I feared his final breaths would be wasted on me, handed my file over to his great-granddaughter to help me select frames. The whole time this girl stared at my face like she knew me, except she didn’t. I’m not much for self-assessment, but for whatever reason this gal was taken with me. And as I perused the wall of frames all I really wanted was her help in finding something suitable. Can’t explain why, but not many people in our household or crew ever wore glasses; I had no starting point. The only two guys who did were in their eighties; one had frames with lenses the thickness of petri dishes, the other had frames with an opening for one big lens and inside was the windshield of a mid-seventies Chevelle. On the other hand, my sous-chef wore glasses, blue and bold and providing a welcome distraction from the plague of acne his face had once fought and lost.
So, the great-granddaughter, eyes still stuck on my face, reached up and pulled down a set and handed the lensless frames to me. I studied them—as trendy as my restaurant and as expensive as its repairs—and as I held them in my hand, they were so light, so delicate that all I could think was, These are gonna break in less than a week. I slowly put them to my face, felt as odd wearing them as if I’d slipped on a dress.
“Oh, yeah,” great-granddaughter said.
I studied myself in the mirror, glanced at her sideways.
Then she smiled and laughed a little. “Oh, yeah.”
I returned to the restaurant, wobbling a bit from my newly sharpened vision, amazed at how far away I could read things; apparently, my sight had been on its way out for some time. And as I walked in the back door of the restaurant, Peter was coming out. We stopped a few feet apart from each other, hands in our pockets.
Peter stared at me for three seconds. “Seriously?”
I shrugged, he walked past.
But for the first time in my life—started in culinary school, really—I started being around people unlike myself, unlike my family, for extended periods of time. Once the restaurant turned into a full-time job, the people involved in its operation and success became full-time acquaintances, people of a (non-mob) culture who brought something to the table, no matter how bland or understated, that rubbed off on me. The changes were subtle, things as unnoticeable as wearing a different kind of pullover—“You look different, Johnny”—to a marginally different haircut to those glasses; I knew there was a small audience that would accept these changes. No one on either side could single out what the difference was, and rightfully so, no one really cared, either. The point is the change was there.
Two worlds, on a slow path toward collision.
I found Melody in Kentucky when I was twenty-four years old. I found her there again when I was twenty-five—twice—with the visits spaced apart by the distance between each of my headaches, the same point in every cycle of making sure she was all right and making sure she was still all right. And as always, each and every trip fell under the guise of knocking Melody off. I might’ve even tried to spy on her more than I did, except my excuses for either not finding her or not being able to take her out became flimsier with each return home.
On my fourth trip to Lawrenceburg, Kentucky—I was now twenty-six years old, she was twenty-two—Melody disappeared. I waited for two days, the greatest length of time I could leave Sylvia alone, but her car never moved. More alarming was the appearance that it hadn’t moved in a long time. Dead leaves and tiny branches were strewn across the roof, trunk, and hood, debris that would have blown away from regular driving. The front passenger tire had gone partially flat and there were stains on the bottom quarter of each tire where rainwater had washed away the grime from the wheels—wheels that had not turned in a great while.
Having originally planned on returning home by Friday evening, I waited out that second night, went to the Lawrenceburg post office as soon as it opened on Saturday morning, carried in an empty envelope with Melody’s—Shelly Jones’s—name and address scribbled on it in handwriting purposely written to appear unlike my own.
I handed it to a middle-aged postal clerk and gave him my story:
“Hope you can help me. Got a letter I’m trying to