“Didn’t you hear me? I called you, like, a hundred times.”
“Sorry.”
She looked past me into her mother’s closet and frowned accusingly. “What are you doing?”
“Nothing. Just standing here.”
“You’re not thinking about throwing out Mom’s things, are you?”
“I wasn’t really thinking anything. But, yeah, I’ll have to decide what to do with her clothes at some point. I mean, by the time you could wear them they’ll be out of fashion.”
“I don’t want to wear them. I want to keep them.”
“Okay, then,” I said gently.
That seemed to satisfy her. She stood there a moment and then said, “Can you take me now?”
“You’re sure you want to go?” I asked. “You’re ready for this?”
Kelly nodded. “I don’t want to sit around the house with you all the time.” She bit her lower lip, and added, “No offense.”
“I’ll get my coat.”
I went downstairs and grabbed my jacket from the hall closet. She followed me. “You got everything?”
“Yup,” Kelly said. “Pajamas?”
“Yes.”
“Toothbrush?”
“Yes.”
“Slippers?”
“Yes.”
“Hoppy?” The furry stuffed bunny she still took to bed with her.
“ Daaad. I have everything I need. When you and Mom went away, she was always reminding you what to bring. And it’s not the first time I’ve ever gone on a sleepover.”
That was true. It was just the first time she’d been away overnight since her mother had gotten herself killed in a stupid DUI accident.
It would be a good thing for her to get out, be with her friends. Hanging around me, that couldn’t be good for anyone.
I forced a smile. “Your mom would say to me, have you got this, have you got that, and I’d say, yeah, of course, you think I’m an idiot? And half the things she said, I’d forgotten, and I’d sneak back into the bedroom and get them. One time, we went away and I forgot to pack any extra underwear. How dumb, huh?”
I thought she might return the smile, but no dice. The corners of her mouth hadn’t gone up much in the last sixteen days. Sometimes, when we were snuggled up on the couch watching TV, something funny would happen, she’d start to laugh. But then she’d catch herself, as though she didn’t have the right to laugh anymore, that nothing could ever be funny again. It was as though when something made her start to feel happy, she felt ashamed.
“Got your phone?” I asked once we were in the truck. I’d bought her a cell phone since her mother’s death so she could call me anytime. It also meant I could keep tabs on her, too. I’d thought, when I got it, what an extravagance a phone was for a kid her age, but soon realized she was far from unique. This was Connecticut, after all, where by age eight some kids already had their own shrink, let alone a phone. And a cell phone wasn’t just a phone these days. Kelly had loaded it with songs, taken photos with it, even shot short stretches of video. My phone probably did some of these things, too, but mostly I used it for talking, and taking pictures at job sites.
“I have it,” she said, not looking at me.
“Just checking,” I said. “If you’re uncomfortable, if you want to come home, it doesn’t matter what time it is, you can call me. Even if it’s three in the morning, if you’re not happy with how things are going I’ll come over and-”
“I want to go to a different school,” Kelly said, looking at me hopefully.
“What?”
“I hate my school. I want to go someplace else.”
“Why?”
“Everyone there sucks.”
“I need more than that, honey.”
“Everybody’s mean.”
“What do you mean, everybody? Emily Slocum likes you. She’s having you for a sleepover.”
“Everybody else hates me.”
“Tell me, exactly, what’s happened.”
She swallowed, looked down. “They call me…”
“What, sweetheart? What do they call you?”
“Boozer. Boozer the Loser. You know, because of Mom, and the accident.”
“Your mother was not a-she was not a drunk, or a boozer.”
“Yes, she was,” Kelly said. “That’s why she’s dead. That’s how come she killed the other people. Everyone says so.”
I felt my jaw tighten. And why wouldn’t everyone be saying that? They’d seen the headlines, the six o’clock news. Three Dead in Milford Mother DUI.
“Who’s calling you this name?”
“It doesn’t matter. If I tell you, you’ll go see the principal and they’ll get called down and everyone will have to have a talk and I’d rather just go someplace else. A school where there’s nobody that Mom killed.”
The two people who’d died in the car that hit Sheila’s were Connor Wilkinson, thirty-nine, and his ten-year-old son Brandon.
As if fate hadn’t been cruel enough, Brandon had been a student at Kelly’s school.
Another Wilkinson boy, Brandon’s sixteen-year-old brother Corey, had survived. He’d been sitting in the back seat, belted in. He was looking forward through the front windshield and saw Sheila’s Subaru parked across the off- ramp just as his father screamed “Jesus!” and hit the brakes, but not in time. Corey claimed to have seen Sheila, just before the impact, asleep behind the wheel.
Connor had not bothered with his seatbelt, and half of him was on the car hood when the police got there. His body had been taken away by the time I’d arrived, as had Brandon’s. The boy had been wearing his seatbelt, but had not survived his injuries.
He’d been in sixth grade, three years ahead of Kelly.
I’d had a feeling things would be rough for her when she got back to school. I’d even gone in to talk to the principal. Brandon Wilkinson had been a popular kid, an A-plus student, a great soccer player. I was worried some students might want to take it out on Kelly, that her mother was being blamed for getting one of the school’s most- liked kids killed.
I got a call Kelly’s first day back at school. Not because of something someone had said to her, but because of something Kelly had done. One of her classmates had asked her if she got to see her mother’s body in the car before they pulled it out, whether she’d been decapitated or anything cool like that, and Kelly’d stomped on the kid’s foot. Hurt so bad the girl had to be sent home.
“Maybe Kelly’s not ready to resume school,” the principal had told me. I’d had a word with Kelly, even made her demonstrate for me what she’d done. She’d stepped around the front of this other girl, raised her knee, then driven her heel into the top of her classmate’s foot. “She had it coming,” Kelly’d said.
She promised not to do anything like that again, and returned to school the following day. When I didn’t hear of any further incidents, I’d hoped things were okay. At least as well as could be expected.
“I’m not putting up with this,” I told her now. “I’m going into that office on Monday and those little bastards who are saying these things to you are-”
“Can’t I just go to another school?”
My hands tightened on the steering wheel as we drove down Broad Street, through the center of town, past the Milford Green. “We’ll see. I’ll look into it on Monday, okay? After the weekend?”
“It’s always ‘we’ll see.’ You say you will but you won’t.”
“If I say I’m going to do it, I’ll do it. But it means you’ll be with kids who don’t live in your neighborhood.”
