Page 58 of Havoc

Ransom stops.

He works on it for a second.

"He said his girl had beat every boy in her grade at long division and the teacher had called about it," he says, "and he could not decide whether to be proud or to go up there and fight somebody."

There is a sound in the ditch. Frogs and something moving in the water.

"That's true?" I say.

"I ain't got any reason to make it up."

"People make things up all the time for⁠—"

"Not me." He puts the cigarette in his mouth unlit and takes it back out. "Girl, I got a daughter I ain't spoke to since she was twelve years old. I send her money every month and it gets cashed every month and that's the whole of it. Nineteen now.

"I don't make things up about people's fathers."

* * *

He's gone maybe ten minutes when Storm comes around the side of the building.

He doesn't come from the door. He comes around from the back, out of the dark by the fence line, and he stops about eight feet away with his hands down and doesn't come any closer.

I stand up.

My heel goes and I stand up anyway.

"Twenty-two years," I say.

"I know how long it was."

"Two hundred and sixty-four checks. I've got them in that box, and I've counted them eleven times."

"Two hundred and sixty-five." He says it without any weight on it at all. "One didn't clear in oh-nine. Bank's fault. I wrote another one."

Everything in me goes out like a light and comes back.

"You knew I existed."

"Yes."

"You knew my name."

"Lennox Marie," Storm says. "Born the twelfth of March. He carried a picture of you in the front of his wallet where the money's supposed to go and he'd take the money out from behind it and hand it to a man and put the wallet back in his pocket and never once move that picture."

The gravel. The frogs. Forty people inside a building thirty feet away.

"Then why?" I ask, and my voice cracks straight down the middle of it and I let it. "Why send money to my mother for twenty-two years and never one word? Not a letter. Not a card. Not one line on the bottom of one check that said his name out loud to me. I was eleven. I would have taken anything."

Storm stands in the dark with his hands at his sides.

"Because a word would've told somebody you existed," he says.

I don't understand it.

I don't understand it and he can see that I don't, and he does not explain it, and that is the moment I stop being angry at this man and start being afraid of him.

"Go home," he says.