Page 6 of Justice

I stood in there until the heat quit on me. The Banks would call in the morning, or they wouldn’t. Either way I’d smile, say thank you kindly, and start counting days on a brand-new calendar in my head. Every job was a countdown to the next thing. Every dollar went to the same get-away account.

There was a number I needed. The day I hit it, I was gone, and Skye Mercer would lay down in the dirt next to the name that came before her. I’d wake up somebody brand-new in a place that had never heard of either one of them.

Till then, I’d sleep in a room with one door and four locks. And I’d be the sweetest, warmest, most heaven-sent caregiver a rich, grieving family ever let through their gate. I’d hold that old woman’s hand and mean it clean down to the bone. I may be desperate for the cash, but I was also going to do a great job. That family deserved it.

I got out, dried off, and checked the locks one more time before bed. Top to bottom, every last one.

3

JUSTICE

My head was pounding like somebody was trying to come through my temples with a jackhammer. That was the effect my oldest daughter had on me lately. One phone call from that school and every vein in my skull started throbbing in the same rhythm, a countdown to whatever fresh hell she’d cooked up while my back was turned.

When Monica passed, I made myself a promise standing over her casket. I would raise our girls right. I would be enough for both of them, and I would not let the world get its hands on them, not like it got its hands on everything else soft that ever came into my life. I meant that promise down to the marrow. What I did not understand, standing there in my black suit, was that the real danger wasn’t out there in the world.

It was already living in my house. It just had my dead wife’s eyes.

Storie was a field of landmines, and three years after Monica’s death I still couldn’t map the thing. Some days she was sweet as pie, curled up under me on the couch, laughing at my jokes, calling me Daddy in that little-girl voice she saved for when she wanted something.

Other days I’d look into my child’s face and see nothing looking back. A stillness I couldn’t name and didn’t want to. I tried to convince myself it was just grief.

So that’s what I did. I loved her. I loved her with money when the words didn’t reach. Trips, shopping sprees, anything her little heart wanted. And when that didn’t work either, I told myself she just needed more time. More love. A softer hand than mine. Maybe a woman’s touch, since God saw fit to leave me doing this alone. Her aunts and her grandmother were three hundred miles up the road in Pittsburgh. I loved them. But I wasn’t about to ship my grief up 76 and call it parenting. Kira came around. Monica’s best friend, always willing, always there. It helped. It wasn’t enough.

Nothing I did worked. The trips, the money, giving her space, bringing Kira around. None of it changed how Storie treated people. Some nights I wondered if I was trying to fix something that didn’t want fixing.

On a normal day I didn’t do pickups. That’s what Reuben was for, a quiet older cat who ran my girls to and from school every morning and afternoon like clockwork. Kingsbrook for Storie, all the way across town, and Stonewall Elementary for Dream. But there was nothing normal about a call that pulls you out a meeting and tells you to come get your child before somebody with a badge gets involved. A call like that, you show up yourself. So I left Rita and drove out to Kingsbrook to pull Storie out early and look her in her face myself.

Dream was still in school where she belonged, and Reuben would bring her home at regular dismissal, once there was somebody in that house to bring her home to.

She slid into the front seat and I pulled off before I even turned to look at her.

“Storie. Why would you say that shit to your teacher?”

“Because she started it.” Bored. Examining a fingernail. “She got mad because I corrected her. She said conversate in front of the class like it’s a real word. It’s not, Daddy. I looked it up. How is that woman standing up there teaching English and she doesn’t even know conversate isn’t a word? With all the money you pay that place, the least they could do is hire an English teacher who actually speaks English.”

“I’m not talking about no conversate.” I found her eyes when I looked over and held them. “I’m talking about what you said about that woman’s father. In front of the entire class. Why would you do that?”

Here is what people never understood about my daughter, and what I was only starting to understand about her. Storie didn’t lash out. Lashing out is a hot, sloppy, thing you do when you lose control, and my child never lost control of anything. She had a knack for getting under people’s skin. She liked to find their soft, gooey spots and jab at them with her steel-forked tongue, watching their faces to see it come apart.

“Well.” She said as calm as Sunday morning. “Her father is in prison for kiddie porn. I found the news article. So all I said was, maybe she should worry about her own family before she corrects mine, since her daddy’s a⁠—”

“Storie.” The name came out of me like a slammed door. “That is not okay. You do not put a person’s private business out in front of a class of children. You hear me? That woman didn’t do nothing to you.”

“She embarrassed me.”

“And how do you even know that about her? Why are you digging up somebody’s daddy’s court records?”

She shrugged one shoulder and looked out the window at the world going by. “I Google everything, Daddy. I’m intellectually curious.”

I ran a hand down my face and drove.

I can’t lie, some sick corner of my mind was proud. Fifteen years old and she moved through people like a scalpel, saw straight through them to the thing that would hurt the most. In my world that is a gift. In my world that is the difference between the man who walks out the room and the man who gets carried out of it. I’d built an empire on being able to read what a person was hiding.

I was proud of how sharp she was. But that pride scared the shit out of me. Because a gift like that, in a child with no bottom to her, pointed at whoever made her feel small that day, was not a gift.

If somebody didn’t redirect all that sharpness, my daughter was going to grow into something dangerous.

I’d find her a therapist. Somebody trained to reach down into whatever Monica’s death had cracked open in her and get it right before it completely hardened. She needed help, not a father who looked at his own baby girl and felt a chill run up his spine. She was fifteen. She’d lost her mama. That was all this was.