the most common name, and this number is in his phone. What if he’s really in there?

Steeling myself, I open the car door. The blast of frigid wind forces me to pull my parka tighter around me and run across the lot to the front doors. Inside, I scan the room for Leo. It’s a big place—the sort of truck stop where truckers can shower and use pay-by-the-minute massage chairs tucked back in a nook where there is a TV mounted to the wall. On the other side is a convenience store with fountain sodas and Minnesota memorabilia; shot glasses with walleye pike on them, or Great Lakes ball caps. In the very back is a cafe. I walk through and see a handful of truckers sharing pitchers of beer at vinyl tables in the middle of the room, a few folks on bar stools at the counter eating plates of beige food. And then, I see a couple of slot machines on the wall. One guy is playing the Luck Of The Irish quarter slots, and it beeps and trills like an old ’80s video game.

I think about Leo’s gambling habit that I didn’t know about, and my stomach lurches. I walk up to the counter and ask a woman whose name tag reads “Tawny” if she knows if Leo Connolly is working. She curls her lip in confusion.

“Uh… Hey, Chad, is some guy named Leo working?” she calls to the back, and a young man with a pimply face and a Pop’s apron appears in the doorway to the kitchen.

“Leo? Old guy?” he asks, but my attention has flipped, and I strain to see what I think I just fucking saw when Chad opened the kitchen door. I walk to the side of the counter with wide eyes and my mouth hanging open as I push the kitchen door open and see it.

“Him,” I say, pointing to his photo on the wall alongside a half dozen others that say “Employee of the Month” above them.

“Oh, Connolly! He hasn’t worked here in forever,” Chad says.

“I called and asked for him yesterday and the woman on night shift said he worked here.”

“I mean, he did . Maybe she assumed he still does ’cause the employee photos are there forever. We stopped doing employee of the month, but Randy hasn’t bothered to take those down yet.”

I feel again like I’ve been punched in the side of the head. Another dead end. Another trick.

“How long did he…work here for?” the words are hard to even say, but I quickly jump into getting as much info as I can out of this kid instead of starting to throw the blueberry waffles on the counter at everyone’s face and pulling my goddamn hair out, which was my first thought.

“Uhhh, a few months, but that was over a year ago. Hey, if you know him, can you tell him to pick up his stuff? He left his bag in one of the lockers. I would have tossed it, but it’s not bothering anyone, and he’s a nice dude, so I just left it there. He never returned my messages to come get it.”

“He has a bag here?” My heart skips a beat.

“Yeah, he just sort of stopped showing up one day,” he says.

“Last October,” I ask, and the kid nods. “I can take the bag. I’m his wife,” I say, and both Chad and Tawny give me a side ways glance. What kind of wife doesn’t know their husband makes Pop’s bacon burgers behind her back?

Chad finally shrugs. “Sure. There’s lockers between the shower rooms. It’s number 23.” He hands me a small key attached to a rubber spiral keychain, and tells me to just leave it in the lock when I’m done. He disappears into the kitchen again, where I get one last brief glimpse of Leo’s face on the wall. Leo, wearing a name tag and a Pop’s apron, and the whole world feels a little less real…hazy around the edges.

I sit heavily on the bar stool behind me and stare at the key for a long moment before looking around the room. I feel like I might be ill.

“Good guy, that Leo. You’re the wife, huh?” I snap my head to the right and see a man in a purple Vikings cap and matching parka. He’s holding a mug of draft beer and dabbing his mustache with a napkin.

“Sorry?” I say.

“I’ve been comin’ here every day for years. I live in the RV park back behind the place there. Not a lot of dining options,” he laughs. “The chicken fried steak’s not bad. I’ve had better, though.”

“You know him?”

“Sure, we used to go over to Lady Luck after he got off shift most nights.”

“What the hell is Lady Luck?”

“The…casino? Down the road.” And some of it starts to make sense. Not the “him working here” part, but secretly gambling outside of town? That tracks.

“You were…friends with him?” I ask, only able to speak in short, stunned sentences, apparently.

“Well, I mean we played blackjack and drank Summit together. Not exactly close.” I can see the glossy yellowing in this man’s eyes that tells me he’s had a long relationship with alcohol, and rough skin that’s seen its share of cold and wind. No wedding ring, a pile of ones on the bar for more cheap beer to keep-a-coming. So, does he live in an RV behind the truck stop because he gambles? Or does he gamble out of boredom because he lives alone in an RV behind the truck stop? A question that is none of my business, but I see a life that easily could have been Leo’s reflected in this man’s eyes, and it makes me very curious how he got here.

“Name’s Ron,” he says, holding his hand out to shake.

“Mack,” I say, taking his outstretched hand in mine and shaking it once.

“Buy you a beer?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say without thinking, then figure I might be glad I had one before I open that locker. He pushes a few bucks across the bar and Tawny pours a foamy Summit from the tap and places it on a cardboard St. Pauli Girl coaster in front of me.

“Sorry, uh… Ron, did Leo, by any chance, tell you why he was working here? Did you know he has a family in Rivers Crossing—he ever mention that?” I ask as the thought starts to press down on my chest—one I have suppressed before—that maybe he has an actual second family somewhere. Like in that Lifetime movie where the stepfather murders his whole family, shaves his beard, changes his clothes, and drives to his other wife and kids like nothing ever happened. I mean, how can I not think that? It’s all so bizarre.

“Sure,” he says, and I feel my heart flutter, speed up.

“Oh,” I reply. That’s not what I’d expected to hear.

“Yeah, I mean. He talked about you and Rowan,” he says, and I feel something rise up in my stomach. Why does this man, with trembling hands and slurry speech at Pop’s Grill in the middle of nowhere, have my daughter’s name on his lips?

“I’m sorry. What exactly did he tell you?” I ask, sipping the foam off the top of my beer, trying to remain calm and conversational.

“Well, just that he loved his family and really screwed up, but he was determined to get it all back—I don’t know, get his shit together,” he says. I swallow back the teary lump climbing up my throat. He was actually trying to make it right? I want that to be true. I can see a scenario where he just got so deep into debt he felt forced to lie to me as he scrambled behind my back to fix his financial mistakes, and it just kept spiraling down. But I can also see the scenario everyone else sees—that he’s a maniac that got so greedy he screwed everyone in his life over and was just a thief and liar, and probably ran away with some college girl to a beach with my life savings. This is new information, though, and why would this guy lie to me?

“I don’t want to betray the guy,” he continues. “You should ask him yourself. You seemed surprised to know he hung around here, so maybe talk to him about it.”

“He’s missing. He’s been missing for over a year,” I say as calmly as I’m able.

“No shit? I wasn’t sure what happened. I figured he got his shit together like he said—decided to stay away from the casino or somethin’.”

“No, it appears he did not get his shit together, so if there is anything that you can tell me it might help find him. Please? Anything he might have said at all.”

Ron scratches at his chin, looking thoughtful. “Well, we chitchatted all the time. I don’t remember everything the man said. Alls I know is that he liked Lady Luck, you know? His whole thing was he said he had a master plan. He told me he usually drove out here to the casino in the middle of the night after you were asleep, and then he lost a bunch more money over time. He took a job here for cash that he kept using at the casino to make back his money—but I guess he never did.”

“He told you that he snuck to the casino in the middle of the night? Jesus,” I say, absolutely baffled at how I didn’t know this. He would get up and say he was going down to the den to watch TV ’cause he couldn’t sleep, and I would find him in the recliner in the morning. I never thought twice.

“Well, yeah, for a while. But then he said he told his wife—well, you—that he started a new investment opportunity, didn’t say what—and then he could leave most afternoons and come here and work for cash, gamble for a little bit, and be back home by dinner,” Ron says, taking a careful sip of beer from the glass in his shaking hand.

How did it come to this? He was so desperate to make some money back that he worked for measly cash at an hourly job to just suck that little more out of a slot machine and keep losing and keep trying. For the first time I feel a pang of empathy for what he must have felt—must have been going through alone.

“God, missing. I’m so sorry,” he adds.

“Was he…do you know if he mentioned owing anyone money? Like I mean of course he owed money, but like, a loan shark? Or did he get caught up in anything like that—drug running, I don’t know. A reason that would explain where he went, or if someone…had a reason to want him dead,” I ask, pushing my drink away from me and feeling a confusing blend of emotions.

“No, he never said nothin’ like that to me, sorry. I wish I could think of anything else that might help. God. Missing, huh? Wow.” He repeats.

“Thanks, Ron,” I say quietly, feeling a bit defeated and more perplexed than ever. I push my stool away from the bar and walk over to where the lockers stand outside a shower room. A hairy trucker walks past me in a towel, holding a Big Gulp and giving me a nod hello as he passes. I stare down the short hallway at the stack of old gym lockers and say a silent prayer that something in here gives me an answer. I walk over to them and find number 23.

I swallow hard, holding my breath as I click open the lock, and what I see doesn’t really surprise me. His missing work bag. The bag I have been wondering about all of this time is crammed sideways into the narrow opening, and I pull it out and hold it to my chest for a moment before hoisting it over my shoulder and walking quickly out to my car before anyone decides to stop me. It’s irrational, since I was given the key and permission, but everything is irrational lately. I just don’t want anyone to question what I’m doing or why I have it, and I find myself sprinting to my car and driving away as fast as I can.

A few blocks down, I pull into the parking lot of a Take ’N’ Bake Pizza and park. I grab the bag from the passenger’s seat and unzip the top, peering in at folders stuffed full of papers. I dig around them to see if there is another phone maybe, money, drugs; I don’t know what the hell I’m looking for, but there isn’t anything else. I pull out the three file folders and begin to riffle through them.

At first, I’m confused by what I’m looking at, and then it hits me. They’re printouts of “paperless” communication forms from our mortgage company, and I quickly realize Leo changed the statements so only he would get them electronically and hide them from me. I don’t understand why though—the house was paid off years ago. I realize what he’s done before I even find the document confirming it. There is a second mortgage he took out and defaulted on, and it’s been delinquent all these months. All of the notices only in his name, going only to his email address. I look deeper and see unpaid taxes too. My God. I gasp when I finally see the words “foreclosure.” I’m losing the house.

Before I can scream, my phone buzzes inside my pocket and makes me jump.

“Fuck!” I hold my chest and recover my breath and then fish my phone from my pocket and look at it. A text. From an unknown number. I stare at it in utter disbelief when I read what it says.

Stop looking for me.