She showed up at his condo with coffee and a half dozen chocolate glazed, only to have a surprised young man in a t-shirt and pajama bottoms answer Tony’s door.
“Hi,” she said, non-plussed. “I’m here to see Tony. Are you his nephew or something?”
“No, I’m his tenant,” the guy answered with a big, yawning stretch. “Moved in about a week ago.”
Lacey frowned. “But where’s Tony then?”
The guy shrugged. “No idea. I met him a couple of times, but now he’s using a management company to run the place, and that’s who I’m paying rent to.”
Lacey shook her head, both disappointed and confused. “Well, I guess you can have these then.”
She handed him the coffee and donuts, and the guy’s tired face lit up. “Coffee and donuts?” He took a sip of the coffee. “Sweet! Thanks!”
“You’re welcome,” she said, and turned to go, still wondering why Tony would move without telling her and what he had done with the money she’d given him for her and Sparkle’s new identities.
But then the guy called out behind her, “Hey, you’re not Lacey are you?”
She turned back around. “Yes, I’m Lacey.”
“Oh, sorry. Tony said this girl name Lacey from his old strip club might stop by, and he left a letter for you. But I thought you’d look like, you know, a stripper. No offense.”
“None taken,” she said.
“Hold on.” He crammed a donut in his mouth before disappearing back into the apartment.
A few minutes later she was sitting on the stoop of Tony’s old building reading the letter he had left behind. She had to squint hard at his chicken scratch writing to decipher it.
Sorry, kid. I know it’s not nice to disappear like I did, but I never been a goodbye kind of guy and I didn’t want it to get too touchy-feely. I left the materials we was talking about and some extra money for you and Sparkle in the box. Once I figure out where I’m going to be staying, I’ll try to send you a postcard or something.
Your friend,
Tony
It was a simple letter, but Lacey found herself raising her hand to her mouth and crying after she read it. She had just lost the only other man on earth she cared about and she hadn’t even known he’d left the city.
Thoughts of her real father, the other man she had lost, filled her head on the El ride home. She could still see him now, kissing her and his granddaughter, who Lacey had originally named Darla, goodbye before they left for her first under-the-table job as a daycare worker in West Philadelphia.
She should have returned home around six that evening. But just as she was about to unlock the apartment door—Darla balanced carefully on one hip—she remembered she’d left some important documents in the car…documents she was supposed to return to Lacey Winters, the retail clerk who lived across the hall with her two-year-old daughter, Sparkle. Lacey, who had dreams of getting into college but didn’t want to bother with GED classes, had paid her a thousand dollars to take the GED test for her the previous day, giving her two forms of ID to pull the fraud off.
She’d taken the money and the test, though she’d known her father wouldn’t approve. A thousand dollars was a lot of money and since they were both working under the table—he as a short order cook, for a fraction of what he used to make owning his own restaurant—she felt bringing in extra cash was the least she could do.
She decided to carry Darla down with her to grab the paperwork. It was easier to take her toddler back down the multiple flights of stairs than it was to open the apartment door and face her father. He was a smart man and if she told him she’d left something in the car, he’d certainly have questions—questions she preferred to avoid.
At the last minute, she decided to go out the side door to the parking lot in order to throw away an empty raisin box Darla had been nibbling from. This decision would ultimately save both their lives. She was tossing the carton into the dumpster when she both felt and heard the explosion.
Later, Philadelphia newspapers would declare the explosion that took several lives in their death trap of a tenement building “accidental.” They’d insinuate that the John Doe who owned the faulty stove might, like many people living in the building, have been hooked on crack and lit up without realizing his stove had a leak in it.
But Lacey knew instantly she’d been the intended victim. Though she and her father had taken great pains to stay hidden in North Philly, somehow Darla’s grandfather, Hector Mendez Sr., had found them.
Maybe someone recognized her on the street. Fairhill, where they lived, wasn’t the best neighborhood and had a huge Hispanic population. Hector Mendez had probably spread the word he was looking for her beyond New Jersey. But in the end, it didn’t really matter how he found out, only that he did. She had learned her lesson.
Lacey would never trust anyone again with real information about her past. From then on, her main mission in life became doing whatever it took to keep her daughter and herself safe and alive. Even if whatever meant getting on a bus to Chicago and using the ID that belonged to a woman who had died because of her. She got as far away from the East Coast as she could on the limited funds she had eventually landing under-the-table work at a rundown diner.
However, less than a year after their arrival in Chicago, the newly re-dubbed Sparkle started setting off red flags at her daycare and was eventually diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. Lacey knew she’d need more money than her job waiting tables could provide to get Sparkle the services she needed. But she was too scared to use a dead women’s ID to try to finish her degree, so Lacey spent whatever time wasn’t taken up by Sparkle and her job at the library, relearning all the accounting basics she’d been taught before being forced to run for her life. She hoped she might prove to her current boss that he should let her take over the books.
Unfortunately, the cook/owner of the diner was a penny-pinching pig. Not only did he turn down her offer, saying he could handle his books himself, but he also fired her for merely suggesting he might need someone to cook his books so the IRS didn’t get suspicious that he was the only one on the official payroll at his restaurant.
Then she’d met Tony at the library.
They might never have talked, except he was an avid reader and the one who came upon her quietly crying at one of the library kiosks in her waitress uniform.
“What’s the matter, kid?” he’d asked. “You’re too young to be crying all over your homework.”