Just Around the Corner
“No.”
“You want to tell me about it?”
“No.”
“Do I need to know?”
Probably.
Another turn. And a car passing on the left. Matt slowed down from twenty miles an hour to a crawl.
“The first thing I remember about my father happened when I was about two. The cops came to our door and put handcuffs on him and hauled him away. He wasn’t back the next morning.”
He paused. Waited for her reaction—disgust, contempt, horror. Or maybe pity. The reactions, though varied in strength, were basically all the same.
Phyllis held hers in.
“That was only the first arrest. There were many more.” He paused. “I don’t know how old I was when I realized what my mom did while he was gone—the different men friends she ran around with, the bars. Trying to find forgetfulness, I guess.”
At least that was the justification he’d created for her. The one he could stomach.
“And love,” Phyllis said quietly.
“If that’s what she wanted, she wasn’t looking in the right places.”
“Not everyone is as smart as you.”
He replayed the words a couple of times, searching for the sarcasm. He found only open understanding. From a woman who didn’t know him at all.
A woman who’d spent only one day with him. A day that had resulted in irrevocable consequences. The baby. He couldn’t forget, even for a moment, about his most recent fall from grace.
“Every time my father went to jail, he was gone for a longer period. The last time, he never made it back home.”
“He died in prison.”
“Not from a disease. You don’t have to worry about that,” he assured her, coming up to a one-way bridge. He waited for the approaching car to go first. “He was murdered.”
Stepping lightly on the gas, Matt guided the Blazer over the bridge.
“And your mother?”
“She ran off with her boyfriend.”
“And abandoned you and your brother and sister?”
“Just me. My brother was…gone by then. And she took my sister. Lori was older than me, out of high school, and she and my mom were pals.”
“They just…left you?”
More turns. Matt negotiated them. “I was glad they did,” he told Phyllis. “I wasn’t living with them anymore, hadn’t been since I turned sixteen and got a job at the grocery store. I rented a one-bedroom apartment with my first paycheck.”
“At sixteen?” Her voice had lost its calm.
The warmth was still there. Matt didn’t get it.
“Who’d rent to a sixteen-year-old kid?”
“An old lady who’d taught him in the fourth grade and had a room over her garage.”