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“Okay, I guess.”
I give her directions. Hang up. Raoul’s loves the police. Without us they’d have no business before noon. Their coffee sucks so I hope Darla Boothe hasn’t pinned all her hopes and dreams on the Joe I offered. But their chorizo really is the best. I’m hungry. And, I can drink bad coffee.
We’ve been in Raoul’s now for a half hour at least and Darla Boothe smokes.
The snow has driven construction workers inside here from a site across the street. They’ll spend the day eating hash and eggs and smoking cigarettes, watching the crummy TVs tuned to the local news and making fun of the female anchor who is twenty years past her face-for-TV.
“I hate to trouble you but I just smoked my last cigarette,” Darla says, eyeballing my smokes.
“You’re welcome to share mine,” I say, nudging the soft pack across to her. “Beware though. They’re heavy.”
“I’ve never heard of these.” She examines the pack, taps one out. “Rum Coast cigarettes, huh? Do you buy them online or at an Indian Reservation or something?”
“South of the river. Any convenience store with bars on the windows and the clerk inside a bulletproof box will have them.”
Rum Coast is my brand of coffin nail. For ditch weed tobacco, they’re stout. Darla’s first inhale, she hacks as if that one drag gave her cancer. I can see the look on her face as she contemplates trying it again, but her eyes say that one more drag and she’ll be choking back vomit. She crushes it out.
“Sorry for the waste,” she says, her voice a swirling mixture of rasp, worry and a gentle smoothness that must have been erotic if I heard it lying next to her back in her prime.
“You’re not the first to reject my brand. No worries,” I say, enjoying my smoke. “So, this is Delilah?”
Darla brought a shoebox full of photographs. Each picture tethered to the next by the presence of Delilah Boothe. They’re all jewels on a necklace that is the timeline of a little girl’s growth into adulthood. I flip through the pictures and Delilah Boothe becomes more human than search object.
“This is my little girl,” Darla says, sipping coffee. “She was ten in this one; that was the first year I planted Foxglove in the front yard.”
She taps her finger on a picture of a dark-haired girl looking bold on a pink bicycle. Where the drive meets the walk to the front door is a small patch of white Foxglove, a flower that sends a long, thin stem upwards adorned with rows of bell-shaped and freckled flowers.
They are also rather poisonous.
“Where have you already checked?” I ask, take a bite of my chorizo burrito. Lazily roll ash off my smoke.
Darla thinks. Gears turn behind her eyes, rust in their cogs from all her tears. She exhales and I can hear the flutter in her lungs born from being emotionally drained.
“I think if she wanted to come home she would have.”
“Excuse me?”
“I know Elam cares for her; he’s the only father she ever had. But, Delilah follows her heart everywhere, even to places she damn well knows she shouldn’t go. If her heart isn’t aiming back here, she won’t come.”
“Ma’am, you’ve spoken with old boyfriends, friends from work, school, maybe checked her old places of employment—”
“Delilah’s heart is guided by a wayward compass,” Darla says. “For a time I dated a man who loved to sail. He used to say something about deviation with compasses. I get it all confused now but he said it interfered with how a compass could read north. Delilah’s heart is guided by a compass that cannot read north.”
This is how people answer questions that they do not want to answer.
“Elam said after high school Delilah went off on some crazy adventures before she came back around and went to college.” Darla’s eyes slowly close and she nods. She does not re-open them. “Is there a possibility she’s off on another adventure?”
“I guess,” she says under her breath, closing her eyes for a long while. She opens them suddenly and shakes her head as if she were asleep and startled awake.
This is going poorly.
Redirect. I drop a fingertip on a photograph and slide it out from the bunch. “Tell me about this one.”
Darla focuses on the photo, reads it with her memory. Smiles. “Christmas,” she says. “1992, I think.”
The picture is of Darla and her two daughters, all wearing matching Santa sweaters that screamed early ’90s. Even Darla’s hair was still feathered with ridiculous bangs; the ’80s fashion mistakes hadn’t had enough time to bleed away before this picture immortalized them.
“Yes. 1992. That was the year we had these sweaters,” she says, a small bit of life seeping back into her. “I wanted it to be a tradition but this was the only year we wore them.” She huffed a dry laugh. “Fashion. What a fickle bitch it is.”
