The First Time I Died by Jo Macgregor

Author:Jo Macgregor [Macgregor, Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780639931722
Published: 2018-10-06T16:00:00+00:00

27

NOW

Wednesday December 20, 2017

“Doc Armstrong is dying?” I asked, shocked.

“Cirrhosis of the liver, as I heard it,” Hugo said.

“Jeez, you leave a town for a decade and everyone gets ten years older and sicker,” I muttered.

“Not me, I’m healthy. Want to know my secret?”

“Sure.”

“I eat a garlic sandwich for breakfast every morning.”

That explained the awful odor.

“It keeps the bugs away,” he said.

Customers too, I’d bet.

“You said Blunt was a good-for-nothing. Drugs?” I asked.

“You betcha. If it ain’t the liquor that’s been the death of Doc Armstrong, then it’s his boy, because that one never could clean up his act, and he tries to take some of our youngsters down his path, from what I hear. The official story is he does construction work out of town from time to time in Bangor and Portland and such, but everyone knows it’s the boy going into rehab out of state. He comes back looking shiny pink and clean, and flies right for a month or six, then he starts up again. That kind of treatment costs a family a wheelbarrow of money and a whale of tears.”

“Poor Jessica.”

“Oh, yah. But now that’s a girl as done well for herself, even if she did—”

The bell on the shop door interrupted, and Hugo looked over my shoulder, nodding.

“Hi, hi, Lyle, come in. I’ll just go fetch your lunch,” Hugo said, and disappeared to the back of the store.

The man who walked up near to where I stood at the counter moved so slowly and carefully that his steps made no sound. He was tall and had dark eyes, but I could make out little else about his appearance because he was wrapped in sweaters, a coat, two scarves, mittens and an ice-frosted khaki balaclava. A stuffed backpack was slung over one shoulder, and a mean-looking marmalade cat rested in his arms. I nodded a greeting, and the wool-swathed head nodded back. So this was Lyle.

He gently placed the cat on the floor, where it sat beside his feet, yellow eyes fixed on me. No, not quite on me — its gaze appeared to be focused to the left of me. I glanced over my shoulder to see what it was staring at and saw nothing. Lyle pulled off his mittens to reveal hands clad in fingerless gloves. He rubbed the fingertips, with their dirty, overgrown nails, over his lips.

“Your eyes are different,” he said in a pitch so rough and deep, it was more vibration than voice. “Which one is real?”

“Both of them.”

“I don’t know which one to focus on.”

I lifted my hands in a can’t-help-you-with-that-problem kind of shrug.

“And I don’t know you,” he said. “You’re a stranger.”

Not as strange as you, buddy.

“I grew up here. But I left many years ago,” I said, wondering why I was telling him anything.

“Now you’re back.”

They were innocent words, but something about his gruff tone and the way the cat was tilting its head and squinting off to the empty side of me, was unnerving.

“I’ll be going home soon,” I said.

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