Elaine had been a social worker until two state budgets ago, but now she worked part-time at the Goodwill and volunteered at a couple of food pantries and at the Planned Parenthood in Maylock. The upside of this was that they didn’t have to find money for childcare. When the school day ended no one minded if Nana hung around at the Goodwill with her mother. The downside was that they were going to lose the house.
This bothered Frank more than Elaine. In fact, it didn’t seem to bother her at all. Despite her denials, he suspected that she planned to use the sale as an excuse to depart the area altogether, maybe take off for Pennsylvania where her sister lived. If that happened, Frank’s every other weekend would become a weekend every other month, at best.
Except for visiting days, he made a concerted effort to avoid the place. Even then, if he could arrange for Elaine to bring Nana to him, that was his preference. The memories that went with the house—the sense of unfairness and failure, the patched hole in the kitchen wall—were too raw. Frank felt as though he had been tricked out of his entire life and the best part of that life had been lived at 51 Smith Lane, the neat, plain ranch house with the duck on the mailbox, painted by his daughter.
The matter of the green Mercedes, however, made a stop-in imperative.
As he jerked over to the curb, he spied Nana drawing with chalk in the driveway. It was an activity you’d normally associate with a much younger child, but his daughter had a talent for illustration. The previous school year she had won second prize in a bookmark-designing contest held by the local library. Nana’s had shown a bunch of books flying like birds across a cloudbank. Frank had framed it and hung it in his office. He looked at it all the time. It was a beautiful thing, imagining books flying around inside his little girl’s head.
She sat cross-legged in the sunshine, butt planted in an inner tube and her rainbow of implements arrayed around her in a fan. Along with her drawing ability, or maybe in accordance with it, Nana had a gift for making herself comfortable. She was a slow-moving, dreamy child, taking more after Frank than her vibrant mother, who never messed around about anything, was always straight-to-the-point.
He leaned over, popped the door of his truck. “Hey, Brighteyes. Come here.”
She squinted up at him. “Daddy?”
“Last I heard,” he said, working hard to keep the corners of his mouth turned up. “Come here, okay?”
“Right now?” She had already glanced down to her picture.
“Yes. Right now.” Frank took a deep breath.
He hadn’t started to get what Elaine called “that way” until he was leaving the judge. By which El meant losing his temper. Which he rarely did, no matter what she thought. And today? At first he had been fine. Then, about five steps across Oscar Silver’s grass, it was as if he had tripped some invisible trigger. Sometimes that just happened. Like when Elaine had kept after him about yelling at the PTA meeting and he’d punched that hole in the wall and Nana had run upstairs, crying, not understanding that sometimes you punched a thing so you wouldn’t punch a person. Or that business with Fritz Meshaum, where he had been a little out of control, granted, but Meshaum deserved it. Anyone who would do a thing like that to an animal deserved it.
That cat could have been my kid was what he had been thinking as he crossed the grass. And then, boom! Like time was a shoelace and the length of it, between him walking and getting into the truck, had been knotted off. Because suddenly he was in his truck, he was driving for the house on Smith, and he couldn’t recall getting in the truck at all. His hands were sweaty on the wheel and his cheeks hot, and he was still thinking about how the cat could have been his kid, except it wasn’t a thought. More like an urgent flashing message on an LED screen:
e r r o r e r r o r e r r o r
m y k i d m y k i d m y k i d
Nana carefully placed a stub of purple chalk in the empty spot between an orange and a green. She pushed up from her inner tube and stood for a couple of seconds, dusting off the rear end of her flowered yellow shorts and rubbing her chalky fingertips contemplatively.
“Honey,” said Frank, fighting not to scream. Because, look, she had been right there, in the driveway, where some drunk asshole in a fancy car could drive right over her!
m y k i d m y k i d m y k i d
Nana took a step, stopped, studied her fingers again, apparently with dissatisfaction.
“Nana!” Frank, still twisted into a lean across the console. He slapped the passenger seat. Slapped it hard. “Get over here!”
The girl’s head yanked up, her expression startled, as if she had just been awakened from sleep by a thunderclap. She shuffled forward, and when she reached the open door, Frank grabbed the front of her tee-shirt and tugged her up close.
“Hey! You’re stretching my shirt,” Nana said.
“Never mind that,” Frank said. “Your shirt’s not the big deal here. I’ll tell you what the big deal is, so listen to me. Who drives the green Mercedes? Which house does it go with?”
“What?” Nana pressed at his grip on the front of her shirt. “What are you talking about? You’re going to ruin my shirt.”
“Didn’t you hear me? Forget the fucking shirt!” The words were out and he hated them, but he was also satisfied to see her eyes jump from her shirt to him. He finally had her attention. Nana blinked and inhaled.
“Okay, now that your head’s out of the clouds, let’s get together on this. You told me about some guy on your paper route who drove a green Mercedes. What’s his name? Which house does he live in?”
“Can’t remember his name. I’m sorry, Daddy.” Nana bit her lower lip. “It’s the house beside the one with the big flag, though. It’s got a wall. On Briar. Top of the hill.”
“Okay.” Frank let go of the shirt.
Nana didn’t move. “Are you done being mad?”
“Honey, I wasn’t mad.” And when she said nothing: “Okay, I was. A little. But not at you.”
She wouldn’t look at him, just kept rubbing her goddam fingers together. He loved her, she was the most important thing in his life, but sometimes it was hard to believe she had all four wheels on the road.
“Thank you.” Some of the heat was draining from his face, some of the sweat cooling on his skin. “Thank you, Brighteyes.”
“Sure,” said Nana. The girl retreated a small step, the sound of her sneaker sole against the pavement impossibly loud in Frank’s ear.
Frank straightened up in his seat. “One more thing. Do me a favor and stay out of the driveway. For the rest of the morning, anyway, till I can sort something out. There’s a man driving around crazy. Draw inside with your paper, all right?”
She was biting at her lower lip. “All right, Daddy.”
“You’re not going to cry, are you?”
“No, Daddy.”
“All right. That’s my girl. I’ll see you next weekend, okay?”
He realized his lips were incredibly dry. He asked himself what else he was supposed to have done, and a voice inside him replied, “Well, gee, what else could you have done? Maybe you could have, I don’t know, this will probably sound totally wild, Frank, but hey, maybe you could have not freaked the fuck out?” The voice was like an amused version of Frank’s own voice, the voice of a man who was kicked back in a lawn chair and wearing sunglasses and maybe sipping on an iced tea.