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her first mistake but it still might not have been so bad if she hadn’t done almost everything else she did as wrong as she could do it.
    First she did not come alone but arrived accompanied by a policeman. He was nice enough but he was armed and stood too close to me. I could see that it bothered Al right away.
    They came exactly at eleven. Al had put on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and had had her coffee so she was awake and alert and did not like Mrs. Preston from the moment she walked in the door. With an armed man, as Al said later, who never had his hand that far from the butt of his nine-millimeter. Al does not like guns or what guns do or the people who use guns or the people who sell guns or the people who make guns, even guns for hunting, which she thinks is immoral and wrong although I’ve never heard her call it patently absurd.
    â€œLet’s see,” Mrs. Preston said, taking out a folder and a ballpoint pen before she had been there ten seconds. “Your name is Alice Henson?” The pen hung over the paper.
    â€œWhat is that?” Al asked, her voice cold.
    â€œThis,” Mrs. Preston said, “is the initial investigation form we must fill out.”
    â€œWhy must ‘we’ fill it out?”
    Mrs. Preston looked at the policeman and raised her eyebrow as if to say, Oh yeah, one of these smart ones.
    â€œMrs. Henson, there has been a complaint lodged.”
    â€œA complaint about what?”
    Another raised eyebrow and I thought, Oh, this is just great—the cop will have to pull them apart in about a minute.
    â€œI think it would be best if Officer Bates took Anthony into the other room so we can discuss this alone.”
    â€œNo.” Al’s voice was cold, seemed to make the room cold. “Officer Bates isn’t taking my son anywhere.”
    Mrs. Preston took a long breath and looked at Officer Bates again, the eyebrow raised again, the almost sneer again. “Look, you don’t seem to understand. We’re here because a complaint has been filed that you are mistreating your child—”
    â€œNo. I’m not.”
    â€œâ€”and if we want to or feel it is necessary we can take the child into protective custody.”
    Al turned an ugly shade of white, almost gray, really, and her eyes got very bright and sparkly, like the time just after the biker said the thing to her that I didn’t hear when Al told him about the hammer and then the biker got real nice to us both. I’d only seen her eyes look like that the one time before and, even though things worked out with the biker, this time everything went downhill so fast it seemed like we were riding on a greased sled.
    Looking back, I try to make it slow motion in my mind which Miles says he does sometimes when he is rehearsing a scene or a part for a commercial.
    First I stepped away from the cop. I think he thought I was going to run when really all I was going to do was get a better view of the fight I was sure was going to start in about half a second between Mrs. Preston and Al. It turned out I had the time right but the target wrong.
    As I moved, the policeman reached out for my arm and missed and his hand bounced off my shoulder and hit the side of my head. It wasn’t much of a hit—there was no pain or anything—but I must have winced because I saw Al’s eyes go bad again and she said a word to the cop which I had heard the biker use on more than one occasion and she swung around and picked up a table lamp and hit the cop across the top of his head so hard it sounded like somebody dropping a watermelon the way Miles did in the commercial.
    It’s funny but I always thought a lamp would break if you hit somebody over the head with it. I had seen people getting hit with things like the lamp in movies and the lamp always broke only this time it just went “thunk” and the cop went down on his knees and then down on his face making a sound like the