Chapter 16: The Fence

Caleb's POV

I was between them before I knew I had moved.

My shoulder was in front of Archie, and my wife's hand was still locked around his small fingers.

"Lyd," I said. "Let go."

"We're only going for ice cream."

"Let go of him."

"Cal, please, it's all arranged, I talked to..."

"You're Aunt Lyd," said Archie.

He said it clearly, in the voice he uses to read signs out loud.

Lydia looked down at him.

"You're Aunt Lyd," he said again, and he pulled his hand out of hers one finger at a time. "My mom's right there."

He walked around me and went to Willa.

Willa dropped to her knees on the pavement and wrapped her whole body around him.

Behind her, twenty parents had stopped on the sidewalk with their phones half out.

The crossing guard stood with her whistle in her mouth and did not blow it.

A tall woman I took to be the principal was coming across the grass at a fast, careful walk.

Lydia's face came apart.

It did not do it prettily.

Her knees folded, and she sat down hard on the curb with her good blue sweater in the gutter.

"He said," she said. "He said if I brought him, he'd stop all of it."

"Who said?"

"Dane. Last night. He said bring Archie to his place by four and he would call the county off, and give me Saturdays."

She laughed, one awful hiccup of a laugh.

"He doesn't even want him there. He wanted Willa to run."

"So she'd look like a woman who took her kid and ran," I said.

"I'm so stupid. I'm so stupid, Cal."

I didn't say that she wasn't.

Her mascara had run, and her hair had come out of its pins.

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