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When all was said and done, it was hard to hate Lester. Molly got him in the back of the patrol car and the first five minutes were quiet. Then he started hiccuping and talking without spaces for breath, and it took a while for Molly to realize he was talking about his wife. It was all the condensed longing that had been trapped in his chest, every minute detail he had been torturing himself with since the murders. He talked about what she did in the morning when she woke up, how she wore her hair, the song she hummed in her nose when she cooked. Lester babbled, the words tripping over one another, like he was afraid he was going to forget it all. Pearl did Pilates. She'd hated peanut butter. When they were dating she'd do an impression of her mother chastising her for dating Lester, and he'd always found it funny. Blue Hawaii was her favorite movie. Oddly enough, she did not like Blue Hawaiis.
Molly watched him in the rearview mirror. It wasn't a play for sympathy. He didn't seem like he was throwing himself on her mercy, he had loved deeply and killed and regretted it.
In the last ten minutes before they pulled into the station, Lester only said one phrase, over and over again.
“I’m sorry.”
Of course by the time the whole mess was sorted out, Lester never went away. That Malvo fella left a hell of a tangled mess in his wake, something she suspected he was still laughing about. Lester had done some muddying of the waters on his own, though, and she doubted he'd be on speaking terms with his brother for a while.
Lester's face never changed during the whole trial. He was utterly beaten as a human being. When Molly had fitted the pieces together, she realized that was what had happened. Lester had finally beaten himself, let cruelty get the better of him.
Gus had been of as much help as he could be during the trial. At the end he waited for her on the threshold, seemed like he wanted to tell her something, but in the end he just awkwardly said goodbye and went back to Duluth.
And that, as they say, was that.
Life moved on, though for a while it had seemed it never would. Vern's loss ached less every day, holding his infant daughter acted as a balm. Ida was a dear. Even the boys seemed to lighten up around her. And the day she finally got a promotion, there were flowers on her desk. Mums. The card read 'to the best darn detective in all Minnesota.' She sat at her desk awhile, turning the card over and over contemplatively.
Lester's place was easy to find. She'd been there enough. Lester was out front fiddling with the weed whacker, dressed in a short-sleeved plaid shirt and canvas shorts. Minnesota summer was upon them by this point, and Molly had abandoned her more dignified winter wear for a sleeveless and some shorts that didn't make her self–conscious about her inner thighs.
Lester looked up when he heard her approach, and winced just a little. “Hi there M—Deputy Solverson.”
Molly smiled a little to put him at ease. “It's just...Molly if you please, Mister Nygaard.”
Lester watched her warily. He seemed smaller somehow. Retreating.
“Please call me Lester, then, Molly.”
His voice gave the impression of fear covering itself with joviality. It was an affect, an air he probably put on around his wife and Sam Hess as well. Molly didn't like that. She didn't want to be feared.
She nodded and squatted down to his level. “Whatcha workin' on, there?”
Lester remained stationary, wire cutters in one hand, squinting in the sun.
“...line's tangled.” he muttered.
“Oh shoot.” Molly laughed. “That's a pickle, isn't it?”
Lester hadn't moved. “Deputy Solverson, I gotta...I gotta ask what you want with me?”
Molly tried to appear flippant. “I just wanted to check up, is all. See how you're holdin' up.”
Lester looked at her. “I killed my wife.”
The air hung between them like a dead fish.
“I know,” Moll said, “I am the best darn detective in all Minnesota.”
Lester looked at the weed whacker, seeing but not seeing it. “I'm sorry.”
“For what?”
“The flowers. That was a mistake. I didn't want ya thinking...I don't want you to think I liked it, pulling one over on ya.” He resumed fiddling with the machine's insides.
“Of course not.” she did believe him about that.
“No I am,” he insisted, as if she had objected, “I'm sorry I just, I got to thinking I was so clever, that I could just wiggle my way out of it.”
And you did , was the unspoken truth between them. But Molly didn't say it because he really hadn't. Lester had escaped a loveless marriage to get trapped in his own head.
“That's quite a mess you've got there.” she indicated the machine's entrails with her chin. “Ain't it time to just cut your losses?”
“Oh ya.” Lester seemed to come back from a great distance, blinking away a half–formed thought. “That's what I'm aiming at, only, it's not going so well.”
“Oh,” and years of her father's DIY–teachings kicked in, “well, here, it looks like if you cut this section, that'll free up the rest of it right here.”
Lester went after the line with the nippers, but he closed them at the wrong angle and ended up gouging the plastic. He squinted down at the line.
“Son–of–a–gun.”
“Oh no, it's okay.” She was suddenly, oddly desperate for this to work out, for Lester to fix it. “Here, I got it.” She whipped out the pocketknife she'd been carrying since she was twelve.
Lester panicked. “Oh no– shucks– I can–”
“–it's all right Mr Nygaard, I’ll just–”
“,–nononono it's okay, lemme get it–”
“—there.” She severed the line with her little blade. The line sprang free and unwound itself a little. “You should be able to get it, no prob.”
Lester just sat there, blinking at the weed whacker.
“Thank you,” he said. He sounded surprised.
Molly laughed, suddenly aware of how sweaty her shoulders were, how her legs ached from crouching.
“It was nothin',” she said, “thank you for letting me meddle.”
Lester looked at her. No,” he whispered, “really. Thank you.”
Molly's flush had nothing to do with the heat.
“You're welcome,” she murmured.
Molly didn't jump into it right away. She knew how it was, small town, people talk. She stumbled over the wording too, though she managed not to sputter when she asked Lester if he wanted to grab a burger at her dad's place. Lester didn't answer at first and she was afraid he'd do something awful like hang up or cry or something, but then he said “okay” and all the blood rushed back to her head.
For the meeting she didn't want to dress down, but she didn't exactly know how to dress up in the first place. Her entire wardrobe revolved around “dress down,” except for some hopeful silky things balled up at the back of a drawer and funeral wear. She tittered at the thought of meeting Lester in funeral get–up, a nervous titter that made her grab the kitchen counter for support.
She decided on a short, kinda dressy shirt and practically lacquered her underarms with deodorant. Of course she was already sweating, and she didn't stop once she was at the diner. The little smirk her dad shot her didn't help. It was middle school all over again, shakes with Jerry who sat three seats over and didn't want to kiss because her dad would probably shoot him dead even though she reminded him that her dad wasn't a cop any more and anyway he wouldn't know if she didn't tell him.
Molly realized she was twisting her straw to death and eased up. She tried not to look up every time the bell dinged, tracing symbols in the spilled sugar on her table.
Something cleared their throat behind her. “Mol–Miss Solverson?”
Lester didn't know what to do with his hands, shaking the fingers, grasping them behind his back, making as if to put them in his pockets only to change his mind and pretend he was brushing himself off instead. The appearance of someone even more nervous than she was acted as a kind of balm. Molly got calmer in response, turned conciliatory. “Howdy! Pull up a seat, dad's got our burger's grilling! I hope you don't have that celiac's, all he's got left is wheat buns.”
Lester's smile was half terror. “I–I'm fine, I mean I don't think I have that, and I don't want to be any bother—”
“It's no bother,” Molly put her hand on his, “and even if it was, it wouldn't be, okay?”
Something weird and static seemed to pass through their hands. It hadn't hurt, so it wasn't an electric shock. It wasn't just her, either, Lester's face jumped and then locked down to conceal it.
“Burger'sll be ready soon,” she told him.
Lester sat down gingerly, like he was afraid the seat was going to fly out from beneath him. When he wasn't scheming, Molly found Lester was almost endearingly helpless. It was like he was trying to swim through the world and was surprised to find it wasn't filled with water. Molly sipped her iced tea for something to do. Her dad flashed four fingers over the counter at her and she nodded. Lester drummed his fingers and looked everywhere but her.
“Bet you haven't been out in a while,” she said, and realized in the middle of saying it that it was a very stupid thing to say.
All the warmth seemed to drain out of Lester. His fingers stilled, his arms dropped to rest with dead weight on the tabletop. He remained looking in the same direction he had before Molly spoke, some point above her head and to the left, too distant to be real.
“A while, yes.” he echoed. His voice was low in his throat.
Molly considered apologizing, but it felt like Lester had been apologized to too often.
“Right.” she said, “it hasn't been that long for me, that Gus Grimly fella—the one who pulled Malvo over in your car—we ate here a few times.”
Lester now looked at the table just above his right hand.
“It wasn't–it wasn't like a date-type thing if that's what you're thinkin', it was more of a work thing, only he brought his daughter—”
“Why're you doing this?” Lester asked, so softly she wasn't sure it was even words at first.
“S–sorry?”
Lester made eye contact for the first time. All the pathos had fallen from his face, it was weary now, and rugged in a way. The difference was striking. Lester pushed himself away from the table slightly, placed his palms on the edge, and leaned over to her.
“I'm sorry,” he said to her, “I'm sorry for lyin'. I'm sorry I got your boyfriend killed. I'm sorry I caused all this heartache. I'm sorry I killed my wife. You don't have to hold it over my head, okay? I won't go to bed happy ever again, if that helps.”
Molly's mouth opened and closed a few times.
“He wasn't my boyfriend,” she said.
Lester's eyebrows lifted slightly.
Molly drummed her fingers on the tabletop.
Lester sighed.
“M–Mister Nygaard,” she said, “if it helps, I don't think you're a bad fella. Your moral compass might need some tweaking, but you...I mean it was that Malvo fella, wasn't it? He was like a whatchamacallit—white-walker. Everywhere he put his feet, the grass died.”
Lester wet his lips.
“Actually,” he said, “the thing I figured out about Lorne is this: he can't make you do what's not already in you. Hess? I hated Hess. But I couldn't stand up to him. I hated my wife too. I loved her, but I hated her. Does that make any sense? She was easier than–than Sam–” his voice broke.
Her father saved them by bringing the burgers. “Breakfast of champions,” he said, and dropped Molly a wink. Lester took the three seconds she wasn't looking at him to recover, and had a faux-interested look plastered on his face.
“Looks good,” he said.
Molly smiled weakly and nodded.
It took ten visits before Lester stopped jumping at her hello. Twenty before he would smile without seeming forced. It would probably take many more before he would stop wincing whenever she touched him. He was, all things considered, very nice. He seemed a little milquetoast at first, but once you got beneath that he was actually pretty smart. His self confidence had been pulverized over years of mockery and abuse, which made him endearingly self-conscious. He fixed her snacks, told her corny jokes, and made her feel like the smartest person in the room.
Bill called her into the office once. “Heard you've been seen around with Lester Nygaard lately. You aren't hounding him about the case again, are you?”
And Molly could smile with perfect confidence and say, “Call him up and ask him.”
Bill smiled weakly and left it at that.
Mid-June she invited Lester to go fishing. The nice thing about Lester was that he never stopped being pleasantly surprised at being included. She had a rowboat her dad had fixed up for her sixteenth, the two of them along with a cooler full of sandwiches and beer rowed out to the quiet end of the lake and set up.
“Of course you wanna be going after bigger fish,” she said in a practiced cadence as she baited a hook on automatic pilot, “minimum's 12 inches on Walleye, though I think they mighta raised that since I was last out here. I got a few bloodworms in the cooler in a baggy, although I got some freeze-dried if you're more partial to that. The license I got you is a three-day, but don't feel too pressured to use it up, I got a deal from a cousin who works in Fish'n Game.”
Lester stared at her, smile frozen on his face.
“You ever been fishing Lester?”
Lester cough-laughed. “No, no, can't say that I have. Went out hunting with my dad once, fainted when he winged a rabbit.”
Molly smiled at him. “Well, a worm's easier than a rabbit. No nerve endings, far as I know. Most people just get squeamish getting 'em on the hook.”
She talked him through the nightcrawler on his tackle(“you bait a nightcrawler you can bait anything”) and actually got him relaxed by mid-afternoon. The beer helped. Lester told her the story about the time his brother tried to jump his friend on a ramp made out of particleboard and the ramp had broke and the bike had skidded and Chaz had opened up his knee and by the time Lester got to the way he'd had to carry Chaz home in a wheelbarrow Molly was laughing so hard she could hardly hold her rod.
They hadn't caught anything yet, but it didn't seem to matter. Floating aimlessly was more fun.
“Molly,” Lester said out of nowhere, “you look real nice. I keep meaning to tell you that.”
“Me? Ah.” Molly laughed. “I'm more mosquito-bite than human.”
“No.” Lester was laid out on his back, staring out into the sky. “Not just now. In general. I like it.”
Molly wasn't quite sure how to respond. “Thank you, Lester.”
Lester propped his head up slightly so he could look at her. “Why're you thanking me?” he grinned.
Molly stammered. “I...that's just what you do. Compliments, and that.”
Lester shook his head. “Not a complement, it's a fact. Don't have to thank for facts.”
He smiled dopily and wiggled his foot at her.
They didn't bring home any fish and Molly got sunburned. Still, she couldn't stop smiling the rest of that day.
Knutzen rapped on her desk. “You got a visitor.”
At first she thought it was the fella who called about the traffic sign near his house getting ripped off, but it was Lester.
“Hey there.” her face was warm all the sudden.
“Hey.” he lifted a paper bag. “brought ya lunch.”
“Oh.” Now she didn't know what to do with her hands; she lifted one to about shoulder-height then dropped them both to the ledger, scooting papers around aimlessly.
Lester smiled warmly at her and set everything down. “Your dad called me up and said that you said you don't always get away for lunch. He gave you a chicken club and I think a Sprite.”
“Big pickle?”
Lester chuckled. “The sandwich or me?”
Molly's laugh barked out of her so suddenly she couldn't control it. She slapped both hands over her mouth, shrieking little giggles out her nose as tears streamed from the corners of her eyes.
Lester looked alarmed for a moment. “Was it that funny?”
Molly didn't have the muscle control to shake or nod her head. It took her a moment to get past it, fanning air onto her cheeks and taking sips of her pop.
“I don't think I've ever made a woman laugh like that,” Lester said. It spoke of how far their relationship had progressed that he didn't mention Pearl.
He sat at her desk while she ate, exchanging pleasantries and passing the time, and then he tapped her desk and said his lunch at Munk's was over and he needed to skedaddle. His fingertips lingered on the surface of her desk as he left.
Small town. Small minds. Small people wagged small tongues.
She was steppin' out with that Nygaard fella, the one who killed his wife?
Molly was, and always had been, pragmatic about her dating choices. The pool in Bemidji was dishearteningly small, and seemed to get smaller all the time. Lester was not old enough to be her father, but he was old enough to raise eyebrows. They had never done anything more intimate than shake hands in public, and yet the rumor that they were dating spread like a pernicious distemper over Bemidji. No one said anything, but made it felt everywhere she went. Bill raised his eyebrows at her, attempted smile twisting his mouth. Her dad hung over her with the refill pot of coffee, unspoken words between them. The only one in town unaware they were dating was Lester.
Molly opened the door in her father's old flannel shirt, sans pants.
“Oheck.” she immediately put the door between her body and Lester. “Sorry, I was just, I'm cleaning up a bit.”
“No need to put yourself out for me,” Lester said, tactfully avoiding looking at her. He had a bucket of KFC and a box of wine.
“It's okay, I'll just...put myself back in.” She held up a finger and dashed away. She heard Lester close the front door behind him as she shrugged on a shirt and jeans. He had the wine open by the time she got back to her kitchenette.
“I got the store brand, hope that's okay.”
“I only got plastic cups, hope that's okay.”
They shared a laugh.
The movie was the French Connection. It had been Molly's favorite since she was ten, even though it wasn't what you'd call PC. Lester knew it was directed by the Exorcist guy, and pointed out the real detectives it was based on in one of those cameo parts. Lester was fun to watch movies with. Lester quick to laugh at her jokes. Lester had a nice laugh.
Lester turned, probably to tell her something she realized a little too late, and Molly closed the distance and kissed him. It felt like Lester went completely limp at the other end of her lips. A dull roar filled her ears.
They broke apart.
“I'm sorry,”she gasped.
Lester flinched.
“Hey now, that's...” he trailed off. He looked down, wouldn't meet her eyes.
Molly touched his shoulder. “Lester.”
He pressed his lips together.
“Lester?”
“One minute,” he said.
Molly wet her lips nervously. “If this is about... before ...”
“Why you got to do that?” Lester sounded like his nose was full of toffee. “Why'd you have to go and do that?”
Molly put her hand back on his shoulder and wouldn't let him shrug it away. “You know why.”
Lester looked up, and his eyes were wet. “Is–is that all this was?”
“What?”
“You making fun of me? Is this because I k–k–killed—”
“Now, hold on. Hold on just. One. Darn. Minute.” Molly said. “This ain't for anybody or anything else. I'm not the type to–to do that. Don't you do that to me. Not you.”
Lester's face fell. “Oh God, Molly, I'm sorry–”
“Shut up about sorry,” she said, “you face me, Lester. You face me and stop apologizing.”
Lester locked eyes with her. He kept flinching and trying to look away, so she brought their faces closer together. Onscreen, Gene Hackman exploded in a series of expletives.
“I know you're sorry,” she said, “but Lester, you say that so much it loses meaning.”
Lester let out a snort that sounded like a sob.
“You've done some bad things,” she continued, “but Lester, you gotta get past that. You can't make up for it, not like this. I lost someone, but so did you. And we changed—for better or worse, I guess I can't say—and we're different people than we were before–before it all happened. I'm not a deputy and you're not...whatever you think you were. We're here.”
Lester stared back at her, swallowing several times. “Moll–” he began, but she kissed him and this time he kissed back.
Lester sipped coffee while Molly finished up her hash browns.
“It's gonna be Bernie's first this Sunday,” she said, “her mom's having it in the morning, on account o' naptime.”
“Mmm.” Lester turned the page of the paper. “Already? Jeez, that kid grows like a weed. What'd we get her?”
Molly mopped up her ketchup with the rest of her egg. “I got a little monkey onesie and one of those towels with the Velcro. I signed it from the both of us.”
Lester smiled, but the corner of his mouth twitched. “I’m sure she'll understand...tell her hi for me?”
Molly looked up through her lashes at him. “I'll give her your love.”
She put a hand out and started fiddling with his tie. It was emerald green, the pattern was blue fishhooks.
Lester held his arms out. “What's wrong?”
Molly smiled. “Land a big one today.”
Lester's face flashed into a grin so sudden and warm it was like the sun after an eclipse. Molly tucked the tie back into his jacket.
“Or I'll make you wear the one with the lipstick-kisses,” she mock threatened.
Lester laughed and kissed her. On pulling away, he polished her arm bars.
“Go get 'em, Lieutenant.”