Dead to Me by Mary McCoy

I met her. She hired me to check up on you, maybe a year or so ago. She wanted to make sure you were doing okay, that you seemed happy.”
    “You followed me?”
    “I didn’t peep through your window or anything. I just told her that you went to school, caught a movie now and again. You should know. It’s your life.”
    The way he said it, it didn’t sound like much to write home about.
    “The funny thing is, I could have been anyone. She picked my name at random out of the phone book. I could have been out sick with the flu that day. Her finger could have landed somewhere
else on the page. But it didn’t. And now here we are.”
    “Are you sorry?”
    “That’s the other funny thing,” he said. “I’m not.”
    It was a strange thing to say, yet somehow I knew what he meant.
    “Annie’s special.”
    Jerry nodded. “She is.”
    We sat there by Annie’s bed, neither one of us saying a word. After a long moment, Jerry cleared his throat and met my eyes.
    “I’m sorry I said you didn’t know your sister anymore,” he said. “It wasn’t very nice, and it’s not true.”
    “It’s okay,” I said, and I meant it. I was halfway to believing it myself.
    “People change, but the thing is, they don’t. Not all the way through.”
    He looked at her for a moment more, then stood up, put on his hat, and went to the door. I thought he was about to leave without saying good-bye, but then he froze in the doorway and turned
around to face me, a strange expression on his face.
    “Tell me again how you wound up at the Stratford Arms,” he said.
    I explained breaking into my father’s office, finding the postcard, and how it had led me to Ruth’s bungalow.
    When I’d finished, he let out a sigh, then motioned for me to follow him.
    “Come on,” he said. “I’ll pull the car around.”
    I cocked my head to the side, not sure I’d heard him correctly.
    “You want me to come with you?”
    He nodded, looking like he was already thinking better of it.
    “There might be something I could use your help with after all, Alice.”

J erry’s car was a two-seater Plymouth, the kind traveling salesmen favored because it had a big trunk for hauling vacuum cleaners and sets of
encyclopedias. In any case, it was a good car for people who traveled alone and carried a lot of baggage with them.
    “Get in,” he said.
    We crossed the river, and downtown Los Angeles rose up from the horizon like some mountain kingdom blanketed in clouds and mist. As we got closer, it wasn’t half so magical. The buildings
that peeked through the smog were squat and derelict with fire escapes bolted on the front, and ads for chewing tobacco painted on the sides. When we turned onto Main Street, the first thing I saw
was a man in a stained undershirt holding up his pants with one hand and making violent gestures with the other. On the opposite corner, I spotted the target of his abuse, a white-haired man who
was trying to sweep the sidewalk in front of a small grocery. He looked so frail and hunched that it would have been a long job, even if the gutters had not been overflowing with cigarette butts,
bottles, and other, much worse things.
    Jerry parked the Plymouth in front of the store and nodded to him.
    “Hi, Otto.” He pointed to the man in the stained undershirt, now reeling across the street with malevolent but unsteady purpose. “This guy giving you a hard time?”
    Otto shrugged. “He knows I don’t sell bottles on credit. Never keeps him from asking, though.”
    “Somebody should tell him to ask nicer,” Jerry said.
    We positioned ourselves on either side of the old man and stared down the man in the stained undershirt. He sized us up and decided we didn’t look like much of a threat.
    “Sell me a drink, or I’ll break your face.”
    Jerry put a nickel in the drunk’s hand and folded his fingers around it. “Get yourself a cup of coffee, fella. Later, if you still feel like it, you can come back and break this old