Chapter 4: Dad

I didn't scream at him.

I didn't slap him, either, though my hand wanted to.

I leaned close to his ear and said, "Your mother's coming back with the car. You might want to be unconscious for it."

Then I went inside and locked the door.

I watched through the front window as the stroller dad helped his mother fold Carter into the back of her Mercedes.

He let his arm hang out the door the whole way. A nice touch.

Then I sat on my kitchen floor and called Sam.

"He opened his eyes and talked to me," I said.

"What'd he say?"

I told him.

There was a pause on the line.

"Good," Sam said.

"Good?"

"Men who are winning don't whisper, Hazel. Tomorrow we tell your father."

My father lives alone in the stone house in Chestnut Hill where I grew up.

He keeps it the way my mother left it. Her gardening clogs are still by the back door, thirteen years later.

On Sunday he made us lunch himself, which meant cold cuts from his own stores laid out on the deli paper they came in.

Sam ate four sandwiches.

My father watched him do it with narrowed eyes.

"You eat like a man who's been staking out my house," he said.

"Only on Tuesdays, sir."

My father almost smiled. He caught it in time.

The dining room table was right behind us.

It was the same table where he'd stacked two million dollars in banded hundreds.

A robot voice on the house phone had told him what would happen to Carter if he called the police.

I hadn't been able to eat at that table since.

"Carter's mother called me yesterday," my father said. "She says you attacked her son with a telephone."

"I showed her a text message."

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