Chương 3
June’s spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.
She was listening.
I walked into the hallway.
“Let what go?”
“Please don’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“Make me choose.”
I leaned against the wall.
For years, my mother had said those words whenever my father made a choice she did not want to challenge.
I had mistaken helplessness for kindness because kindness was what I needed from her.
“You already chose.”
She started crying.
I almost apologized.
The reflex rose so quickly that I opened my mouth.
Then I saw June watching from the kitchen.
I swallowed the words.
“Don’t contact her unless she asks for you.”
“Ethan, I’m her grandmother.”
“Then start acting like it.”
I ended the call.
June looked down at her cereal.
“Are we not a family anymore?”
I returned to the table and sat across from her.
Outside, somebody dragged a trash bin across the parking lot.
A dog barked from the building next door.
The refrigerator clicked off.
I reached across the table.
June put her hand in mine.
“We’re a family.”
“Just us?”
“For now.”
She squeezed my fingers.
I expected that answer to feel like losing everything.
Instead, sitting there with four stitches beneath my daughter’s eye and forty-seven dollars until payday, I felt something frighteningly close to freedom.
Freedom, it turned out, had terrible timing.
By Monday morning, my checking account was overdrawn because the clinic copay hit before my paycheck cleared, June had decided she hated the antibiotic ointment, and my supervisor called while I was scraping ice from the windshield of my service van.
“You sound awake,” Luis said.
“I resent the accusation.”
“Good, because Barrett Medical lost heat on the fourth floor.”
“I’m fifteen minutes out.”
“You’re twenty-eight minutes out.”
“You tracking me now?”
“No, I’ve met traffic.”
June sat in the passenger seat with her backpack between her knees, eating half a toaster waffle wrapped in a paper towel.
I had arranged for the school nurse to check her stitches at lunch, though June had objected on the grounds that this would make her “officially weird.”
I told her fifth grade had already made everyone officially weird.
She rolled her good eye at me.
When we reached school, she did not immediately open the door.
Kids moved around us in bright coats, slamming car doors, shouting names, dragging science projects through patches of dirty snow.
June watched them through the glass.
“You have to go eventually,” I said.
“I know.”
“Want me to walk you in?”
“No.”
“Want me not to walk you in?”
“Yes.”
“That was suspiciously fast.”
She smiled, then touched the bandage beneath her eye.
“What if people ask?”
“Tell them whatever you want.”
“What would you tell them?”
I looked at the school entrance.
The truthful version sounded ugly coming from an adult.
“My uncle shoved me into my birthday cake because he thought hurting me would be funny” was the kind of sentence that changed how children looked at your family.
“I’d say I got hurt at my party.”
“That’s not the whole truth.”
“No.”
“Is it lying?”
“Not everything private is a lie.”
She stared at me.
Rebecca had been better at questions like that.
Rebecca could turn morality into something you could hold in your hands.
I tended to turn it into a hardware manual.
June finally unbuckled.
“Can I tell Maya the whole thing?”
“You can tell Maya whatever you need to tell her.”
She opened the door, then leaned back inside.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Don’t sell anything else because of me.”
The parking lot seemed to narrow around us.
I had never told her about the watch.
She must have noticed it missing.
Kids notice the absences adults believe they have disguised.
“I sold it because I needed money.”
“For my cake.”
“For several things.”
“That means yes.”
She shut the door before I could answer.
I watched her walk toward the entrance with one shoulder slightly higher than the other under her backpack.
Then a minivan honked behind me.
I drove to Barrett Medical thinking about watches, castles, and the irritating accuracy of ten-year-olds.
Luis met me beside the boiler room with two coffees and no questions.
That was why I liked him.
He was forty-eight, divorced twice, and possessed an almost religious contempt for unnecessary conversation before nine in the morning.
He handed me a cup.
“You look awful.”
“That counts as unnecessary conversation.”
“Medical observation.”
We spent four hours tracing a control failure through a system installed sometime during the late Cretaceous period.
At eleven, while I was shoulder-deep inside an air handler, Luis said, “Your dad called the office.”
I hit my head on a metal bracket.
“Son of a—”
“Careful, we’re in a hospital.”
I backed out.
“My father called you?”
“Called dispatch.”
“What did he want?”
“Asked whether you still worked here.”
I stared at him.
Luis sipped his coffee.
“I told dispatch you were dead.”
Despite everything, I laughed.
“What did they actually say?”
“That employment information was confidential.”
I wiped grease from my knuckles.
“Then what?”
“Then he asked for Hal.”
Hal Brenner owned the company.
Hal had known my father for twenty years.
My stomach tightened.
Luis saw it.
“Relax.”
“I am relaxed.”
“You’re strangling a screwdriver.”
I put it down.
At noon, Hal called me upstairs to an empty administrative office Barrett Medical let us use for paperwork.
He stood beside a printer with his reading glasses halfway down his nose.
Hal was sixty-three and shaped like the refrigerators he enjoyed repairing even though nobody paid him to repair refrigerators anymore.
“Your old man is pissed.”
“I gathered.”
“He says you assaulted Blake.”
“I shoved him after he shoved June into her birthday cake.”
Hal stopped adjusting his glasses.
“What?”
“She needed four stitches.”
“He left that part out.”
“Most people improve stories by editing.”
Hal sat on the edge of a desk.
“He also reminded me Mercer Mechanical holds three subcontracting agreements with us.”
May you like
There it was.
Not a threat exactly.
