Peg nodded fervently. Squee was looking around at all of them, trying to keep up with a game whose rules he didn’t quite understand. Roddy froze briefly, taking stock of the situation around him and formulating a plan. A second later he was moving toward Squee. He reached out his hand to help the kid up off the couch, then realized he had a hat in it. He gave the hat a shake, then, inspired, flapped it onto Squee’s head. “Shakes or Morey’s, Squee-man?”
Squee peered out from beneath the lavender brim of the hat. “Shakes!” Eden mouthed the same word—
Squee hopped up from the couch with surprising energy. He glanced toward the kitchen, briefly wondering what would become of Eden’s dinner (which surely involved some weird constellation of lentils and broccoli) from which he was pleased to escape. He stood before Roddy, who lifted the cap off Squee’s head, adjusted the band as tight as it would go, and replaced it on the boy.
“Let’s do it,” said Roddy, and he scuttled the kid ahead of him and out the door. He turned back to Eden. “I’ll call?” he said. “See when it looks OK to come back?”
Eden nodded. She waved him away, and then she and Peg watched from the living room window as Roddy and Squee climbed into the truck and began to back down the driveway. They were still watching seconds later when another truck came over the rise and sped up the driveway straight at Roddy and Squee.
Peg drew in a sharp breath, anticipating the impact—a sudden smash of glass and metal. Eden simply held hers. Roddy saw the other truck. He braked, then put his own truck in forward drive, ready to go over the lawn, around the side of Lance’s truck, and down the hill. In her mind, Eden saw Roddy hesitating over whether it would be wrong to run tire tracks through his mother’s lawn, and it wasn’t until Peg looked at her that she realized it was her own voice saying, “Go! Just go!”
Roddy pulled out forward, steering his truck to the right, onto the far side of the lawn. Lance—coming up from behind him, his vehicle bucking as he took the ruts too quickly—saw Roddy turn off the driveway and onto the lawn, and he swerved his own truck right as well, as though his plan—if Lance was capable of having a plan—was to block Roddy’s exit. Lance didn’t know who was in that truck, besides Roddy. He couldn’t see Squee in the passenger seat from that distance, four feet tall and hidden beneath the lavender hat.
Then came the crash that Peg had braced for, Roddy’s brakes squealing as he slammed them, Lance’s truck coming straight for Roddy’s passenger side as though he’d never thought to brake at all. The trucks seemed to hit in the flash of an instant, just a slam: the front of Lance’s truck into the side of Roddy’s. And then everything went slow: the protracted skid of the trucks across the lawn, joined in a lopsided T, Lance’s pushing Roddy’s as if to nudge it along, impeded by the surface of the grass, which tore beneath them and slowed them down as though the ground itself was offering what help it could by way of traction.
When the trucks stopped altogether, Eden and Peg were running from the house and across the lawn. There was a moment of nothing, no movement from the vehicles whatsoever, just the two women running, their steps nearly silent, across the grass toward the collision. Then, first, the door of Lance’s truck flew open and Lance stepped out, tall, and seemed to hover on his feet for a moment, his face wrenched with fury, before he pitched and stumbled sideways, his expression shifting from anger to confusion as his feet slipped from under him and he buckled to the ground.
Lance was struggling to stand when Roddy’s door eased open. Roddy stepped out, then leaned back in to pull Squee across the seat toward him. Getting a purchase, he gingerly lifted the boy from the driver’s side of the truck. Squee was balled up into himself, his right arm under his left like a broken wing he was protecting from the wind. Roddy held the boy to him and started toward Eden. He said nothing, just moved, because moving the boy to safety seemed the only imperative. Eden went toward them, but Peg was rooted where she stood. Roddy and Eden came at each other, their focus direct and intent and singular, as if Roddy were going to hand Squee off to her, the next sprinter in this terrible relay. But then Peg screamed and Roddy and Eden broke the lock of their eyes and looked up. From a few feet away Lance was lunging at them. He looked unsteady, drunk and furious, yet he flew toward them with as single a purpose as Eden and Roddy had in rushing to each other. Lance yelled, spitting as he growled, “Stay the fuck away from my son!” and he grabbed for Squee as though a boy were something you could steal like the ball in a game of Keep Away. Roddy was just lifting Squee away from his own body, preparing to pass him off to Eden, when Lance dove and caught them all just off-balance enough that when Lance grabbed he managed to catch what was closest to him: Squee’s upper right arm. As Lance grabbed, Roddy lost his grip and his balance at the same time and went stumbling backwards as Squee was wrenched away.
Squee screamed. Lance had grabbed his arm, wrenched it hard without any purchase or balance of his own, so in snatching Squee he sent them both down, Lance with a look of surprise turning to annoyance at what he saw as a great injustice keeping him from remaining upright as he tried to go about the business he’d come for. Squee fell between Lance and Roddy with a cry of awful pain, and on the ground he curled tighter into a ball, holding his right arm desperately to him, rocking and crying into the grass.
Lance and Roddy both struggled to their feet and lunged for the boy. Roddy tried to throw his own body over Squee’s to protect him; Lance went at his son with arms outstretched, ready for a tug-of-war. Lance reached the boy first, grabbed hold of the collar of Squee’s T-shirt, and pulled. The boy screamed. Lance grabbed again, this time with both hands, trying to take Squee by the shoulders and stand him up. He was pulling at him, hollering inches from Squee’s head, “Get up! Get up and get in the truck! Get the fuck up!” and Squee wailed, just trying to curl in and protect the arm that his father kept ripping away from him, and he wailed louder as if trying to out- scream the pain.
Roddy, unable to throw himself on top of Squee without hurting him even more, instead came around and tried to tackle Lance from behind, tried to pin Lance’s arms behind him and stop him from reaching for Squee. But as Roddy pounced, Lance flung him off and sent Roddy sprawling and stumbling backwards, his legs buckling under him as he landed, ten feet back from where Lance and Squee struggled in the grass of his mother’s lawn.
Eden, in the midst of it, watched in terror for a moment, then turned and ran for the house, grabbing Peg from where she stood and pulling her as she ran. She pushed the girl up the steps and into the house, then shoved her toward the kitchen door, pointed at the telephone on the wall: “Call the police!” she shouted. Peg looked at her blankly, uncomprehending. Eden’s voice was cold and hard. “Call nine-one-one,” she said. “Call the police.” Then it clicked and Peg understood. She reached for the phone.
Eden dashed for the living room. She rummaged frantically in the organ bench through old musical scores and polishing rags, came up with a key and set across the room. Her late husband’s gun case stood by the entrance to the hall, virtually untouched since his death that spring. She fumbled with the key in its cheap tin lock, flimsy as the clasp on a child’s diary. Her hands slipped and the key fell to the carpet. She bent to find it in the shag, then stopped and spun around, her eyes on a bookend, a marble pedestal topped with one bronzed baby shoe. Roddy’s. She picked it up and hurled it through the glass door of the gun case, drawing her hands back over her face as it struck. Then she peeked out, saw the bookend on the ground, the shattered glass, more glass still falling around it, and she stuck her hand out, grabbed the barrel of a shotgun and yanked it out. It was heavier than she’d expected, and she faltered under its weight. Her arm slipped, slicing into broken glass, but she hardly noticed, just reestablished her grip farther down the long shaft and hefted it to her chest. She was running back out the door then, both hands on the gun, lifting to aim it as she ran.
