The Good Girl

She says that she could never wrap the words around it, about how her father makes her feel. She says I wouldn’t understand anyway because he’d never hit her and never let her spend one night cold. He never let her go to sleep without dinner.

 

She has a student named Romain, this black kid who spends most of his nights in a homeless shelter on the north side. He chooses to go to school though no one’s making him. He’s eighteen, working on a high school diploma because he won’t settle for a GED. He spends his days studying his ass off in school and spends his afternoons cleaning city streets. He spends his nights begging for money under the “L.” She volunteered in a homeless shelter to see what it was like. “For two hours I pulled moldy cheese off prepackaged sandwiches,” she says. The rest of the sandwich was salvaged for the tenants to eat.

 

Maybe she isn’t all that wrapped up in herself as I expected her to be.

 

I know the feel of dismissive eyes, eyes that look without really seeing a thing. I know the sound of contempt in a voice. I know how betrayal and disillusionment feel, when someone who could give you the world refuses even a tiny piece of it.

 

Maybe we aren’t so different after all.

 

 

 

 

 

Gabe

 

Before

 

I check the phone records for Kathryn Thatcher. Not a questionable call in sight. The last time she spoke to her son was when he called from a cell phone registered to Steve Moss at the end of September. The rest were telemarketers, collection agencies, reminders for doctor appointments to which she never went.

 

I put a call into the nursing home in Gary. The attendant asks if I’m family. I say no, I’m not, and they won’t pay me the time of day. I can hear an elderly man screaming in the background. I try not to imagine Mrs. Thatcher listening to his roar. I know it would make her upset. I remind myself that she’s being fed, bathed, cared for.

 

I remind myself that I am not her son. This is not my responsibility.

 

But still I can’t get this picture out of my mind: my mother sitting in her bathrobe at the end of a sunken bed, staring vacantly out a dirty window, hopeless and alone, while an elderly toothless man shouts in the hall. Underpaid nurses ignore her. The only thing to look forward to is the day she will die.

 

The case of Mia Dennett runs nightly on the evening news, thanks to pressure on the part of Judge Dennett, but still no leads.

 

I checked with the DMV and there are no vehicles registered to a Colin Thatcher or Steve Moss, or a Kathryn Thatcher for that matter. We’ve been in contact with anyone who knew Colin Thatcher that we can possibly find. Friends are few, only a couple high school pals who haven’t spoken to him in years. There’s an ex-girlfriend in Chicago who I can’t be entirely certain he wasn’t paying for sex. She doesn’t have one nice thing to say about him. She’s a woman scorned; she offers nothing valuable to me other than a quick lay if I’m interested, which I’m not. Some schoolteachers say he was a boy who got the short end of the stick. Others describe him as a misfit. Mrs. Thatcher’s neighbors can only say he visits frequently, he takes out the trash and mows the lawn. Big deal. The neighbors don’t know what goes on inside the home. But they can tell me he drives a truck. Color? Make? Model? No one seems to know. The answers all conflict. I don’t bother with a license plate number.

 

My mind drifts to the postcard of Grand Marais from time to time. I find myself researching the harbor town on the internet, and ordering travel brochures online. I track the mileage from Chicago to Grand Marais and go so far as to request footage from traffic cams along the route, even though I haven’t a clue what I’m looking for.

 

I’m at a dead end. There’s nothing to do now but wait.

 

 

 

 

 

Colin

 

Before

 

Just my luck, the girl’s still sleeping when I hear a scratch on the front door. It about scares the shit out of me. I jump from my bed on the flabby couch and realize I don’t have the gun. It’s dawn, the sun just beginning to rise. I pull aside the curtains for a look but I see nothing. What the hell, I think. I open the front door to discover that the damn cat has brought us a dead mouse. He’s been MIA for days. He looks like hell, almost as bad as the nearly decapitated rodent beside his bloody feet.

 

I scoop the cat into my hands. I’ll deal with the mouse later. For now, the damn cat is my ransom, divine intervention, if I actually believed in that kind of shit. The cabinets have been cleared out. No food left. If I don’t get to the store soon, we’ll starve.

 

I don’t wait until she’s awake. I let myself into the bedroom and say, “I’m going to town.”

 

She sits up at the sound of my voice. She’s confused by sleep and rubs at her eyes.

 

“What time is it?” she asks, but I ignore the question.

 

“He’s coming with me.” The cat lets out a cry. This gets her attention. She’s alert. She reaches her hands out to him, but I step back. The little bastard claws my arm.

 

“How did you—”

 

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