IX – When Jesse Showed Randy What He Found (and Caused a Car Accident)

A Story for Anxious Times

Chapter 9

For the previous installment of this serial novel, visit here.

Randy was putting the whipped cream on a mocha frappuccino (his least favorite to drink but his favorite to call out; he liked hesitating a bit with an accent on the “i” like a real Italian) when Jesse came into Bo’s Coffee on Friday morning. Randy looked up and saw him in a slightly less black suit, and with no tie this time. His eyes were puffy, and his short brown hair, parted to the right, was more out of place than when they’d met two days earlier. Jesse was a good looking guy, but today he looked a little like a drug addict.

He wasn’t. Jesse rarely drank and had never tried a drug that didn’t end in -ylenol. But he hadn’t slept at all during the night, and when he did finally drift off at about six that morning it had been only for two hours. He wasn’t going to work. He had bereavement pay through next Wednesday since his father had died Wednesday night, and he was split on whether to ever go back now that he knew he was being laid off and had had a nervous breakdown in the middle of the office. Why endure embarassment for a job you were losing anyway?

But for the first time in years, Jesse was actually less than 5% worried about embarrassment. He was grieving, he was still confused by what he’d seen between Randy and his father the day his father eventually died, and he was obsessed with understanding what he’d found in his father’s closet.

Which is what Randy noticed about five seconds after he saw Jessie and prepared to greet him with all the gladness and hope in his chest. Jessie was holding a very old blue coffee can.

Randy, having been a bit of a clothes horse in his increasingly former life, had first noticed that Jesse’s buttons weren’t lined up. (Though he still populated a suit nicely. One woman, leaving the dry cleaner nextdoor as Jesse shuffled up to the door of Bo’s Coffee a moment earlier had actually thought, “Oh, I hope that boy gets off drugs; he could have a nice life if so. He’s handsome enough to be a model.” Then she rear ended the person in front of her. But Jesse had been too distracted to hear that.) But now Randy was looking at the old blue coffee can, no lid. Jesse was holding it by gripping the wall with his right hand, thumb on the inside and four fingers on the outside. He was gripping it hard. So hard his hand was shaking a little.

He sat down on the same high chair at the counter he’d sat on the other day. The high chairs at the counter were a nice touch. It made the place feel like a much brighter version of a neighborhood bar.

Despite his worry about whatever was eating Jesse alive, Randy still said cheerfully enough, “Hey, how are you? I’m glad to see you; I was thinking about you guys all day yesterday.”

“My father died late Wednesday night.” On any other day of Jesse’s adult life he would have shaved the rough edges off of that sentence and polished it with a gentle smile before laying it on the counter for public consumption. But he was aching all over, and desperate to figure some things out. This was the bottom of the ditch for Jesse, and he didn’t have the muscle left to be who he’d always been and talk the way he’d always talked.

“What?” Randy said, feeling his stomach land near his ankles. If Jesse had been looking at him, he’d have been shocked to see Randy, normally so confident and jovial, with that blisteringly surprised and sad expression on his face. But he wasn’t looking at Randy.

“What happened?”

“He never woke up. The infection had spread more than anyone knew.”

“Jesse, I’m so sorry. Listen-” and he waived another Friday morning employee over to the register and pulled Jesse over to a table and sat him down before sitting himself, across from him. “I know we just met the other day, but I can’t help it, I feel like we’re already friends and I just want to say I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Anybody who’d have had the temerity to listen would have been almost moved to tears by the feeling in Randy’s voice and eyes, but Jesse wasn’t even looking at him. Now he noticed himself about his shirt buttons not being lined up. A day-and-a-half ago that would have been an apocalyptic event. Today he didn’t care. Life was funny. No wait, life was a joke, but not a funny one. A greasy, mean-spirited one told by a guy who chewed with his mouth open.

Man, he needed sleep.

He blinked long and hard and then opened his eyes extra wide to let the light in and hopefully jolt him. “He’ll never be able to tell me what he said he was going to,” Jesse said, and then he put the coffee can on the table. “So I went to his house yesterday. I didn’t tell anyone. He has a closet in his bedroom. This was on the top shelf. Next to to an old comforter and a box with some of my mom’s books.” He paused, but he still never looked at Randy. “He’d kill me if he knew I went in that closet. He’d kill me if he knew I went in that room.”

Randy didn’t know what to say. He wouldn’t have spoken even if he had.

“How much do you know about your father?” Now, as he asked Randy that question, for the first time Jesse actually looked at him. There was something violent in his eyes. Something broken, too. Randy didn’t answer.

“We don’t know, my little brothers and sister, what town he was born in. We’ve never met his parents. I’m only half sure he was an only child.”

Randy felt unsettled. He’d spent hours with Bruce Henderson, had guided him to Jesus, and though it had only been one day, Randy truly felt like a blood brother to the man after what had happened in that hospital room. But now there was something dark in Jesse’s voice that was making Randy wonder if the man he’d touched that day was an illusion.

“We knew he ran away from home as a teenager. That he joined the army. That he met my mom. That’s about it.” Jesse spun the coffee can around once, casually, and it made a solid, scratching sound on the tabletop. “My father wasn’t the kind of man you asked a lot of personal questions of,” he said, and there was no irony, no self-pity in his voice, which somehow made it scarier to Randy. Jesse sounded cold, sharp, somehow even a little dangerous.

“You want coffee?”

He had no idea where it came from, and he’d have laughed at himself if he weren’t so uncomfortable, but Jesse surprised him by saying, “Yeah.” So Randy went up and got himself a black French Roast and Jesse a Colombian (what he’d had the other day) with cream. When he got back to the table, Jesse had put what had to be a decades-old scrap of paper on Randy’s side of the table. That was when Randy started to feel better, and the first time he had a faint idea of why Jesse was really here.

Jesse stared at the paper he’d put in front of Randy as he took the first sip of coffee. Randy picked it up, comfortable enough with the signal that that was what Jesse wanted. “Who is this?” he asked evenly.

“I called that number. It’s a home number, and that lady,” Jesse pointed at the paper, “doesn’t live there now. It’s in a place called St. Marys, West Virginia. The woman who lives there now bought the house from the daughter of a lady who’d lived there for decades.”

Randy studied the paper for a moment. It had originally been ripped off something, but it was thicker stock, like an index card or part of a paper plate. That had to be part of why it had held up.

“She couldn’t tell me much more. Maybe she didn’t want to. But I looked up the daughter, starting with the property sale. And I talked to her on the phone.”

“What did you say?” Randy asked. He’d forgotten about his coffee.

“That I found what I thought was her mom’s name and home phone number written down on a scrap of paper in my father’s things, and that he just died, and that I was just trying to figure out why he had it and kept it. I was hoping sympathy would help. It didn’t, at least not much. But before it went completely south I told her about what he’d said Wednesday night, about his needing to tell me something he never had before. And I told her the paper was obviously old, maybe forty or fifty years old, and that it was in his closet with some other things he’d obviously kept for a reason. I said I thought it was because it’s a part of what he’d wanted to tell me.

“She was quiet for about ten solid seconds. And I thought she was going to hang up on me. But she said, ‘My mother was a dispatcher at the Pleasants County Sheriff’s Office. You could try there and see if they know anything about your father.’ But I didn’t want to let her off without trying everything I could. So I said that if the thing was forty or fifty years old, like it looks, it’d mean my dad was a young boy or a teenager. And I asked her if her mom had ever said anything about knowing a Bruce Henderson who’d have been a kid in the 60’s. She said no, the name didn’t sound familiar. But she was warming up a little, and I could tell she was really thinking. And then she said, ‘There was a story she told me once about her job. I had asked her if her job was hard or something like that, for a project at school where you wrote a paper about one of your parents’ careers.'” Jesse looked up at Randy, made eye contact, and smiled for the first time. It was a grim smile, but Randy returned it.

“She said, ‘She told me that one time, before I was born, a little boy walked in the front door of the sheriff’s office, and she’d been at the front desk and asked what he needed. And he’d never looked up from the floor, but just asked if he could talk to a policeman, a nice one please, and that it sounded like a little speech he’d rehearsed. And she’d said there wasn’t a policeman in at the moment, but that if he could wait a little bit she’d have one talk to him when one came back. And she’d said this little boy’s shoulders dropped, or something like that. I remember really clearly she said it looked like he’d wanted to cry, but he’d forgotten how to, and I only remember that part so well because she’d actually started to cry then telling me about it. And she said that then she’d gotten him a little cup of water, and that when she gave it to him he looked up into her eyes, and then he asked her if it was really true you could go to jail for doing the special things. And she told me, though she probably left some parts out because I was only about ten years old, that that really scared her, but she wasn’t sure why. But she just wanted to do something for this boy. But then he set the cup of water on the counter and ran out, and she came around and went out the front door herself but by the time she got there he was off, around one of the corners and gone.’ This woman told me she’d only thought about that story a couple of times since then, but that it definitely would have happened in the 60’s.

“I asked her a few more questions, but she didn’t know anything else. She said sorry a couple of times, and said that if that boy was my father, her mom would want to help me, but she died in ’96.” Jesse stopped talking. He rubbed his eyes and took a sip of his coffee, which reminded Randy he had coffee himself, but he didn’t feel like having any anymore.

“What do you think?” Randy asked after a few seconds of quiet.

“It was him,” Jesse said, certain, looking back at Randy exhausted but determined. “This,” Jesse said, pulling from out of the can a postal envelope just as old, “was the aunt he lived with for a few years before joining the army. I knew the name, but I didn’t know she lived here,” he said, gesturing with the envelope, “a place called Jackson, Ohio. It’s way east, near West Virginia. Maybe a hundred miles west of Pleasants County. I already know twice as much about where my father came from as I knew before Wednesday, and I know almost nothing. And some of it came from you. If you hadn’t come with me to the hospital, he’d have died without saying anything.”

Randy shook his head. “You don’t know that-”

“I know who my father wasn’t. And he wasn’t a talker. Not about this. Not about his life, or where he came from.” Jesse took another sip from his coffee. Then followed it up with a solid five second gulp once he’d assessed the temperature. He blinked a few times, trying to clear the blur from his eyes. “I have some bereavement pay. A week. And I may never go back to the office, anyway. I’m being laid off.”

Randy grimaced, and Jesse appreciated it. But he didn’t really show it. He just finished what he’d come to say.

“I’m going out there. First to his aunt’s house, see if maybe a relative bought it or still lives there. And then to the sheriff’s office in Pleasants County, find out anything they can tell me. Maybe they filed a report. And maybe I can even find the home he ran away from. But he didn’t have anything else like this in that closet, and that’s where he would have kept a secret. I know it. This is it, whatever’s out there. And I’m going to find out.

“I wanted to say thank you, Randy. I don’t believe in what happened Wednesday night, but you drove me down to see my father and you were a good man to him the night he died. And I also wanted to see if you had any suggestions. You were there Wednesday. His last day. You heard what he said.” Jesse ran his fingers through his hair and then leaned forward. Randy looked into his eyes and wondered how much he’d slept.

“Is it really a good idea for you to take off and drive to West Virginia? You don’t look good.”

Jesse smiled at that. It was hard not to like Randy, even when he told you things like that.

“And what about the funeral? And your brothers and sister?”

Jesse shook his head. “We got the big parts taken care of yesterday. We’re having a little memorial service Tuesday. It’ll be small. My mom’s been dead for twenty-five years and she was an only child. and you already know as much about my father’s family as I do. So I can sit here and wait through four days of silence for an awkward service where about ten people will politely stare at whatever one picture my sister can find where my dad is halfway smiling, or I can go figure out who he was. What he wanted to tell me when he got out of the hospital.”

Jesse looked out the big front window of Bo’s Coffe to his left. A police officer had finally arrived at the accident that Jesse’s sad, drug addict appearance had (unbeknownst to him) caused. He had his hands around this thing, or at least he almost did. And he wasn’t going to let up. If he didn’t do this now, he knew he never would. And even though his love for his son had started to push the idea of killing himself out of his heart, everything was still about to change. His career was over, and he would certainly have child support and alimony after he and Janie divorced.

His dead father would be a more and more distant memory with each passing month. This was his chance. He had to.

“I’m going. And I’d like to have a running start. Any thoughts? Ideas?”

Randy smiled. “I’ll do you one better. My brother-in-law gave me a few paid days off. Something happened, and he wanted me to-” he stopped and waived his right hand in front of his face. “Doesn’t matter. The point is: How about I drive you?” He gave it a second, then added, “I’m guessing you still haven’t gone back for your car keys.”

Jesse smiled, then laughed. He had the look of a man no longer surprised by the unexpected thing happening, though he was very grateful for it.

“I should let you know then,” and the smile faded a bit as he said this, “I don’t know how this ends.” And he pointed at the envelope, now on the table between them. Randy was confused for a second, then realized what Jesse meant and turned the forty or fifty year old envelope over. On the back were written a few directions, another name and phone number, and then a few sentences in what looked unmistakably like a young person’s handwriting. Randy pieced together that the directions were from St. Marys, West Virginia to Jackson, Ohio, and that the name and phone number must have been Jesse’s great aunt. But the sentences were obviously what Jesse had meant. Specifically, the third one.

“Don’t tell her about the special things under the house.”