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“And you get to watch.”

“And I get to watch.”

I have a move for this. It’s not complicated and it has never failed, and standing in a lobby holding a pen in the wrong hand I can’t find a single part of it.

I put pen to paper.

“Cruel place.”

In the G-Wagon afterward I don’t start the engine.

There’s not much. A clinic page with her name on it and a photograph where she’s not smiling and has obviously been asked to. Doctor of Physical Therapy. A university in Sweden I can’t pronounce and one here I can.

That’s the entire internet on Astrid Nilsson. No dog, no boat, no half marathon. Nothing a person puts up in order to be looked at.

I read the bio twice. It doesn’t improve.

Then I put the phone face down on my leg, which is the grown man’s version of putting it away.

Monday at eleven thirty.

I’ve been handled by a lot of people who were paid to handle me. She’s going to be one more, and I already know I’m going to try to make her laugh, and I have a fair idea how that’s going to go.

Chapter two

Astrid

She struck another student.

“Ms. Nilsson? Are you still there?”

“Yes.”

“We do need a parent to come pick her up.”

“I am leaving now.”

I pull the truck door shut and end the call. Heat has collected inside the cab, trapped in the leather seat and in the metal buckle against my hand. My coat catches beneath the belt. I free it, put my bag on the passenger floor, and turn the key.

The truck was eleven years old when I bought it and it has started every morning since. It is not a beautiful machine. I did not want a beautiful machine. I wanted one that would be there in the morning.

The radio wakes in the middle of an advertisement.

I turn it off.

Tova’s notebook had been open beside her cereal this morning. She kept drawing after I told her to clear the table, moving the bowl six inches and apparently deciding that satisfied the instruction.

I can picture her refusing to move if somebody smaller needed somewhere to stand.

I cannot picture her fist hitting another child.

Apparently I have twenty minutes to improve my imagination.

I pull out of the clinic lot.

By the time I reach the school I will have a calm face and my questions in the correct order. Twenty minutes is more than enough. It has always been enough.

In the mirror, the man from the doorway is gone.