Goodbye to the Man Who Betrayed Us novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: Bail

Grace moves Lily into her mother's apartment over the closed lunch counter and pays the tow driver's bail with Daniel's black card; he walks out with a message from her mother.

My hand closed on the suitcase handle so hard the plastic creaked.

Vivian smiled under the bandages.

She wanted me to hit her.

She wanted me to hit her at the top of a staircase, with Daniel's lawyer twenty feet away.

I bent down until my mouth was beside her ear.

"Then she saw you," I said. "And so will everybody else."

I carried the bag past her without touching her.

Behind me, I heard her start to cry, loud and soft at the same time.

Daniel's feet came pounding up from the dining room.

I didn't turn around.

We slept in a hotel by the airport that night, Lily curled into my side with the whale.

On Tuesday morning I drove us across the Bay Bridge.

My mother's building sat on San Pablo Avenue, a two-story box painted the yellow of a school bus.

The lunch counter took up the ground floor.

TWELVE STOOLS, the sign said, hand-lettered in red.

The steel gate was down. A funeral notice was still taped to it.

Her apartment was upstairs, up a narrow flight from the side door.

I unlocked it with the key she'd given me at sixteen.

It smelled like her.

Linguiça, Pine-Sol, onions she'd fried on Friday for the church supper.

I set the bags down and couldn't move for a minute.

Lily pulled on my sleeve.

"Mama. Is this Grandma's?"

"This is Grandma's."

"Then I need to count it."

She let go of me and put one hand on the wall.

"One, two, three, four." Her sneakers squeaked on the linoleum. "Something cold."

"That's the refrigerator."

"Five, six. Something soft."

"Her chair."

She patted it all over, the arms, the cushion, the crocheted thing on the back.

Then she climbed into it and sat there with her feet sticking out.

"It's her chair," she said, like I'd argued.

"I know, baby."

"Okay. Now the next room."

She counted the hallway, the bathroom, the bedroom with the cedar chest.

By lunch she could get from Grandma's chair to the toilet without touching a single wall.

I watched her do it three times.

Then I left her with the woman from the laundromat next door, who'd come up crying with a pound cake.

The bail office was four blocks down, between a nail salon and a check-cashing window.

The man behind the desk read Rafael Ortega's name off his screen and whistled.

"Five hundred thousand. Your bond premium's ten percent. Fifty grand, ma'am, and it's not coming back."

"I know how it works."

I took Daniel's black card out of my wallet and laid it on the counter.

He looked at the name on the card.

Then he looked at me.

"Chen," he said. "Like the family that's on the news about this?"

"Like that."

"You're paying bail for the man who's charged with killing your..."

"Run the card."

He ran it.

It went through.

I signed where he pointed and didn't read a word of it.

Every line I signed felt like pulling a nail out of a board.

The jail was downtown, a tan building with no windows on the street side.

I waited on a bench in a long hall with a mother and two girlfriends and somebody's grandpa.

Nobody talked.

At four-fifteen a steel door buzzed.

He came out carrying a paper bag with his things in it.

He was bigger than he'd looked on the TV.

He had to turn his shoulders a little to come through the door.

He still had the short beard, the shaved head.

His navy work jacket was gone.

The police had kept it, I realized.

My mother's blood had been on it.

He stopped when he saw me.

He'd seen me exactly once, for less than a minute, in the worst hour of my life.

He knew me anyway.

"Mrs. Chen."

"Grace."

"Grace."

He looked at the paper bag in his hand, then back at me.

"They said a Chen paid my bail. I figured it was a trick."

"It's his money," I said. "Not his idea."

The corner of his mouth went up, then stopped.

"I'm sorry about your mama. I didn't get to say that at the hospital. They took me out of there before you came back."

"You held her on the road."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You rode with her."

"She wouldn't let go of my hand."

My throat closed up.

I nodded because I couldn't do anything else.

He shifted the paper bag to his other hand.

"I've been sitting in there since yesterday with one thing in my head," he said. "Your mama gave me two things to tell you."

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