Final Appeal

My scream breaks free. “Maddie! Maddie!” I shout. I’m off in a second, running toward the swings. “Help, police!”

Maddie looks confused, then terrified. The man glances back at me, then sprints in the opposite direction.

I pick up my pace, running as hard as I can. “Help! Police!” I scream, full bore.

My panic sets off the other mothers. One of them gathers her children together, hugging them to her legs. The other, a young mother, takes off like a shot after the stranger, who’s fleeing across the grassy common. She’s a short-haired woman in bicycle pants, and she passes me in no time. “I got that bastard,” she says, hardly puffing as she whizzes by, cowlick flying.

I keep running until I get to Maddie, who’s frozen with fear in front of the swings. I scoop her up and hug her tight. Over her shoulder I watch the young mother almost on the heels of the man. I pray to God he doesn’t have a gun as she grabs him by the sweater and they both fall hard to the ground.

The cop comes running from the entrance to the playground, but the young woman doesn’t need his help. She clambers onto the man’s back and wrenches his arm behind him. A group of teenagers playing basketball at the far side of the playground stop their game and come running over. It’s a done deal by the time the cop and the teenagers reach the middle of the huge field, which is when I guess the young woman must be an undercover cop, sent by Winn just in case.

“What’s happening, Mommy?” Maddie says in a small voice. “What’s going on?” She wraps her arms tighter around my neck.

“That man who was running, was he the one you saw on the playground at school?”

“Yes.”

I watch as the basketball players ring the prone man. “It’s okay now, baby. It’s all over.”

“What are they gonna do?”

“They’re gonna put him in jail.”

“Why?”

Because he’s a killer, I think to myself, and hug her even closer. I pick her up and walk over to the crowd around the man. The cop has handcuffed him and flipped him over on his back. The woman has her running shoe at his Adam’s apple. She gives me a brusque wave as I approach.

“We got him,” the cop says.

Please. “You had an assist, I think, from the FBI.”

The cop and the woman exchange looks over the unconscious man. “Are you with the feds?” the cop says.

“Me? Are you kidding?” The young woman laughs. “I’m a librarian.”

“What?” I say. “But the way you tackled—”

“Arrgh,” the man moans, regaining consciousness. He’s older up close but still a scumbag, like Winn said.

“He’s waking’ up!” one of the ballplayers says.

The librarian presses her ribbed toe into the man’s throat. “Stay right there, asshole.”

“Grace?” the man says, disoriented, looking up from the grass.

“How do you know my name?”

“I gave it to you, for chrissake.”

“What?”

He spits grass out of his mouth. “I’m your fuckin’ father.”

Bernice glares through the gate of her Fisher-Price prison, eyeing with canine distrust the stranger who is my father.

“Lucky for me that dog wasn’t with you today,” he says. Underneath his sweater is a ropy gold chain; no shoulder holster, as far as I can tell. “That’s a big mother dog.”

“Watch your language.”

“Sorry.”

“You want coffee or not?”

“Yeah.” He holds up his mug.

“How do you take it?” I pause over him with the pot of coffee. Maybe he needs a hot shower.

“Black is fine.” He looks up at me with blue eyes that eerily mirror my own, which stops me short. I can see the years on him; the deep crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes and a softening around the jowls. He must be over sixty, but he looks fifty. His hair is jet black, like Robert Goulet’s; I wonder if he dyes it. I pour him some coffee, then myself, avoiding his eyes.

“You’re mad, aren’t ya?” he says.

“You know me so well, Dad.”

He winces when he sips his coffee. “Christ, this is hot!”

I stop short of saying, Good, you burn yourself? “So what are you doing here? In the neighborhood, thought you’d drop by?”

He frowns at my sarcasm but evidently decides not to send me to my room. “Look, I wanted to see my granddaughter.”

“Why?”

“I just wanted to see her, okay?”

“Why now? She’s been around for six years. It’s not like she’s been booked up.”

“I just retired.” He clears his throat, but his voice still sounds like gravel. “I moved back to Philly.”

“So you were in the neighborhood.”

“I figured it was time to settle up, you know?”

“No, I don’t.”

“When you’re my age, you’ll know.” He slurps his coffee, wincing again.

“We have a telephone. You could have called.”

“I know, I looked you up in the phone book. That’s how I knew where she went to school.” He glances into the living room, where Maddie’s teaching herself to make a cat’s cradle with a pink string he brought her. “She’s a little lady. Just like you were,” he says wistfully, but I have no patience for his wistfulness.

“You scared her, you know. And me.”

“I’m sorry.”

I pull out a chair at the side of the table, two seats away from where he sits. Even from here I can smell his aftershave, something drugstore like Aqua Velva. He doesn’t say anything for a minute, staring down into his mug. I’ll be damned if I’ll fill this silence. I sip my coffee.

“Okay, so it wasn’t the best way to go about it,” he says finally.

“On the contrary. It was the worst possible way to go about it.”

“Now I got your Irish up.” He laughs softly, but I’m not laughing.

“You want a drink? Little sweetener for that coffee?”

He looks at me, stung. “I haven’t had a drink in a long, long time.”

“Right.”

“It’s the truth.”

“Good for you. Where do you live?”

“Philly, now. South Philly.”

The Italian neighborhood. “What do you do?”

“I used to teach.”

“You were a teacher?” I can’t hide my surprise. I would have figured him for a bartender, maybe a trucker. But a teacher? “What did you teach?”

“English.”

“What?” He can barely speak it. I almost spit out my coffee.

“You’re surprised at your old man, eh?”

“Please. Let’s not leap ahead with the ‘old man’ stuff. Where did you teach?”

“In high school. In Virginia.”

It was his car, the black one. It’s parked out in front of my house like an official Mafia squad car. “Have you