Chapter
65
Haunted by thoughts of Ava as a wanted felon, haunted by the looming execution of Cam Nguyen and the babies, we barely slept. Bree finally dozed off around dawn. But I was wide-awake when our bedroom door creaked slowly open around a quarter to seven.
“Dad…” Ali began in a soft voice.
There was no use arguing because I wasn’t going to sleep as it was. I got up, holding my finger to my lips. Out in the hall I whispered, “Let me take a shower and I’ll walk you to school.”
He grinned at me and I saw that he’d lost another front tooth. I gestured at my own. “When did that happen?”
“Last night,” he said. “Nana Mama said it happened too late for the tooth fairy to come.”
“I heard she had strict rules,” I replied. “The tooth fairy, I mean.”
My youngest son nodded as if that were the most logical thing in the world and then went down the stairs toward the racket my grandmother was making as she whipped up breakfast.
Fifteen minutes later, after a quick shower, a shave, and a change of clothes, I turned the bathroom over to Bree and left our room. I stood on the landing at the top of the staircase, looking into Ali’s room and watching him pull on a sweatshirt. All I could think about was Joss Branson and Evan Lancaster and whether some insane couple was going to drown them today and strangle a prostitute for no reason that I could figure.
“C’mon, little man, I’ve gotta move,” I said.
“I’m moving!” Ali cried as he pushed his feet into his sneakers.
I shifted my attention to the staircase at the end of the hall that climbs to my attic office and frowned. Sawdust? I almost went over to see, but then Ali bounded out of his room, saying, “I’m ready!”
He threw his arms around my legs, smiled up at me, revealing his missing front teeth again, and said, “We gotta move!”
“That’s right,” I said, and hugged him to me.
We went out the front door with cries of “See you after school!” to Nana Mama. The builders were just arriving for the day, and I had a brief conversation with Billy DuPris, our contractor, who informed me that the plywood walls were going up around the addition today and the roof tomorrow.
“Dad, I’m going to be late,” Ali said.
“Gotta move,” I told DuPris, and we headed south toward Sojourner Truth, which is about seven blocks from my house.
As we walked, Ali held my hand, and my thoughts drifted to Ava and how she’d begged us to forget her. I noticed a panel van from a vacuum repair company parked on the opposite side of the street and thought someone in the neighborhood must have gotten into the business, because I’d seen it parked there before, sometime in the past—
“Dad?” Ali said.
“Huh?” I replied, looking down at him and realizing we’d gotten to the end of the block and had to cross the street. “Oh, sorry.”
“Dad, you think a lot,” he said as we walked on.
I smiled and said, “Sometimes too much.”
We walked in silence for the next five blocks. When we were almost to the school, Ali said, “I think a lot sometimes.”
I looked down at him in wonder. You never knew what my son was going to say next. “Sometimes?”
“Yeah.”
“You thinking now?”
“A lot.”
“What are you thinking about?”
He fell silent.