She tried to log on to their credit-card sites, but she didn’t know the passwords. Eric paid those bills.
She didn’t know anything.
Click-clicking, palm wet and sticky, she tried to open his e-mail.
Incorrect password.
It had been Elite-D, for years. The only password they ever used, but now it didn’t work.
One by one, she yanked open all the warping plywood drawers of the desk, paper wafting. Booster minutes, work orders, credit-card bills, mortgage statements, past-dues. One drawer glided free, landing on the floor, releasing something.
It fell to the carpet, tented there.
A creased Father’s Day card from years before, an illustration of a card deck on the cover:
I was dealt to be your daughter.
You were dealt to be my dad.
No matter how the game turns out,
You’re the best hand I ever had.
Bottom drawer, a fat stack of receipts—gym dues, meet fees, furnace maintenance, last week’s dinner at the Wooden Nickel.
She sat down at the swivel chair, breathing. Then she bent down to pick up the greeting card, her foot hitting something: the shredder bin under the desk.
She dragged the bin toward her and overturned it, knocking the cross-cut shredder onto the carpet. Over and over, she plunged her hands through the confettied shards, nicking her knuckles once, twice, until she found it: a pink paper corner, the staple trapped between the shredder blades: Briggins’ Collision.
It wasn’t a place she knew, not the Firestone they usually went to.
Briggins’ Collision.
Reardon.
Reardon, which was forty-seven miles away.
It took her a long time to free the pink paper from the keen blades of the shredder, but she did.
Quarter panel $400 +, another shard read. Cash.
She placed it in the center of the desk, bent her shoulders forward. As if her body had lost its bones, that’s how it felt. One too many shocks to her shocked system, she could no longer tense, no longer charge forward, no longer do anything. Her body was sinking back into itself like a slime-thick snail. Hiding.
Seventeen years of knowing him—the particular softness of the inside of his wrists, the way he whistled whenever he walked into a bank, the precise choreography of his fingers when he wanted her to turn over in bed. And now to feel she didn’t know anything at all.
Devon, do you think your father might have done something?
I don’t know what he did. Do you?
None of this, she said to herself, again and again, was Eric. This was not Eric.
Except there was this: He would always do anything for her, wouldn’t he? For Devon.
Trampolines, second mortgages, booster president, Gwen, the new equipment, the pit, the righteous e-mails he wrote to unfair judges but never sent, shouting down a heckler in the stands and again in the parking lot.
And yet sometimes he still seemed surprised by the power and weight of feelings she could stir in him, the anger when she was criticized, the awe when she performed.
I didn’t hear him, Lacey had said, but Devon kept saying, Dad, Dad, don’t cry, don’t.
And: What made that kid think he had any right?
So many things you never think you’ll do until you do them.
She stared into the shredder bin, the pink accordion snares of the receipt in her hands. If someone taped them together, they could still figure it all out, couldn’t they? And surely Briggins’ Collision had another copy, the original. And signs on the car, telltale clues, faint ridges that spoke of new paint. Patches, like the surface of an orange peel, like the time they’d had their bumper repaired.
Everything was there, if someone wanted to look.
She picked up the bin and thrust it under her arm, carried it down to the furnace, cast the tatters inside, and watched them burn.
She thought about the piece of Scotch tape, the paint chips on it. She should have burned it too. There might be microscopic pieces left in the drain. You could never hide everything.
Lying on the bed, the lights off, the ceiling fan burring softly, she tried to make the pieces fit together.
(Could you recall the details of a random night in your family life? she wondered, as if there were a you to hear it.) Time passed, hollowed out, and she tried to do something akin to meditation, self-hypnosis, a trance like at slumber parties as a kid. That night, the night Ryan died, everyone was tired and frantic. Everyone was always tired and frantic. Lacey’s birthday invitation had threatened Pedicures, pottery painting, and petits fours! and Katie remembered hunting for wrapping paper, worrying over the gift—a desk lamp that looked like a gummy bear, a pair of glitter bracelets—because Gwen’s daughter didn’t want for anything, as long as Gwen wanted it too.
Devon, exhausted from the Flip into Spring Invitational, her face with that kind of numb glaze, could barely tie her tennis shoes.
I’m gonna walk, she said. I don’t need a ride. It’s not that far.