The girl looked over her shoulder at Rodney when he spoke. I just blinked. “Umm… it’s okay, I can pay cash if…”
Rodney shook his head emphatically. “No way. Your food’s free tonight.” He tapped a pimply-faced boy, who had been preoccupied with making a fudge sundae, on the shoulder. “Steve, check it out. We’ve got Kevin Swanson up in here.”
Not just here; up in here. The distinction wasn’t lost on Steve, who nearly leapt over the counter to shake my hand. “Kevin Swanson? Holy shit!”
I leaned forward and accepted the proffered hand. Abby, her hair pulled back and her uniform shirt streaked with field dirt, watched silently.
“For real,” Rodney said, crossing his arms over his skinny chest. “Your money’s no good here. Dumb bastards all over the country are gonna have to think again before they go busting up in somebody’s house. You told those assholes.”
“Blew them away,” Steve added.
“It’s too bad you had to waste bullets,” the little blue-eyed angel behind the register offered. “You should have just stabbed their sorry asses and let them die slowly.”
“Bullet’s better than they deserved,” Steve agreed.
Rodney shook his head again and gestured at the tray of food beside the register. “For real, eat up, and if you want more, come and get it. You’re an American hero, dude. You can take that to the bank!”
My face burned. Abby glanced down at her phone—she had put it away for the game, so maybe it wasn’t actually part of her body, like I’d thought—but I sensed she wasn’t looking at it. She was looking at me. But I didn’t know what to say, and so I just said, “Uh… thanks.”
“Sorry to cuss in front of your kid, man,” Rodney said, “but, we… uh… got robbed here last month. Couple of ‘hood rats with sawed-off shotguns. We’re still on edge, you know?”
“Oh yes,” I said. “I know.”
I half feared that Rodney and the rest of his merry but vulgar crew would follow us to our table, but another group of customers walked in and this distracted them long enough for me to grab my tray, grab Abby and retreat to a table at the back of the restaurant. I watched her unwrap her grilled chicken sandwich and take a bite without saying a single word.
“Abby,” I said quietly.
She looked up. Although still a child at thirteen, her face already foretold the woman she would become. She’d inherited Allie’s rich brown hair along with the delicate structure of her mouth and cheeks.
“You’re famous,” she said with a wry smile.
I opened the cardstock box in which my McRib sandwich had come. I didn’t feel hungry anymore, but I understood that at this time of day, I was supposed to eat.
“I never wanted to be famous,” I replied. “Just rich.”
“Seriously! You’re, like, a celebrity! The guys at school have put together an Abby’s Dad Is Awesome page on Facebook. Know who the profile picture is?”
“Who?”
“Dirty Harry.” She talked in between bites. To emphasize the Dirty Harry point, she made a gun with her right thumb and index finger and pointed it at me with a Clint Eastwood grimace. Then it disappeared, and she transformed into a thirteen-year-old girl again. “Aren’t you going to eat?”
“Oh. Yeah.” I took a bite. I loved McRib. Allie refused to eat it, claiming that while she didn’t know for sure what they put in it. Personally, I didn’t care. It looked like a rib, it dripped with tangy barbecue sauce and it tasted good. Don’t ask questions; just enjoy.
Barbecue sauce dribbling on my fingers, I set the sandwich down and wiped my hands on a napkin.
“So,” I said. “What do you think?”
“About what?”
“About what I did.”
She put her sandwich down on the wrapper before her. In the space of just a few moments, she’d almost finished it. She cocked her head to one side, looking away and thinking. Like the hair and face, this gesture very much echoed Allie. “I guess…” she started, then paused. She pursed her lips, her brow wrinkling.
I waited.
“I guess it is what it is,” she said. “I mean, what else are you going to do when two guys break into your house? You do what you have to do to survive. When thugs get all up in your house, you either call 911 or you blow them away.”
She shrugged and appeared to think some more.
“I don’t know, I guess I do think it’s kind of cool. You have this boring job, you go to work in a suit every day, but now you’re, like, an action hero.”
From its position in the box, the McRib called to me. Eat me, it said, bleeding barbecue sauce. Eat me now.
“Death is not cool,” I admonished. “No matter who it is that dies.”
She rolled her eyes.
“Human life is precious,” I said. “All of it.”
“I know, Daddy, chill.”
“I’m not happy about what I did,” I continued. I lied, but if she knew how I really felt, she wouldn’t call me “action hero” anymore. She’d realize that her dad was a psychopath, and so I said the things I had to say, because I so badly needed to hide the ugly truth. “I’m not proud of it. I didn’t even want to do it. In fact, if you and your mother hadn’t been home, I’d have gone out through the basement door and run off, because the only reason I did what I did, and I mean the only reason, is to protect you. They could have taken everything else—the TVs, the computer, the jewelry, everything down to the curtains. I’d have let them.”
She blinked at me. I suddenly felt myself laying it on too thick, preaching now instead of just talking, my tongue dripping not barbecue sauce but bullshit. And the look in her eyes—they were green, like my mother’s—made me realize that I was preaching to myself. She wasn’t listening to me; she was observing me.
But I couldn’t stop. “Those guys will never learn from their mistakes, Abby. Not now, not ever. Whatever they could have become, we’ll never know, because they’re dead. We’ll never get a chance to win them back. And I think it’s sick to celebrate that.”
“And I think that’s a bunch of nonsense,” she said.
My eyes widened. My spine straightened and I drew back, as if she’d just reached across the table and slapped me.
“They were going to rape me, Daddy.” Her voice remained level, but cool. “You shot them, though, so they didn’t. You can say all you want, but to me, I think that’s pretty awesome.”
“Do you know what ‘rape’ means?” I asked. My face felt numb.
“It’s when a guy holds you down and sticks his thing in you even though you don’t want him to.”
They got her. They weren’t after Allie at all; they were after her. They went straight into her bedroom while I laid on the floor drooling in the basement.
“Who told you about that?”
“Come on, Dad, I’m thirteen. By the way, they were going to rape Mom, too. Why else would they have come in when we were home? If all they wanted was TVs and computers and whatever, they’d have been better off waiting until everybody left in the morning. The cops even said that.”
Abby folded her arms. She looked away at something I couldn’t see—an idea, maybe, a feeling—and her eyes narrowed.
“So I guess I don’t really understand why you feel so bad about it,” she said. “They were going to rape me, they were going to rape Mom, so why would you ever feel guilty about shooting guys like that? I don’t get it.”