I did.” Here we go, I thought. Every few months Tim insists that he didn’t have the affair with his coworker, that she was an unstable liar who had wanted something more, but whom he had rebuffed. Some days I half believe him. This isn’t one of those days.
“You can pick her up on Wednesday after school,” I told him.
“I was hoping tomorrow, after I get done with work. Around noon.”
“She’ll miss her last day of school before vacation. That’s when they do all the fun things.” It sounded lame, I know, but it was all I had.
“Meg,” he said in that way he has. “Meg, please …”
“Fine,” I snapped.
So yesterday I said goodbye to my beautiful, funny, sweet, perfect seven-year-old daughter. “I’ll call you every day,” I promised her, feeling like I was saying goodbye forever. “Twice.”
“Bye, Mom,” she said, swiping a quick kiss across my cheek before climbing into Tim’s car.
“If it hasn’t all melted, we’ll go snowshoeing when you get back,” I called after her.
“So, we’ll be at my folks tomorrow night for dinner and at my sister’s on Sunday.” His face turned serious. “I ran into your mom last week.”
“Oh,” I said as if I didn’t care.
“Yeah, they’d really like to see Maria.”
“I bet they would,” I grumbled.
“Is it okay if I take her over to see them?”
I shrugged. “I guess.” My parents weren’t bad people, just not particularly good people. “Promise me you won’t leave her at the trailer, it’s a death trap. And make sure Travis isn’t hanging around when you visit.” My brother, Travis, is one of the main reasons I became a police officer. Growing up he made my parents’ lives miserable and mine pure hell. It seemed like every week a police officer was at the door of our trailer, Travis in tow. They gave him more than enough chances to get his shit together and he blew it time and time again. It wasn’t until the summer I was thirteen and Travis was sixteen, when he threatened my father with a kitchen knife, smacked my mother across the face and ripped out a chunk of my hair as I tried to pull him away from them, that the police finally got serious.
“What do you want to do?” Officer Stepanich, a frequent visitor to our home, asked wearily. His young female partner, Officer Demelo, stood by silently, taking in the broken glass, the knocked-over chairs, the bald spot on the top of my head. Welcome to our lovely home, I wanted to say, but instead my face burned with shame.
Fully expecting my parents to finally say enough is enough and have Travis’s ass arrested for assault, they once again refused to press charges.
“What do you want to do?” Officer Demelo asked, and I looked up in surprise when I realized she was talking to me and only me.
“Now, now,” Officer Stepanich said, “this is really a parent decision.”
“I don’t think that wad of hair on the floor got there by itself and I can’t imagine that Meg here pulled it out of her own head,” Officer Demelo said, her eyes never leaving mine. I was surprised she remembered my name and even more impressed that she ignored the obviously senior officer’s lead. “Let’s see what she wants to do,” Officer Demelo insisted.
Travis smirked. He was six inches taller and about eighty pounds heavier than I was, but in that moment, knowing that only an ignorant coward would beat on his family the way he did, I felt stronger, more powerful. He thought he was invincible. But in that sliver of a moment, I knew that there was a way out for our family.
“I want to press charges,” I said, speaking only to Officer Demelo, who didn’t look much older than I was, but carried herself with a confidence I wanted for myself.
“You sure that’s what you want to do?” Officer Stepanich asked.
“Yes,” I said firmly. “I do.” Officer Stepanich turned to my parents, who looked bewildered but nodded their agreement. They took Travis away in handcuffs. He came back home a few days later. I expected him to exact some kind of revenge upon me, but he kept his distance, didn’t lay a hand on me. It didn’t keep him out of trouble, though. Over the years he’s been in and out of jail, most recently for drug possession. That arrest twenty years ago didn’t change Travis, but in my mind it saved my life.
“Travis will get nowhere near Maria,” Tim promised. He looked as if he’d like to say more, then settled on, “Talk to you later, Meg.” He drove away with Maria waving happily goodbye.
My windshield wipers can barely keep up with the thick snow that is falling. Great, I think. I’ll be shoveling for hours after I end my ten-hour shift at three o’clock. I debate whether to still make the Dutch letters tomorrow and decide to ditch that idea; instead, I’ll sleep in, watch TV, pick up a pizza from Casey’s and feel sorry for myself.
I feel my phone vibrate in my coat pocket. I peek at the display thinking it might be Maria. Stuart. Shit. I stuff my phone back into my coat. Stuart, a newspaper reporter who wrote for the Des Moines Observer and lived about an hour and a half from Broken Branch, and I called it quits about a month ago when I found out he wasn’t actually separated from his wife like he told me. Nope, they were still living under the same roof and, at least from her perspective, happily married. Yeah, the irony isn’t lost on me. I divorced my ex for screwing around and I end up being the other woman in some poor lady’s nightmare. Stuart said all the usual crap: I love you, it’s a loveless marriage, I’m leaving her, blah, blah, blah. Then there was the little issue where Stuart used me to get the biggest story of his career. I told him if he didn’t shut up I was going to shoot him with my Glock. I was only half joking.
I flip open the phone. “I’m working, Stuart,” I snap.
“Wait, wait,” he says. “This is a business call.”
“All the better reason for me to hang up,” I say shortly.
“I hear you’ve got an intruder at the school,” Stuart says in his breezy, confident way. Asshole.
“Where’d you hear that?” I ask cautiously, trying not to give away the fact that this is news to me.
“It’s all over, Meg. Our phone at the paper has been ringing off the hook. Kids are posting it on their walls and tweeting all about it. What’s going on?”
“I can’t comment on any ongoing investigation,” I say firmly, my mind spinning. An intruder at the school? No. If there was something going on I would know about it.
“Maria. Is she okay?”
“That’s none of your business,” I say softly. I wasn’t the only one Stuart hurt.
“Wait,” he says before I can hang up. “Maybe I can help you.”
“How’s that?” I say suspiciously.
“I can track the media end of things, keep you informed of what we hear, give you a heads-up on anything that sounds important.”
“Stuart,” I say, shaking my head.
