“I hate funerals. I came to this city for one, did you know that?”
Jerome does, but says nothing. Just lets her finish.
“My aunt died. She was Olivia Trelawney’s mother. That’s where I met Bill, at that funeral. I ran out of that one, too. I was sitting behind the funeral parlor, smoking a cigarette, feeling terrible, and that’s where he found me. Do you understand?” At last she looks up at him. “He found me.”
“I get it, Holly. I do.”
“He opened a door for me. One into the world. He gave me something to do that made a difference.”
“Same here.”
She wipes her eyes almost angrily. “This is just so fracking poopy.”
“Got that right, but he wouldn’t want you to go backward. That’s the last thing he’d want.”
“I won’t,” she says. “You know he left me the company, right? The insurance money and everything else went to Allie, but the company is mine. I can’t run it by myself, so I asked Pete if he’d like to work for me. Just part-time.”
“And he said . . . ?”
“He said yes, because retirement sucked already. It should be okay. I’ll run down the skippers and deadbeats on my computer, and he’ll go out and get them. Or serve the subpoenas, if that’s the job. But it won’t be like it was. Working for Bill . . . working with Bill . . . those were the happiest days of my life.” She thinks that over. “I guess the only happy days of my life. I felt . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Valued?” Jerome suggests.
“Yes! Valued.”
“You should have felt that way,” Jerome says, “because you were very valuable. And still are.”
She gives the plant a final critical look, dusts dirt from her hands and the knees of her pants, and sits down next to him. “He was brave, wasn’t he? At the end, I mean.”
“Yes.”
“Yeah.” She smiles a little. “That’s what Bill would have said—not yes, but yeah.”
“Yeah,” he agrees.
“Jerome? Would you put your arm around me?”
He does.
“The first time I met you—when we found the stealth program Brady loaded into my cousin Olivia’s computer—I was afraid of you.”
“I know,” Jerome says.
“Not because you were black—”
“Black is whack,” Jerome says, smiling. “I think we agreed on that much right from the jump.”
“—but because you were a stranger. You were from outside. I was scared of outside people and outside things. I still am, but not as much as I was then.”
“I know.”
“I loved him,” Holly says, looking at the chrysanthemum. It is a brilliant orange-red below the gray gravestone, which bears a simple message: KERMIT WILLIAM HODGES, and, below the dates, END OF WATCH. “I loved him so much.”
“Yeah,” Jerome says. “So did I.”
She looks up at him, her face timid and hopeful—beneath the graying bangs, it is almost the face of a child. “You’ll always be my friend, won’t you?”
“Always.” He squeezes her shoulders, which are heartbreakingly thin. During Hodges’s final two months, she lost ten pounds she couldn’t afford to lose. He knows his mother and Barbara are just waiting to feed her up. “Always, Holly.”
“I know,” she says.
“Then why did you ask?”
“Because it’s so good to hear you say it.”
End of Watch, Jerome thinks. He hates the sound of that, but it’s right. It’s right. And this is better than the funeral. Being here with Holly on this sunny late summer morning is much better.
“Jerome? I’m not smoking.”
“That’s good.”
They sit quiet for a little while, looking at the chrysanthemum burning its colors at the base of the headstone.
“Jerome?”
“What, Holly?”
“Would you like to go to a movie with me?”
“Yes,” he says, then corrects himself. “Yeah.”
“We’ll leave a seat empty between us. Just to put our popcorn in.”
“Okay.”
“Because I hate putting it on the floor where there are probably roaches and maybe even rats.”
“I hate it, too. What do you want to see?”
“Something that will make us laugh and laugh.”
“Works for me.”
He smiles at her. Holly smiles back. They leave Fairlawn and walk back out into the world together.
August 30, 2015
AUTHOR’S NOTE