Page 81 of Price of Angels

Bell Bar was dead. A handful of loyal barflies – single older men with nothing waiting on them at home – were spending the afternoon on stools, staring at the TV and popping peanuts one after the next between slugs of Scotch. But the main floor was empty. The girls hadn’t bothered to take down most of the chairs at the low round dining tables. Valerie and Jess sat at a booth, playing Go Fish.

Holly was in Michael’s usual booth, rolling up silverware in napkins, one eye on the newscast up in the front corner TV, one eye on the snow flurries that were beginning to accumulate in a thin powder-sugar dusting on the sidewalk. Bing Crosby was singing “White Christmas” softly over the sound system.

White Christmas, she thought, adding the movie to her mental queue of films to see. She didn’t figure Michael had that one in his collection. Just the thought brought a smile to her lips, pattered like wings in her chest. Everything was different now. Maybe not forever, maybe for just a few days, but a few days was more than she’d ever hoped for. She wouldn’t think about the future tonight, only about the two of them, and this stolen time, this city lit up for the holiday, and the perfect snow falling against memory and reason, blanketing all that wasn’t sacred.

Dimly, she became aware of Val and Jess’s conversation, the fast vicious snatches of it that she could overhear.

“…don’t know why she wasn’t fired,” Jess was saying. “I mean, you get somebody murdered, you shouldn’t get to keep your job, you know?”

“Ugh, I know,” Val said. “And it’s like she doesn’t even feel bad about it. She’s a fucking robot.”

“And Carly…” A catch of real pain in Jess’s voice, as she remembered her friend. “I told Carly that she was weird, but she tried to be nice to her anyway. And look what happened!”

Holly closed her eyes as the breath left her lungs. Yes, look at what had happened. Look at what her family had done to an innocent woman, whose loved ones would not be celebrating tonight, still clenched tight by grief.

“Hey.”

She hadn’t seen Michael come in, hadn’t even felt the cold draft of air rushing through the door, but he now stood beside her, brows drawn, mouth a harsh line. The sight of him was as comforting as it was devastating.I don’t deserve you, she thought.I don’t deserve for anyone to care, not after what I’ve caused.

“You alright?” he asked, settling into the booth across from her. There was snow in his hair, fast melting, the white flecks becoming translucent. Flakes clung to his shoulders, collected in the leather seams of his cut.

She managed a thin smile. “I’m fine.”

He regarded her another second, not believing her, but finally glanced away, face harsh. “That goddamn store…the whole city of Knoxville was in there, buying cranberry sauce or whatever the fuck.”

Her smile twitch, touched with true warmth. “So it was bad, huh?”

“They were out of whole turkeys,” he grumbled. “I had to get a chicken instead.”

“That works great.”

He murmured an unhappy response.

“Are you angry with me?” she asked. “Or just grumpy?”

He gave her a long, flat stare. “What do you think?” And then, before she could answer, “When are they gonna let you leave tonight?”

“Soon, I’m thinking.” She glanced around his shoulder, toward the window. The street was alive with the swirl of snow. “Very soon.”

Ava’s first memory of her grandmother: warm yellow sweater, creamy rope of pearls, Denise’s hip against Ava’s small stomach as she was toted around the yard. Encompassing sweetness of perfume. The sun dancing in the pines, shivering shadows on the grass. Easter, and all its delicate pastels reflected in Denise’s garden, lying in the lee of the sprawling cream ranch house. Denise’s honey-colored hair, the same as Maggie’s, tickling Ava’s cheeks as their heads rested close together.

“Lily,” Ava said with a delighted laugh, pointing at the purple flowers on the tall stalks beside the garden bench.

“No, darling, those are irises,” Denise said, and her lips were wet with lipstick as she kissed Ava’s cheek.

It was a tender, loving memory, a place in time in which Ava had been so sure of her grandmother’s love of her. That had been before Ava understood the tension between the two generations of her family. Before she’d been told that her father was less than human. Before Denise saw the biker blood coming to the surface in Ava, and gave voice to her bitter disappointment.

Now, so many years after that foundation memory, Ava stood opposite her grandmother and laced her fingers through her husband’s, the dry cool skin of his palm a comfort against her own clammy hand.

Denise, a beauty queen who’d never lost her commitment, had always been slender, and had thinned further as she aged, her well-proportioned frame almost bony at this point. Today she wore a long-sleeved red dress, dark tights, dark pumps, her ever-present pearls. Her face was a window to Maggie’s future, a prediction of what she’d look like twenty-six years from now. She’d allowed her hair to gray naturally, and wore it in a sophisticated bob. She was the picture of modern Southern elegance.

And her hazel eyes were trained on Ava’s hand, where it clutched at Mercy’s.

“Grammie,” Ava said with a deep breath, “you remember Mercy. You met him a long time ago.”

Denise swallowed, the movement of her throat making the pearls around her neck leap. She already knew, and she already hated it. “I can’t possibly keep up with all theDogsin your life, Ava.”

“You remember him,” Ava pressed. Quietly: “I know you do. And Grammie, I need you to not freak out when I tell you this.”

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