Esther glanced down at the lino. ‘Yes.’
‘Well, some pretty big trouble found me this time. You’re really better off not knowing the whys and wherefores but I promise I won’t stay a second longer than I need to. It’s just so I can regroup, you know?’ I opened my eyes as wide as I could in the hopes of looking persuasive.
Esther pressed her lips together and gazed into my eyes.
God damn it.
So this was my comeuppance for what I’d done to her. If I’d been on the level the whole time we were in Atlantic City, she wouldn’t think twice about taking me in. But I hadn’t been. I’d broken her trust early on and though I’d tried really hard, I was never sure if I’d rebuilt it before she left for New York.
‘Esther?’ Jack nudged the side of her face with his nose and murmured, only just loud enough for me to hear, ‘You OK? It’s fine if your friend wants to stay at the flat. It may be technically mine but I think of it as ours, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
‘No,’ she said.
‘No?’ I repeated, my insides hollowing out.
‘Esther?’ said Jack. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘Nothing, I just…’ She looked at me out the corner of her eye. It was the same uncertain look she’d given me that rotten night back at the casino when she’d caught me red-handed. Going through her things. Without her permission. ‘I’m sorry, Bonnie, you can’t stay with us.’
‘Esther, please.’ I put a hand on her arm. ‘I’m begging you, I’ve got nowhere else to go, everyone else I know is in Atlantic City and I really just need somewhere to put my head down for a few days and figure out what I’m going to do. Some place safe. You think I’d ask you for a favour unless I was desperate? Haven’t you ever been desperate in your life?’
Esther took in a deep breath. Her eyes filled with tears and she closed them, battling with something in her mind. Probably the easiest way of telling me she couldn’t take me in, no matter how desperate I was. She opened her eyes again, she was about to speak, but a second later her stare moved past me. Her jaw dropped wide and her eyes narrowed. Jack looked in the same direction, and his expression also changed. His brow weighed heavy with a frown.
‘No way,’ said Angela, shaking her head.
‘What, what is it?’ I asked, turning. Jimmy stood just inside the doorway in his sheepskin jacket and a pair of jeans. His right cheek was still a little puffy from where I’d socked him a good one outside the subway station last night and his hair was damp from the snow that had been drifting down for the best part of the day. He unwound a scarf striped green and black from around his neck and began walking towards the counter. I could tell by the look on his face he’d noticed the others gawping at him but he fixed his eyes on me until he reached where I was sitting.
‘Now then, honey, here’s your grilled chee— Uh-oh.’ Mona had reappeared from the kitchen. The air in the room thinned out, making it hard to breathe all of a sudden. Jimmy Boyle wasn’t popular in these parts – I’d known that, but I hadn’t quite expected this reaction. I looked at him, wondering what he’d done to these people and why the hell he’d come back here when Mona had made it pretty clear just yesterday he wasn’t all that welcome.
‘What’s he doing here?’ Jack growled out the question I’d been pondering. I jumped in surprise at the shift in his voice. When he had spoken before, his register had been nothing short of mellow.
‘Long as I’m standing right here you can address any questions to me direct,’ said Jimmy, his voice of equal roughness to Jack’s. ‘I won’t be here long, just came to return this.’ Jimmy held up my brown leather notebook, which I used for writing down my song lyrics.
‘Oh,’ I said, frowning. ‘I’m sorry, I was in such a rush this morning because I overslept. Probably through sheer exhaustion. I must not have picked it up or maybe I dropped it, I don’t know, but thank you so much for bringing it back to me. It…’ I trailed off. Jimmy had a smug look on his face and on seeing it I snatched the book out of his hands. ‘You didn’t… read this, did you?’
The self-satisfied leer on Jimmy’s face melted away and he clenched his jaw.
‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ he said. ‘If that’s the thanks I get for coming out of my way after a long day at the office, next time I won’t bother.’
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean… It’s just, it’s very private.’ I’d written one or two half-baked lines down this morning about the kiss I’d shared with Jimmy and the thought that he might have read them was mortifying.
‘Hold on a minute, you two know each other?’ Esther asked, looking between me and Jimmy.
That felt like a bit of a complicated question to answer after what’d happened the night before. Just for an instant, I once more felt Jimmy’s arms tight around mine and the force of our lips pressed together.
Pull it together, Bonnie, this is not the time.
‘We met here,’ I said, and then did what I always did when I got nervous. I started to jabber on like a total lamebrain. ‘Late last night I was lookin’ for you but you weren’t here and I had nowhere else to go because I spent my money on the Greyhound from Philly and somehow Jimmy knew I didn’t have no place to go and he let me stay at his for the night so I wouldn’t be shut out in the cold.’
‘Weren’t you on shift last night?’ Esther turned on Mona. Esther’s skin was usually ghostly white but it had reddened and I could see she was working herself up by the way she was breathing, all deep and huffy.
‘Now, honey, come on. You know it’s our job to serve customers, even him.’ Mona put a hand on her hip.
‘Why’d you even come here in the first place Boyle? You know you’re not wanted,’ Esther said, turning back to Jimmy.
‘Well,’ Jimmy said, scratching his left temple. ‘I’d read in Jessie Marble’s showbiz column a week back that Jack Faber and his new girlfriend were spending the holidays in England, so I reckoned it wouldn’t do no harm.’
‘Fact is, buddy, you caused my waitresses a whole lotta grief last summer,’ Bernie chipped in. ‘And when the waitresses suffer, I suffer. It’s inevitable. And I don’t like sufferin’. I’ve never had to outright bar a customer from the Starlight Diner, but if you’re here to make more trouble you can beat it.’
‘Come on,’ said Jimmy. ‘You ain’t trying to say I’m to blame for everything that happened last summer?’ He looked from Esther to Jack, to Angela, to Ryan and rested his eyes on Mona.
‘You didn’t help. Like when you physically assaulted me on our first meeting and then wrote several poisonous articles about me,’ said Esther.
‘Or reunited me with my murderous ex live on TV,’ said Jack.
‘Or phoned me saying you were Esther’s shrink to manipulate me into divulging things I otherwise wouldn’t have divulged,’ Ryan said.
‘You didn’t do anything to me outright. But hurting three of the people I care about is reason enough for me to take against you,’ Angela finished.
I turned to Jimmy and stared at him, shaking my head. He looked from Angela to me and started at the look on my face. Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t in a position to judge anybody, but I didn’t walk around like I was either. Jimmy, however, had been nothing short of snide about Jack and Esther. If everything Esther and her friends said was true, why did he feel entitled to be cruel about them?
‘You didn’t really do all those things, did you, Jimmy?’ I asked, feeling real hot all of a sudden. He opened his mouth to say something, before closing it again. There was an ache in his eyes I couldn’t make sense