Long Drive Home Read Online Free PDF Page B

getting tailgated, honked at, and passed in a no-passing zone by a church van. We hit construction north of the highway, a road closure, but they hadn’t marked a detour, and nobody knew where to go. Eventually we came to the intersection where the Suburban guy had stopped us. By then I’d spilled coffee all over my jeans. Sara looked up from one of the kids magazines she kept in the seat-back pocket.
    “That man was mean,” she said. “I hope we don’t ever see him again.”
    “We won’t,” I said, remembering the self-satisfied way he’d unzipped his jacket. Who’d have imagined that things could have gotten so much worse, that being threatened with a gun would end up little more than a footnote to the afternoon? At least that’s how I thought of it then.
    As usual, the streets around Sara’s school were chaotic. Cars were double-parked, blocking driveways and hydrants. Parents were trolling for open spots. Kids were everywhere, not just from Sara’s school but from the public high school down the street. I walked her upstairs to her classroom. The backdrop I’d worked on the day before was spread out to dry, and I was so sleepy I accidentally stepped on it, leaving a footprint on the forest I’d painted.
    Now that we were there, Sara didn’t want me to leave. She clung to my arm. I told her she didn’t have to talk about yesterday and probably shouldn’t.
    “But I want to,” she said, pulling the detective badge from her pocket. “I brought this for show-and-tell.”
    I mentioned the accident to her teacher and asked her to call if Sara changed her mind about coming home. Then I hugged Sara, a long hug that embarrassed her, and said good-bye.
    On the way downstairs, I ran into Warren, head of the school, wearing an orange vest and carrying a stop sign.
    “Got a sec?” he said. The regular crossing guard had justquit, and Warren was looking for a fill-in until they could hire someone else. “Just a few weeks. It’d count as your parent job for the whole year.”
    Before the accident, I would have been happy to give up my job shelving books in the school library, but now, I had no interest in being responsible for other people’s kids. “Sorry,” I said. “I wish I could help, but work’s pretty crazy right now.”
    In fact, work was pretty slow. I killed some time in Montclair, taking the car for an oil change and hoping for a call to come get Sara. Instead, as I was on my way home, Liz called to say she’d made an appointment with Kim Lee.
    “I thought we were going to wait,” I said.
    She said she didn’t want to take any chances, and this was the only appointment she could get—a last-minute cancellation we should be grateful for.
    At that point, I didn’t see any way out of it. “Then good,” I said. “The sooner, the better.”
    I hung up as I was turning onto our block. In the time I’d been gone, things had gotten busy on Clarice’s side of the street. There was a PSE&G truck with a utility crew repairing the gaslight, plus two pickups and a trailer with rolls of sod. The yard guys had already taken up the grass damaged by the Jaguar and were going over the soil with rakes and rollers. I was glad to see things getting back to normalso fast—until I noticed the tree. Propped against the trunk were a wreath of flowers, a teddy bear, a skateboard. More flowers were piled around a framed portrait of Juwan that I made a point of not looking at too closely. The gauze had been replaced by a white ribbon.
    Sara wasn’t thrilled about seeing Kim Lee. Her practice was in Verona, in a suite of medical offices above a shopping plaza.
    “Can’t I just talk to you and Mom?” Sara said as we climbed the stairs.
    “Sometimes it’s good to talk to someone else.”
    Sara relaxed a little when she recognized Kim from school, and after Kim and I compared notes on Sara’s teacher—Kim’s daughter had been in the same class two years earlier—Kim led Sara into a softly lit room with a