It had only been recently that Johnson had begun the long climb out of the canyon of failure toward the glimmer of a thought that God may not be as full of scorn as he once thought. Things he heard some radio preacher say. Words on a page about an easy yoke and a light burden. He’d always looked at religion as a crutch for people who were too scared to do life by themselves. Now he wasn’t so sure.
There were things he missed from his childhood—the lazy summer afternoons of lemonade and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, friends, fireflies, tying strings to the legs of june bugs and following them like they were kites. But the truth was he longed to escape the past and the remembrance of things stored and locked away in the trunk of memory. Some nights he would lie on his bed listening to her soft breathing, cars passing, and he would try to get a picture of childhood in his mind, of some good thing he could hold, but the good thoughts were usually fleeting. Some men could put all that behind them and move on. For some reason he couldn’t, and maybe that was part of the reason the girl was still with him.
June Bug navigated the Dumpsters and the empty 18-wheeler parked behind the store. To the north, a field with wild grass and flowers bloomed. To the west were mountains and above them dark clouds, as if something waited to descend.
A diesel engine chugged behind him, and he turned to see a tow truck at the light, pulling into the parking lot. He waved at June Bug but she had her face down, watching her feet like he’d told her not to do, the front wheel wobbling back and forth.
“Don’t watch your feet, dummy,”
his father had yelled from the porch.
“Look up and keep your eyes on what you’re headed for. You watch your feet and you’ll wind up on the ground.”
“June Bug, we need to go,” Johnson said, his voice echoing off the store wall.
She kept riding as if she didn’t hear.
An employee in a blue vest stepped out a door and lit a cigarette. The woman glanced toward the girl and blew a long trail of smoke in the air. “This her first bike?”
“Yeah.”
“Like a duck to water, isn’t it?” she said, smiling.
“Just about.” He raised his voice again. “June Bug! Let’s go.”
She looked up and immediately put her feet out, scraping the pavement with her shoes until she stopped. “Why? I’m just getting started.”
“We’ll come back later. I need to go see about the RV.”
“Okay, you go see about it and I’ll stay here.”
“I can’t leave you here. Come on. You can ride more later.”
Her shoulders slumped, and she pushed herself inch by inch until she came closer. “You promise?”
He nodded and waved at her to go ahead of him; then they moved past tire and lube and around the parking lot to lawn and garden. He caught up to her and grabbed the back of the seat before she rolled into traffic. Yellow lights flashed in the lot, and the big diesel was in front of the RV, backing up, its bed extended.
“What are they doing to our house?” June Bug said, getting off the bike.
“Guess we’re being evicted.”
“But I don’t want to leave. I’m just starting to have fun.”
“I know, but—”
“This always happens.” She grabbed the straps under her chin with one hand and tried in vain to take them off. “The minute I start having fun, something goes wrong and we have to move.”
He caught the bike as it fell. “I know it seems that way, but—”
“I hate it,” she yelled. She had her helmet off now and slammed it to the ground with a loud crack. The doors to lawn and garden weren’t working, and Johnson watched her run down the sidewalk to the other entrance and go inside.
He picked up the bike and carried it into the parking lot, stowing it on top of the RV.
The manager was there with the tow truck operator, a thin man with stubble and greasy hands. “Sorry about this, man,” he said.
“Not your fault,” Johnson said. He turned to the manager. “I went over for the part today, and they said it could be another couple of days.”
The manager didn’t make eye contact. “This is not an RV park. You’re supposed to be here overnight.”
The thin man put on his gloves and loosened the chain and fastened it to a hook on the front of the RV. “Where are we taking you?”
Johnson scratched his head. “I guess you could tow me to the lot where I’m having the part delivered.”
He glanced at the manager and said, “I can’t tow you to another parking lot. It’s either to some address or the impound. And that’s going to cost you to get it out.”
Diesel smell wafted over them. The manager stood with his hands on his hips, as if he were powerless.
“Take him to this address,” a woman said. It was Sheila and June Bug was with her. She handed the man a piece of paper. “There’s a carport by the garage. I cleared it last night.”
“Sheila—,” the manager said.
“I’m just helping them out until they can get back on the road.”
The manager looked at Johnson and shook his head. “He’s going to be nothing but trouble. Him and that girl will bleed you dry.”
3
Mae Edwards had been born in Dogwood, West Virginia, in a small shell of a house that still stood by the winding creek that worked its way from the north side underneath the interstate, by the train tracks, and down through the heart of the sleepy town. As water will do, it found its purpose by spilling into something bigger than itself—the Mud River. Dogwood, it is said, is a place where dreams die and good people live out their lives like the last three innings of a hopeless baseball game. Too many runs to make up but too much pride to quit. Mae knew about feeling behind. And she had felt that old, nagging desire to just quit several times, though she had never given in.
Only one thing kept her going.
She was at the table, clipping an article from the
Herald-Dispatch
and placing it in a pile on the plastic tablecloth dotted with coffee cup rings and stains from a thousand forgettable dinners.
Her husband, Leason, walked through the front door with another newspaper. He smelled wet, like an old dog that had just run through the dew-stained grass of the yard. “Here’s you a fresh one,” he said, plopping the newspaper on the table beside her.
“I thank you.” She sipped her coffee.
She waded through the news like seining for minnows, her net the pair of scissors that seemed attached to her right hand. A man shot in Huntington. Police had released few details. A wreck of a church bus in Wayne County. Repairs on a bridge over the Ohio were going to cost more than originally planned. Vandalism in Ritter Park.
He went to the refrigerator and opened it, grunting as he bent over to see shelves crammed with food and Tupperware containers. She was one to toss things, but he would not, and his choices were either a gastronomic paradise or a ticket to Cabell Huntington’s emergency room, depending on which container he chose. Some jams and jellies in the door hadn’t been opened since Kennedy was shot.
“I put one out over on the counter,” Mae said, still staring at the headline, “Top Girl Scout Cookie Sellers to Be Honored.”
Leason shut the door, then found the grapefruit, still cool to the touch, on a plastic cutting board. She’d put it out there for him to slice with the knife he’d sharpened the day before. Like always, he held half of the fruit to his nose, taking in the ripe citrus smell. The grapefruit spoons were in a dirty silverware drawer that went off the track when opened. She’d asked him a hundred times to fix it. He took the sports section from the new paper before he sat and tipped a generous dash of NoSalt to the grapefruit halves.
“See anything?” he said.
Mae sighed. “Not much. Not what I’m looking for.”
Leason attacked the grapefruit, not noticing he was sending showers of juice across the table, all while checking the box score of the latest Cincinnati game. Another abysmal season, but Mae knew there was something to be said about loyalty to a team. Not like the players who jumped from one league to another simply because somebody gave them a million or two more. Leason had talked about the days when it wasn’t the money that drove a team toward the pennant but just a passion for the game. He read the box score every day through the prism of that memory, then grabbed the life section and headed down the hall.
Mae shook her head.
I could set my watch to that man’s bowel movements.
She knew he would spend the next half hour in there doing the word jumble and reading the comics. Same time every day, rain or shine. She wasn’t sure whether to be disgusted about it or to thank God for the regularity.
A half hour later the water chugged through the rusty pipes and the toilet gurgled into the septic tank, and the old man walked back through the kitchen, his belt askew and the varicose veins on his legs showing blue, and threw away his spent grapefruit.
Mae put her paper and scissors down and sat back, her coffee at arm’s length, toying with the handle back and forth. “You think I should just give up, don’t you?” she said, studying his face. “You think I’m crazy, still looking through the paper every day.”
Leason leaned against the stove, wiping his hands on a paper towel from the dispenser he had mounted under the cabinets. “I never said that.”
“I didn’t say you said it. I said you
think
it.”
He tossed the wadded-up towel toward the paper bag that served as their trash. Not even close. “If it helps you to keep looking for things that might give an answer, I don’t care if you take a shovel and dig all the way to China. And you gotta do what you need to do. You don’t need anybody telling you whether it’s a good idea or not.”
“You’re supposed to support me in this.”
“I just brought you the paper, didn’t I?”
“I don’t mean that. I mean support with your words and your thoughts.”
“How in creation do you know a person’s thoughts? Mae, you’re not making sense. No sense at all.”
Mae ran her hand across the tablecloth. Spreading the crumbs was all she was doing, but it still made her feel like she was doing something. The sound of his voice was both a comfort and a wound. She longed to hear what he was thinking, but every time she coaxed a few words out, it only reminded her of what she was missing. His words were a long, cool drink on a hot day, and over the years the drinks had become few and far between. “You think she’s gone for good.”
“I think the best time to find her was the night she disappeared. After that the trail goes cold. And with all the sickos out there these days, it’s hard to tell. It’s just hard to tell.”
“What you’re saying is, after seven years, there’s no use to what I’m doing.”
He crossed his arms like an umpire listening to a coach’s tirade. With as much heartfelt compassion as he could muster, he said, “I don’t think we’re ever going to know for sure what happened. I could be wrong. Something could turn up.”
She closed her eyes tight and held them that way, as if doing so could bring the past into greater clarity. “There’s something we’re missing. There’s something we’re not seeing about this whole thing.”
Leason spoke quickly. “What we’re not seeing in this whole thing is that your daughter knows the truth—”
“Now don’t you go bringing Dana in,” she interrupted. “She’s been tied up in knots about this ever since it happened.”
“She sure has a funny way of being tied up.”
He spoke about Dana like she wasn’t his daughter. Always had. There was some disconnect between the two of them, and Mae had always felt in the middle.
“She shows it different; that’s all,” Mae said. “Look at you and me. I’m here clipping the newspaper almost seven years to the day, and you’re ignoring it like you did from day one.”
“I never ignored it. How dare you say that.”
“You acted like it never even happened.” Mae felt the tears coming and she turned away. This was the most they had talked about it since the anniversary two years earlier, and every time they did, it was like opening up some old wound that had barely scabbed over.
Leason stared at the empty birdcage by the refrigerator, his jaw set. He could say a lot more, she knew that, but he just stood there like a fifth head on Mount Rushmore, stone-faced and easing away from the fight. A few months after Natalie went missing—it was in the fall after the leaves started turning—Dana did the same thing, running off with some guy for a week or two and then returning and losing her job. Mae chalked it up to her grief, but she knew Leason didn’t believe it. He thought Dana knew more than she was telling. He thought the sheriff was right in bringing her back and talking, the trail getting colder.
Leason swallowed something, perhaps his pride, and mustered the courage to break the silence. “How is it I could support you better?”
Mae let the question hang there in the air between them. She rested her forehead on the palm of her hand. “If I’d have known it was going to turn out like this, I never would have had children.”
“You can’t know how things are going to turn out. And you can’t choose somebody’s life for them. You don’t have the power.”
Mae folded, and she could tell Leason was watching. It happened like this around every anniversary. She’d go into her shell, and she wondered how Leason viewed these episodes. Theirs was not a great marriage, nothing for the ages, but it wasn’t bad. And it was certainly worth saving.
She knew he still hurt because of the suspicion on him. He’d been a suspect in those early days when people were looking for anyone to blame, though Dana had said a white man with a leather jacket had stolen the car with Natalie in the back.
“I remember when I was a kid and we were moving up this way from the coalfields,” Leason said. “We had this black dog that found us in the hollow down there. Just a mutt. We never even knew where he came from. Just showed up one day. Times were hard and Daddy said we didn’t have enough to feed the rest of us and we couldn’t keep him. But I felt for the little thing, so I used to find scraps from the table, crusts of bread and things, and put them out the back door when nobody was looking.
“That dog stayed with us. Made his home with us. Went out and scavenged the dump for food or caught a grouse and then came back and slept under our porch. He never got an invite from any of us except for me, but he was about as faithful as they come.
“After the war, Daddy decided to get out of the mines because of the machines and the dust and the black lung. He packed everything we had on a wagon and sent the rest of us over the mountain to come up this way. I don’t know how he ever got that thing all the way here with those two plow horses he had, but I remember the day he showed up at my grandmama’s house. Just sitting on that wagon, smiling from ear to ear, our stuff still tied on the back.
“I asked him where the dog was, and he acted like he didn’t know what I was talking about. Then he said the dog fell in the river, and I knew he’d probably kicked it in or thrown something at it to get it to stop following him. And I cried like a baby about that dog and kept begging God to let me have him back. I’d tied this sea grass string around his neck as a sort of collar and cut a hole in a piece of leather and burned his name in there. We called him Percy. I don’t know why. It seemed like a good name for a dog to a little kid.
“I dreamed about him one night, walking past hobo camps, coming through the woods, and escaping danger. Rainstorms and floods and all these adventures.
“About a year later—it was in the spring when everything was starting to bloom and the worms were coming up and the ground real soggy—my little sister started whooping out on the porch. Mama tried to get her to be quiet because she was sure the neighbors could hear. But what she was screaming was ‘Percy, Percy, Percy!’
“Daddy was making breakfast in that big iron skillet, the eggs sizzling and popping, and he stayed there watching out the window while us kids ran out to see about all the fuss. Then I saw that old dog. From a distance it looked like Percy, but I wasn’t sure. He came up real slow, like he wasn’t really sure it was us. And then when he saw me, he took off running and I saw that sea grass string around his neck.
“I drove back down that way once just to take a look around, and I hit the trip meter while I was still in the driveway. When I pulled up next to where that old house had been, it was more than eighty-seven miles. That dog walked more than eighty-seven miles to come home to us. It took him a solid year and you could tell he was worse for the wear, but he made it. I don’t know how in the world he found us, but he did.”
Mae had been watching his hands as he told the story. She took a big swig of the tepid coffee. “Is there supposed to be some point mixed up with that?”
“I hope to say there is. When something you love gets lost, it will usually find its way back. It may take a while, but if it’s out there, it’ll return.”
“She’d be almost nine now,” she said. “Her birthday is coming up.”
“The other point is, you have to let it go. You have to release even the chance that whatever you love is going to come back. That’s where the power comes.”
She turned to her husband. “That girl is alive. I know it just as sure as you and I are here talking. She’s alive.”
He nodded. “All right, then. I’ll support you until you find her.”
“I’m not giving up.”
“I didn’t think you would.”
“Everybody in this town is going to eat their words about her being dead and buried. She’s coming back here, and I’m going to raise her like she was my own.”
Leason licked his lips and found an errant piece of grapefruit stuck there. “I’ll be the first to drive you both to the mall.”
Someone drove up the gravel driveway and Leason turned his head. “Wonder who that could be.”
Mae stood and looked out the front hallway, past the Hummel figurines and family pictures and decorative plates and handblown glass swans and paperweights on a shelf in the entry. The two lights on top of the car were all she needed to see.
“Oh, dear. What’s happened now?”
4
Sheila said her house wasn’t that far away, but the tow truck driver didn’t seem too happy about taking the RV back into the trees and up a couple of steep hills and around some winding roads. I was lost as soon as we pulled out of the parking lot. The driver fussed about how much gasoline cost and how he probably wouldn’t break even this month, and I just listened, sitting in the middle seat with my dad on the right nodding and saying, “I know what you mean.”
We finally made it to the address, but the man drove past the driveway and had to back up. Then he cussed when he saw it had tall pine trees on either side and was as winding as a snake to the house.
“If I hit one of these trees, you’re going to have more trouble than replacing an engine part,” he said.
My dad got out and walked the driveway, then guided the man until he got to a level place by the garage. “Sheila said to put it right here.”
First thing I noticed was the barking coming from the garage. A big throaty bark like some kind of monster was in there. Lots of scratching at the door too.
While they got the RV unhooked, I went exploring. The house was red on the outside, the color of the wood used to build it. There was a wooden porch with some chairs set up real nice and a fireplace built right out in the yard. There wasn’t a house I could see next to hers until I ran out a ways and looked through the trees. That’s when I found the barbed-wire fence. Where there’s a fence there’s usually some animals, and when I saw a horse barn my heart went pitter-patter all over again.
I ran down the hill and stumbled onto an old basketball court where I could ride my bike, and there was a wire running from one huge tree all the way past the house that I later learned was called a zip line. You grabbed hold of a handle attached to a pulley and rode down.
I saw this beautiful horse standing by the barn, and it was all I could do not to climb right through the fence to go over and say hello. And when I saw that my dad and the tow truck guy were still trying to get the RV situated, that’s what I did.
I have a long history with horses, and I like to draw them in my journals. One time there was this carnival where you could ride a pony around and around, and it was about as close to heaven as I ever hope to get down here. Just the feeling of riding on its back and holding the reins made my insides feel like they were about to burst. I closed my eyes and pretended I was out on the range, just me and my horse, with nothing but empty spaces, and I could choose any which way I wanted to go. It’s kind of like the feeling of living in an RV, only you don’t have to put gas in a horse.
When I made it close enough to reach out and touch the horse, my dad yelled. His voice spooked the animal and the thing reared up and I fell. Another horse came around the barn and ran near where I was—so near I could feel the ground shake. I turned over and pulled my legs up to make myself as small as I could. It wasn’t something I did on purpose; it just happened.
Next thing I knew I was in the air over my dad’s shoulder, and he set me down on the other side of the fence and crawled over it. There were six horses, not two, and for the first time I felt like we had hit the jackpot in life’s lottery.
“You need to respect other people’s property,” my dad said, breathing hard. He pointed to a sign on the fence that I guess I should have seen. “You can’t go wandering into somebody else’s place. You could get in trouble or hurt or both.”
“Yes, sir.”
The tow guy had a sheet my dad had to sign and then pay him, which I’m not sure how he did. I sat by the fence and watched the horses run. I already had names for two of them—the one with the white spot above its nose was Giselle, and the black one that shook the ground when he walked was Goliath. My dad doesn’t believe in naming animals or cars, which I think is just a lack of imagination, or maybe he wasn’t allowed to do that kind of stuff as a kid.
“Can I ride my bike?” I said as we walked back to the house.
“Not on that road. Car comes around that corner and you’re a goner.”
“I just meant on that court over there.”
“Okay, I’ll get it down.”
He had secured the bike on top of the RV with a bungee cord, so he climbed the ladder on the back. He’s not much of a talker, but he sure is strong because he brought it down with only one hand. Then he carried it over to the court.
“How long we gonna stay?” I said as I got started.
“Hard to say. That part should be in any day.”
“Do you like her?”
“Like who?”
“You know who.” I laughed. “Sheila. I think she’s pretty.”
“You just like the horses.” Dad walked back to the RV and then around to the porch, staring at something.
I let the bike fall and ran to him. “What are you looking at?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Come on. Let’s take a walk around the place.”
Brown pine needles crunched under our feet. The grass was old scrub grass that grew in clumps, and in lots of places there was just the red dirt—not like the sandy clay you see in Alabama but a dusty red, like there are rocks everywhere just waiting to stick up from the ground. Dad says the wind and water make little rocks out of big rocks and then it makes dust blow around and I could see that on every window in the house. Dad says that’s why every windshield in the state has a crack in it—because of the little rocks on the highway that kick up.
“Did Indians used to live out here?”
“They’re not Indians, June Bug. They call them Native Americans.” Dad nodded and pointed toward the horse farm. “There was a big massacre not far from here. Back during the Civil War.”
“What happened?”
“It’s too awful to talk about.”
“What happened?”
I knew if I asked him enough times he’d finally tell me. That’s what he did when we went to all those Civil War sites. He’d keep saying stuff like, “A lot of brave men died here, but I can’t talk about it.” That just got me more curious, and I’d ask more questions until he broke down and told me.
Dad sat back on a big rock and crossed his arms. “I think they were Arapaho and Sioux. No, Arapaho and Cheyenne. The government kept pushing them farther and farther west and giving them land here and there to hunt. But some in the group didn’t like the treaties, thought it was their land, and hated all the people coming through their territory to the gold mines and pushing them out.
“The tribe camped near Sand Creek—we can go there on the way back east if you want. Anyway, these boys from the Army came through, and one of their leaders ordered them to attack. There were only women and children and old men there. The young men were hunting.”
“They killed them?”
He nodded. “For a while they made it look like the soldiers were brave and stood up to those painted warriors, but it didn’t stick because the truth came out. That’ll always happen eventually.”
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine such a horrible thing. I’m sure it was worse than what ran through my mind.
“What some people can do to others is just plain awful,” he said. “Hard to understand what’s going through their minds.”
When Sheila got home from work that night she had a big smile on her face, and she acted like we were special guests coming from some foreign country. She had a couple bags full of stuff and one of those take-and-bake pizzas that I’ve been wanting to try. Pepperoni is my favorite and that’s what this one was. I wondered if she knew or just guessed.
Dad asked if he could use her phone, and she told us to come on inside. I held my breath as I walked into the house because I was afraid that I wouldn’t like the place, but there turned out to be no reason for being afraid. First of all when she opened the door to the garage this red dog raced through the kitchen with his tail wagging and his tongue hanging out almost like he was smiling. Around his eyes the fur was white like he was some old dog professor. He came right over to me, past my dad who was running interference (which I think is a football term), and licked me in the face. (The dog, not my dad.)
“Walter, stop it,” Sheila said, pulling on his collar.
When Dad reached out to pet him, Walter growled.
Sheila wasn’t too happy, and she scolded him. “These are our guests. Now you be nice to them or you’ll be in the garage the rest of your life.”
It was almost like Walter understood her, or at least he heard the tone of her voice, and the old thing dipped his head and loped outside to take a pee. You could see all the white splotches on the yard that were his favorite places. You might wonder what kind of person names her dog Walter, but I have to admit that the name fit just right. The only thing that would have been better was to have a girl dog beside him named Eloise or Mabel or something like that.
Sheila showed Dad the phone in the kitchen, and I just stared at the living room. She had one of those really thin TVs in the corner that you see at Walmart playing the latest movie over and over and a bookshelf that filled the whole back wall. The couch and love seat and other chair looked a little old, but the chair was so comfortable to sit in I wanted to stay there the rest of my life and read books and watch TV. There was a fireplace too. Not one of those that you flip a switch and the logs start burning, but a real one with real logs. I could imagine the snow piling up outside and the fireplace on and me on the couch reading a book with a blanket over my legs.
“You like to read, don’t you?” Sheila said behind me.
“I’ve always wanted a bookcase for the RV, but there’s no room. This one is amazing.”
She showed me the section where she kept her classic stories, and there was a shelf up high for books on marriage and relationships and presidents and a couple on war. I could have stood there and looked at the spines of those books all night, but she offered to give me a tour of the house and I was anxious to see the rest of it.
Downstairs was another living room and a fireplace (the people who built this house sure did like their fireplaces and I can’t blame them), but the room had boxes of stuff stacked up like somebody was moving in or moving out. Off to one side was a bedroom.
“This is my guest room,” she said, flicking on a light.
There was a big bed and a dresser and a closet. It smelled musty in there, like nobody had been a guest in a long time.
“What’s the stuff in the boxes?” I said.
She put a hand out and ran it over one. “My husband’s things. I’ve been meaning to have Goodwill come and pick them up, but I just haven’t had the heart.”
“If it’s clothes, maybe some of them would fit my dad.” We shop at Goodwill stores all the time, and I figured it wouldn’t make any never mind to her because she was getting rid of them anyway.
“Maybe I’ll have him go through them. My husband was a little shorter than your dad and kind of skinny, but we’ll see.”
There was a bathroom with a shower down there, another bathroom on the main floor where the kitchen and living room were, and the third floor had three bedrooms and another bathroom. The whole place had hardwood floor that creaked when you walked on it, except for the downstairs, which had a thin carpet. The carpet looked worn and had lots of stains, and from the smell down there I half wondered if that was why Walter spent his time in the garage.
Sheila’s bedroom was on the third floor. Her bathroom had a big bathtub with little jets in it. There were a bunch of different shampoos and body lotions on the counters, and I’ve never seen so much fingernail polish in my life.
The bedroom was neat—her bed was made like it was some hotel room, the corners all tucked in and everything. On the nightstand was a picture of Sheila and a young girl, smiling. I asked who it was and she said it was her niece and then she told me about her and that she was sick and not doing well.
“Do you have any kids?” I said.
She kind of smiled and frowned at the same time, as if I’d asked her something too personal, but she said no, she didn’t have children but that she always wanted to.
“How come you live in this big house all by yourself?”
“I’m not by myself.” She sat on the bed. “I have Walter.”
“Yeah, but he stays in the garage.”
My dad’s voice came up through the heating vent. He was on the phone and sounded mad, like somebody had lied to him or something.
I smiled and sat down on the bed and looked at the cobwebs in the corner of the ceiling. There were definitely flaws in the house, but I would have stayed the rest of my life if it were up to me.
On the way over, we had passed a church made out of logs, and I imagined my dad dressed in a tuxedo, his hair cut, and Sheila coming down the aisle in a long white dress, her face with some blush on it so she didn’t look so pale, me putting flower petals on the floor in front of her. I also imagined her side of the church pretty full and nobody on our side. And then I thought of the picture in Walmart and that my name wasn’t Johnson and if that was true, my dad wasn’t really my dad. Or maybe he was and he had taken me from my mother. I swear, it’s hard to keep your mind from running sometimes.
“I was married once,” Sheila said softly in a voice like a little girl. “But he passed away a few years ago.”
“The bike accident,” I said. “Was he wearing a helmet? Because my dad says you gotta always wear a helmet, even if it’s just in a parking lot.”