Prodigal Blues

"What can I get for you?"

She was about thirty-five, forty years old, with startling red hair and bright green eyes and the kind of smile more gifted and creative men write poems or love songs about.  I smiled back at her, then realized what I looked like, pointed to my face, and said:  "It's been a very long drive."

"I was wondering," she said, not blinking or looking away.

I ordered a Pepsi and some onion rings.  After she left, I grabbed a couple of maps from the rack, looked at them without seeing anything, then slipped them into my coat pocket.

When she came back with my drink I had the badge out, fingers and thumb covering everything except for my face on the license.

She looked at the badge, at my photograph, then at my face.  "Wow.  I don't know that I've ever actually seen one of those—my uncle would sure get a kick out of this.  Is there some kind of trouble, sir?  We don't want no problems."

I pocketed the badge.  "No, God, no, not at all.  But I need to speak to either Joseph or Ellen Matthews, preferably both."

She looked at me and shrugged.

"The owners?"

"My husband and I are the owners of this place, sir.  Have been for almost four years."

"Then you bought this place from them—from Joe and Ellen Matthews, right?"

She shook her head.  "No, sir, we bought this place from my uncle, Herb Thomas—well, we didn't exactly buy it from him, not outright, we bought in.  It was getting to be a bit much for Uncle Herb, ru

I could feel something trying to shake loose inside, but I wasn't about to panic now.  "I need to know… your uncle—Herb?  How long had he owned the business before you and your husband bought in?"

"Oh, Lord, Uncle Herb must've run this place… jeez, let me think… two, three years."

"So it's been in the family for about seven years?"

"Yes, sir."

I picked up my drink with a trembling hand and emptied the glass in three deep swallows.  I slammed it back on the bar with more force than I'd intended, making Beth jump and at least one pool player lean over for a better look.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"That's okay, mister—uh, officer.  What is it you need, anyway?  I'll do everything I can to help."

"Is your uncle around?"

"Not right now, but I expect him and Larry back any minute.  You need to talk to him?"

"Unless you can tell me who he bought this place from."

She smiled and shrugged once again.  "Sorry—I mean, I know he did buy it from someone… name might have been Matthews.  I'm just not sure.  But you can bet he'll remember.  Uncle Herb remembers everything.  Personally, I always thought that was part of what made him sick in the first place, him always remembering everything and the type of job he had before he retired.  A person who remembers everything, they're always worried about something, you know?"

I nodded.  Beth went back to the kitchen to check on my onion rings.  Someone put some money into the jukebox and played Marshall Tucker, "A New Life."  Another song I always liked.

Okay, I told myself.

Okay.

The place probably held a lot of bad memories for them, how couldn't it?  You lose your child, have him stolen from you, and everything you look at reminds you of that loss.  How could a family undergo a trauma like that and not be damn near ruined by it?  Oh, sure, familial love can go a long way in helping you to deal with a loss, but how long did it take for this place to seem more like a headstone for what their family once was rather than the home it had been?  Christ, I couldn't blame them for selling the place, pulling up stakes, and moving somewhere new.  A fresh start.  But, God—to have done that means that they had let him go, they had given up hope.  And if Beth's math was right, if this place had been in her family for the last seven years, that meant that Christopher's parents had waited only two years, maybe less, before giving him up for dead.

And I suddenly hated them for that.  How could anyone simply give up on their child still being alive?  It's not like when you have the family pet put to sleep, or it just turns up missing one morning—"Oh, Fluffy's gone, dear me; guess we'll have to go to the shelter and pick out a new one"—no, this was a human being we were talking about.  If Tanya and I ever had children and one of them turned up missing, I'd tear through anything that got in my way in order to find them.  I'd never give up.  Let alone so soon…

I rubbed my eyes, took a deep breath, and checked my self-righteousness at the door.  Yeah, it was easy for me to sit there and judge Joe and Ellen Matthews, not having any idea what they'd gone through for those two years immediately following Christopher's disappearance.

—ever notice how the most vindictively moral advice on how to raise a child comes from people who don't have children?  "Well, no, we don't," they always say when called on it, "but we know enough that if we did have them, we'd…"

Blah, blah, blah.

And so I sat there, having the nerve to judge the Matthews for their actions without having one iota of a notion as to their pain and grief.  Maybe two years' waiting, two years' uncertainty, two years' worth of disintegrating hopes and guilt and God-only-knows what else—maybe two years of that was more than even the strongest of us could bear, so how could I blame—let alone hate—them for what they did in order to protect the remnants of their family?

So they had given up, sold their business, and moved on to a new life.

Maybe that wasn't such an awful thing.

So the big question now was:  Would Uncle Herb who remembers everything know where they had moved to?  My bet was yes—the transfer of a property and business like this isn't exactly something that can be done in an afternoon, it takes time.  And if the Matthews were in a hurry to get away after finally making what had to be an incredibly painful decision, then papers would have to have been sent back and forth in the mail, the money transferred into the Matthews' new bank account wherever they'd gone—hell, Uncle Herb probably had to call them at least once during the process.

I released the breath I'd forgotten I was holding.

Okay.

Uncle Herb the-worrier-who-remembers-everything would know where they'd gone—and if it wasn't right on the tip of his tongue, odds are he was the type of guy who saved paperwork.  Worriers usually are.  I myself have still have some receipts for vinyl record albums I bought in the late 70s.  Don't ask me why.

Beth brought my onion rings and a Pepsi refill.  "You look like you're feeling a bit better."

"I am, I think.  Let me ask you something I'll bet you can answer:  does Uncle Herb tend to keep fairly accurate paperwork?"

She burst out laughing, covered her mouth, then took a deep breath.  "Sorry.  It's just… asking if Uncle Herb keeps accurate paperwork's a little like asking the Andretti family if they know where to find a car's gas tank."

"So that would be a yes?"

"That would be a yes.  Uncle Herb's got enough files stashed around this place to build the world's biggest bonfire.  Larry and me spent I-don't-know how long getting all that stuff entered into the computer, but Uncle Herb still insists on keeping the papers themselves."  She leaned closer.  "Between us—and please don't let on I told you this—I think computer's scare him a little.  I know he doesn't trust them.  Says they make everything a little too easy for a person.  He don't trust anything that goes too easy.  He prefers the forms and the legwork."