“Hello?”
She turned around. “Hey,” Samantha Worthington said.
“Hi,” I said. “You’re unarmed.”
She dug into the front pocket of her jeans. When her hand came back out, it was wrapped around something. I could guess what.
She came halfway up the steps, arm extended. “I believe this is yours. Or your kid’s. I don’t know. All I know is, it’s not Carl’s.”
I opened my palm to allow her to set the pocket watch on it. Our fingers brushed together lightly. Samantha retreated, ran her fingers through her hair to get it out of her eyes, and said, “Sorry.”
“It’s okay.”
“Not just about the watch.”
“You mean the shotgun in my face.”
“Yeah,” Samantha said. “That.” She forced a smile. “You get some fresh shorts?”
“I did.”
“I was doing laundry, grabbed Carl’s jeans; they felt kind of heavy. Found the watch in his pocket.” She shook her head. “You’d figure, if he was going to lie to me, he’d do a better job of covering up after himself.”
“His future as a master criminal looks uncertain,” I said.
She pointed toward the street, where a small Hyundai sedan sat. “He’s in the car. I brought him to apologize to your boy.”
I opened the door a crack and called in, “Ethan! Out front!”
Almost instantly I heard stomping on the stairs, and then he emerged. “Yeah?”
Samantha looked at her car and made a waving-in gesture. The door opened and a black-haired boy Ethan’s age got out.
My son looked at Carl, then at me. I put the watch in his hand and said, “You can give this to Poppa in a minute.” He looked at it, stunned, like he’d won the lottery. “This is Carl’s mom, Ms. Worthington.”
“Hi,” she said as Carl approached. Once her son was standing next to her, she said to him, “You know what to say.”
“Sorry I took the watch,” he said, looking more at the ground than at Ethan. “That wasn’t right.”
“Sorry I punched you and stuff,” Ethan said.
Carl shrugged. “Okay.”
There was an uncomfortable three seconds of silence. Then Ethan asked, “Do you like trains?”
“What?”
“Do you like trains? My grandpa has some. In the basement. If you want to see them.”
Carl, his face blank, looked at his mother. “Uh, yeah, I guess,” she said. The boy came up the stairs and disappeared into the house with Ethan.
“The Middle East should be so easy,” I said, coming down the steps.
“Carl’s not a bad kid,” Samantha said defensively. “He’s just... like his father sometimes. I don’t like it when he gets like that. He can be a bit of a bully. But there’s a good kid in there, I swear. Some days it’s just a little harder to find.”
“Sure,” I said.
“And yet, he’s kind of my rock, you know? He’s there for me. We’re there for each other. I guess that’s why, when you said he had that watch, I just stood up for him.” She raised her hands a moment, a gesture of futility. “Now what do I do? I feel like an idiot standing here. The plan was, Carl says he’s sorry and we go. Now he’s in there with your kid.”
“You want a coffee or something?” I asked. “You’re welcome to come in.”
She looked at the house. “You got a nice place. Beats the shithole I’m living in.”
“Your place isn’t a shithole,” I said. “And besides, this is my parents’ house.”
“I thought, when Ethan said the trains were his grandfather’s, that maybe they’d been handed down to him or something.”
“No. My dad built a small layout in the basement for Ethan. At least, he says it was for Ethan.”
“When I looked up an address for Harwood, this was the only one that came up. So, that’s cool that you live with your folks? You and your wife and Ethan?”
“Just Ethan and me.”
“Oh,” she said. “Divorced?”
I shook my head. “My wife passed away a few years ago.”
She nodded quickly. “Oh, sorry, didn’t realize. So, well, whaddaya know. We’re both raising boys on our own.”
Did I want to know why she was a single parent? The short answer was yes, I was curious. But did I think it was a good idea to ask? Maybe not. I was grateful she’d returned the pocket watch, and it was nice of her to apologize for scaring the shit out of me. Once Ethan finished showing Carl the trains, Samantha Worthington and her son could be on their way.
So all I said was “It can be a challenge.”
“No shit,” she said. “Especially when your ex is in jail and his parents think they should have custody.”
Well, there it was. No need to ask. Although I now had even more questions. Before I could choose just one of the many bouncing around in my head, she asked, “So what do you do?”
“The last fifteen years or so I’ve worked for newspapers,” I said. “I’d worked at the Standard, then went to the Boston Globe, then came back here to work for the Standard again, and first day on the job they closed the paper.”
“Oh, man, that sucks,” she said. “I didn’t know they’d shut down the Standard.”
“It’s been quite a few weeks now.”
She shrugged. “I don’t read the papers. Books, mostly. I’ve got enough shit going on in my own life, I don’t need to read about everyone else’s. I like escaping into a good story instead, where everything’s made up. It doesn’t have to be happy. I don’t mind bad things happening to good people, so long as they’re not real. God, I’m blathering. So that’s why you’re living with your parents? You’re out of work?”
“We’re moving out shortly,” I said. “I just got something else.”
Had I already made up my mind about Finley’s offer, or did I reach a decision in that instant to deflect shame?
“Oh, that’s great,” she said. “Congrats.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You?”
“Hmm?”
“What do you do?”
“I work in a Laundromat,” she said. “It’s pretty exciting. Cleaning the washers, emptying out the coin holders, keeping the detergent dispensers full.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
“Are you kidding me? Every day I want to kill myself.”
“Sorry. My sarcasm detector is in the shop.”
“Yeah, well, you should get it fixed. Who the hell would want to work in a Laundromat? The only good thing is, I’m on my own; if things are slow I can read. And I can nip out and do things if I have to, like pick up Carl at school.” She rolled her eyes. “And when the school calls in the middle of the day and says he’s being suspended for fighting, I can go and get him.”
Carl seemed too old to be chauffeured to and from school. Samantha must have been reading my thoughts.
“If I don’t watch him, they’ll snatch him.”
“They?”
“Brandon’s — that’s my ex — parents, or maybe even friends of his, or theirs. They’ve got money — his parents, that is — and his friends, like Ed, that asshole, are just dumb enough to think grabbing Carl would be a smart thing to do. My former in-laws always hated me, and hate me even more now that I’ve moved away from Boston to Promise Falls. Once Bran got sentenced for those holdups I was gone.”
“Holdups?”
“Bank robberies, actually,” she said offhandedly. “Armed. He’s not even up for parole for ten years. And they think it’s my fault. Like someone else stuffed all that money in the trunk of his car.”
This woman had problems like the Standard had typos.