On Easter Sunday my daughter called and asked me to come and get her, and her mother-in-law put a hand on my chest in the doorway in front of thirty guests and told me to go home. My son-in-law told me to call the police, because the Chief was standing in his back yard eating food he’d paid for. He was right about that — and it is the reason he lost everything.
My Easter ended at 2:13 in the afternoon, with cold coffee beside the sink and dish soap still on my hands.
Dad. Please come and get me.
Then a breath. Then a sound I am not going to write down. Then the phone hitting a floor, and behind all of it, classical music and children laughing somewhere outside.
A father learns certain sounds.
Nell has called me on bad days since she was small. A flat tyre at nineteen, on the shoulder of the county road, crying about something that was not the tyre. A panic attack in her second year of college that she was certain was her heart.
And the night Sutton Ostrand proposed, when she rang me at ten at night and told me she was happy, and her laugh came half a second late.
That half second bothered me for two years.
I shook his hand anyway. I sat at their table. I gave them the benefit of every doubt I should have killed at the door, and that is the signal men like Sutton want most — permission from the person who should have known better.
