What are you gonna do? Eldon asked Gary. “That’s what I asked him, right in front of everyone else,” Eldon told Miranda on their way back into town from shooting practice. “‘What the fuck are you gonna do now?’”
“Not in front of Katie,” Miranda said. “What do you want her first word to be?”
A week later, she found out what Gary had decided to do.
There was a knock at the door around midnight. She’d gotten home early from the Kickstart, relieved the elderly woman from down the hall of their apartment building who often looked after Katie, who was fussy. Teething, she figured. Miranda was cradling her in her arms, walking her around the apartment, trying to settle her down.
“Police,” someone said.
There was hardly anything left of the Toyota, the officer told her. The train hit it at nearly sixty miles per hour, carried it down the track well over a mile. They’d need her to come in and identify this Eldon Swain person, at least those parts of him that were left.
15
“SO, WHAT’S THE PLAN, Stan?” Angie asked me.
It was hard not to smile. It was perhaps the first time I’d allowed the corners of my mouth to go up since coming home several hours earlier from the Metropolitan. Although there had been no “family meeting” to fill in Angie and her brother Paul on what had happened, it didn’t take long for them to put it all together. I’d told Paul a couple of things, Angie had spoken to her mother, then the kids compared notes, went back to me and Sarah individually to try to fill in some of the gaps, and they more or less had it. They’d been so good at information gathering, I couldn’t help but wonder whether they didn’t have a more promising future in the newspaper business than Sarah or I, certainly the way things were at the moment.
Paul, freed of work obligations by me, had gone off to a friend’s house, and Sarah had vanished as well, telling Angie she had errands to run at the mall. I doubted that. She just didn’t want to have to keep avoiding me in the house. She needed more space. We hadn’t said a word to each other since Sarah blasted me in the middle of the newsroom for everyone to hear. I wished I could have been one of the people in the audience, rather than one of the featured players. It would have been the greatest bit of office gossip to chew on in years.
Now I was sitting at the kitchen table, a cup of coffee in front of me, staring at the wall.
I had fucked up, and didn’t know what to do.
Then Angie came in, sat down across from me with a cup of coffee of her own, and asked her question.
“I don’t really have a plan,” I said.
Angie stirred her coffee, took out the spoon, and licked it. She and I had been through a pretty traumatic set of circumstances a little over a year ago, and that shared experience had given us a special kind of bond since. She’d grown up a hell of a lot since then. She was in her second year at Mackenzie University, and taking, among other things, some psychology courses. But it hadn’t been her classes that had given her insights into human relationships. She had an instinctive feel about those.
“This is not what it’s supposed to be like around here,” Angie said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Has it ever been this bad between you and Mom?” she asked.
I thought a moment, shook my head. “No. That thing, a couple of years ago, with the purse?”
Angie nodded. It was not an easily forgettable episode in our lives.
“That was dumb, but your mom forgave me. And I’ve tried to be a better person since then, not such a know-it-all, not telling everyone how to live their lives. Trying to keep a lid on the anxieties.”
Angie nodded. “We’ve noticed. You’ve been doing not too badly.”
I smiled again. God, she was beautiful, this girl of mine. “Thanks for noticing. But I let myself get dragged into something where I didn’t belong, and it’s blown up big-time.”
“Where do you think Trixie is?” Angie asked. “She’s really got a daughter?”
“So she said, just before she took off. I guess, wherever her daughter is, that’s where she’s going to go.”
Angie knew Trixie. Of course, she’d met her when we used to be neighbors, but Angie had also consulted Trixie, given her area of expertise, for some background on at least one of her psych courses. “I think she’d be a good mom,” she said.
My eyebrows went up. “You think?”
“She’s a nice person. Like, just because she does what she does doesn’t mean she can’t be a nice person. I mean, you’re the one who’s her friend and everything.”
I sighed. “Look where it’s got me.”
She reached out and touched my hand. “You always get in trouble because you care. You care about us, and you care about your friends. Maybe a bit too much, sometimes.”
I smiled. “How’d you get to be so smart?”
Angie smiled. “Mom.”
“I think she thinks I had something going on with Trixie. She left some lipstick when she kissed me, when I was handcuffed to the railing. I wasn’t really in a position to resist.”
Angie said, “I wonder if all the other girls have these kinds of chats with their dads.”