on her skinned knuckles. After she drank the glass of juice Broker held out to her and took her vitamin, she stared straight ahead, blinking the sleep from her eyes. Aware that Broker was watching her especially closely this morning, she said in a stoic voice: “You didn’t find Bunny, did you?”
“Not yet.” He pictured the toy standing lonely vigil out on the ski trail.
“Did Ditech come home?”
Broker shook his head.
Kit wrinkled her forehead. “She’s dead, isn’t she? She got in the woods, and some critter ate her.”
“We don’t know that, not for sure,” Broker said. The bunny and the cat. Sounded like a kid’s book. Maybe the first real lies he’d ever told his daughter. Two small utilitarian lies.
Kit studied her father. “Where do we go when we die?”
Broker came back glib. “Us, or cats?”
“I mean, when I die, will I get to see Ditech again?”
Blindsided by eight-year-old early-morning judo, Broker gestured vaguely, slow on the uptake. Too slow.
Kit spoke first. “Dooley says, if you believe in God and you’re saved, you go to heaven, and it’s a perfect place where you have the best times of your life all at once. How come he knows that, and you don’t?”
Broker proceeded gently in this terrain. “Dooley doesn’t
Kit scooted closer under the covers. “Uh-uh. Dooley is sure. You don’t know because you don’t believe.”
“Well, I believe things that I can prove,” Broker said carefully.
“Like?”
Broker looked around, saw a smooth, slightly oblong Lake Superior cobblestone on the dresser. The size of a goose egg. His mother, Irene, had painted it red with white dots and a green sprig, like a strawberry. He reached over, picked it up, and told Kit, “Like…hold out your hand.”
Kit raised her palm. Broker placed the stone in her hand.
“Now toss it up. Not too high. Just up.”
She flipped it up. It rose about a foot and a half and fell back to the comforter.
“Again,” Broker said. “Do it four more times.”
The stone went up and down five times. Kit picked it up and looked at it. “So?”
“There are physical laws. Everything in the world obeys them. What goes up comes down.”
“So?”
Broker tried to say it a different way. “Well, some people, maybe like Dooley, have faith that the stone will keep going up someday. That it won’t come down.”
“Maybe you got to throw it harder,” Kit said.
“No, it’s always going to fall back to earth.”
Kit knit her brow, plucked up the stone, and deposited it in Broker’s hand. “Maybe God isn’t a rock. What if God’s a bird? A bird won’t come down when you throw it in the air.”
Before he could respond, Kit let him off the hook by vaulting off the bed and asked, “What’s for breakfast?”
Broker blinked several times, not sure he entirely followed what had just happened. “Oatmeal. Now hubba- hubba. You get dressed, and don’t forget to comb your hair.”
Broker went down the stairs and into the kitchen, which since 4:00 P.M. had been an insomniac zone of nicotine, coffee, and the War in the Box.
Broker cleared the debris from her night watch off the counter, scrapped the remains of a sandwich into the garbage-good, at least she was eating.
Her sleep patterns were erratic. Sunny days she had a limited amount of energy and did her exercises. Cloudy days she was a zombie, slept in the afternoon, and walked the kitchen all night, watching cable TV.
He adjusted to her pattern. If she was in the bedroom, he slept on the couch. If she took the couch, he took the bed upstairs. Nights she slept with Kit, he had a choice. Sleeping in the same bed just did not work.
He stacked the plates and glasses and cups in the sink, wiped down the counter, and launched into his routine. Nina moved off as he measured Quaker Oats and milk into a pan and set them on the stove. From the corner of his eye, he checked her fast.
She stared at the dishes stacked in the sink like they were ancient ruins; not quite sure where to start deciphering the puzzle of their archaeology. She’d lost the ground she’d gained last night “Broker, I…” The thought lost its trajectory and burned up midway across the space between them. Efficiently, not losing a beat, he put two slices of bread in the toaster. He turned to Nina and asked, “Bad night?”
“Couldn’t sleep.” Her eyes darted out the windows and fixed on the overcast sky with a look of palpable dread.
He nodded and said nothing as she walked past him, left the kitchen, and went up the stairs. She’d take a shower, try to sleep.
“
He checked the oatmeal, stirred it a few times, then walked to the front of the house and shouted up the stairs, “Five minutes.” Then he returned to the kitchen, selected a pear from a bowl on the island, washed it, and sliced it. The toast popped. He checked the oats, turned off the burner, took a wooden tray from the top of the refrigerator, put a bowl on it, shoveled in the oats, sprinkled cinnamon, brown sugar, a pat of butter. Grabbed the remote, turned off the damn televison.
Okay.
Peanut butter and honey on the toast. Milk. He assembled the breakfast on the tray and took it to the living room just as Kit came down the stairs, pulling a comb through the snags in her hair. Best for her to take it in here, away from the lingering cigarette smoke. Broker left Kit with the tray, spooning oatmeal with one hand, pulling the comb through her hair with the other.
“I thought we’re going to school late because of the meeting with the principal,” Kit said.
“We are, but I gotta drop off the flat tire at the garage.”
He stepped into his boots, pulled on a coat, went outside, started the Tundra, cranked up the heater, left it idling. As he walked back to the house, he stopped and scanned the misty gray tree line. The black trunks hanging like roots from the gray fog reminded him of what his dad, a veteran of the Bulge, called Hitler weather.
Then he caught the brown mass of the garbage truck parked up the road, just sitting there in its own cloud of exhaust. To get a better look, he walked down the drive.
The truck started up, then slowed and stopped in a squeal of brakes next to the garbage bin he’d wheeled down to the road last night. A hydraulic whine. The jointed mechanical arm with the pincer arched over the top of the truck descended and fastened on the bin. Then halfway up, the rack jerked and shook the bin sideways, and the cover swung open.
“Hey!” Broker yelled, breaking into a jog as a week’s garbage spewed out along the snow-covered ditch. Then the rack released the bin, and it crashed down on its side.
Gears ground as the truck accelerated, but not fast enough to deny Broker a clear glimpse of Jimmy Klumpe’s profile, eyes fixed straight ahead, in the foggy windows as the truck pulled away.
Penny-ante bullshit. This time Broker coldly controlled his anger and spent the next couple minutes swearing under his breath as he collected the soggy garbage barehanded and shoved it back in the bin. Then he walked up the drive, got in the truck, drove down, got out, lowered the tailgate, hoisted the heavy bin into the bed next to the flat tire. His conversation with the reasonable man in the bathroom mirror was nowhere in sight.
Broker stopped in town at Luchta’s Garage and told Kit not to unfasten her seat belt. Stay put. Then he got out, lifted the tire from the truck bed, and carried it in through the service door. A wiry older man in blue overalls regarded him over a short-stemmed pipe.
