“Not exactly,” Katie said. “Lacey, what if you called your mom for me?”
“Why don’t you call her?”
“I have. She isn’t answering. Maybe if you called…”
Lacey looked at her, her fingers dancing up to the security panel on the wall.
“I texted her,” she said, “when you got here. So she already knows.”
Katie wondered if, behind her aura of mute surrender, the stupor of her eyes, like a drugged pixie, Lacey knew more about her mother, and everything, than anyone guessed.
“She just leaves you alone with Riley? Does she know him well?” Katie blurted, not sure where it came from or why she was saying it.
“Riley’s a girl,” Lacey said. “I already have a boyfriend.”
“You do?”
“We met at the county invitational. He works concessions. He has long sideburns and the keys to all the rooms at Lightning City.”
Those pointy brows like butterfly antennae, and the stoned lips, numb and pink-jutted.
“Lacey, when you say boyfriend, what does he—”
“He has a big key ring and he said he’ll take me on a tour, but not till I’m in high school.”
Katie squinted, trying to be sure she was understanding.
“Don’t tell my mom, okay?” Lacey was saying, her head tilted against the front door. “About my boyfriend.”
A crush of questions pushed into Katie’s brain, all for this candy sticklette of a girl.
But before Katie could ask them, the front door had opened, the beeps of the security system announcing Katie’s departure.
“Mom says if a man ever touches me,” Lacey said, “she’ll definitely kill him.”
The door shutting behind her, the smell of sweet pea dancing behind her, and then gone.
Katie sat in her car for a long time.
There were two missed calls from Eric—prompted by Gwen, she was sure.
“I know what you did,” she said to his voice mail. “How could you? You’d better be driving home with my daughter right now. I know everything.”
And she wasn’t even sure what she meant by everything. It felt like the biggest word in the world. It felt like a black hole.
Pulling up the drive, she saw the garage door was open, gaping before her, a big ragged mouth.
Inside, Mr. Watts stood with Drew in the back corner, next to a snare of rakes and brooms, the rust-furred reel lawn mower, the only one they’d owned since Devon’s accident. Long ago, Eric had taken a sledgehammer to the old one, sending sparks across the lawn, a figure eight of singed grass. Even this one—its blades looked so sharp.
“Mom, we were looking for the shovel,” Drew said as she got out of the car and walked toward them. “In the book, they dig up a buried treasure.”
“Hardy Boys,” Mr. Watts said, gesturing toward the worn volume Drew had set on the garage floor. “Melted Coins. He can keep it.”
“And look what we found.” Drew held out his hand. “On the ground.”
She looked in his outstretched palm, cherried and tender. In the center sat a trio of silver wafers, one as large as a dime, the other two almost too small to see.
Katie cupped Drew’s hand in her own, eyes still on the silver, like the paint in a model-plane kit.
“He thought they were silverfish,” Mr. Watts said.
“Not once I got closer,” Drew insisted, looking down at the concrete floor, as if expecting to see more. “There was no antenna or anything.”
“Paint chips,” Mr. Watts said. “Must have come off your car.”
“Dad’s car,” Drew said. “Mom’s is blue.”
She could feel Mr. Watts looking at her. Drew waiting for her.
But her brain stuttered, stalled.
“Anyway,” Mr. Watts said, clearing his throat, “we had an adventure.”
Her phone, like a preying animal, one eye lifted, blinked with texts from Eric: Please, I can explain.
Get home now, she typed.
It was the sole corner in the house without booster flyers and spreadsheets, without gym grips and tape and everything coated in chalk.
“I hope I get to go outside soon,” Drew said, his cheek pressed against his window screen. “Not just the garage.”
“You will, honey. Open the window.”
“Look,” he said, pointing to the black walnut tree outside.
She was grateful for the distraction.
“The catkins,” she said. “You used to say they looked like demon fingers.”
They’d chosen the house in part because of the dark canopy of the walnut tree. When they first came to see it nearly fifteen years ago, Katie asked the man rolling a sod cutter next door—their future neighbor Mr. Watts—what all the long green frills drooping from the branches were. They looked like flower leis.
Happens every spring, Mr. Watts had said. You like them now, but just you wait.
Later, she’d realized what he meant, the way the catkins fell in soft heaps to the ground and turned brown and black. Banana-peel clumps, Devon called them.