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“You tryin’ to scare me?” Her voice cracks. I can imagine she’s intimidated—which is not what I want. I’m sure she’s alone in the house with the toddler. She’s a felon so she can’t legally own a firearm but who knows. That never stopped anyone. Here’s a man on her porch four times her size who knows where she lives, her name, her history. I’m sure she’s wondering what else.
“I’m callin’ the cops,” her voice cracks harder. She looks back inside the home. I’ll put good money that she looked at the little girl. She turns back. I see a tears watering up in the green eyes.
“No, I’m not trying to scare you. I just wanted to ask you about an old boyfriend. The guy you got busted with.”
“Mickey? I haven’t seen him in—” She stops. “He got out before I did. He—one day he just—”
Things are adding up in ways she doesn’t want them to. Like when a doctor tiptoes around the word “terminal” but the patient gathers the clues together, Carla hears twenty years ago, boyfriend and rape.
“You don’t mean—” she says, having fully lost her ability to speak in complete sentences.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out,” I say. Hold up a shopping bag from the little kids store eight miles up the way. “I got your granddaughter some things. Thought maybe she could use them.”
Carla’s green eye scans above and below the security chain, looks at the bag, looks at me.
“Who did you say you are again?”
“Richard Dean Buckner. I’m in the directory if you have one.” I hand her my card again. Her small hand offers two fingers through the doorway. I gently slip the card between them. Skittish. I need her to talk with me. Everything has to be gentle.
She pauses at the door for some time. Then: “I’m not ready to talk about this.”
“I understand. There is a time issue here, but let it sink in. Call me or, if I may, I’ll just stop by tomorrow. Same time.”
I sit the toy store bag down on the porch, next to the box of diapers. “For your granddaughter.”
I walk back to the car. Get in. Hoping to hear her call out for me before I shut the door. She does not. I shut it. So loud right now. Back out of the driveway. Leave.
Damn it.
I light a smoke and try and think of a new avenue I can go down while I wait for Carla to fall in line. What I really should have done this morning is gone right to PD headquarters and petitioned for some DNA from the rape kit. At least start that paper trail nightmare.
Two miles up the road my phone rings.
“Mr. Buckner?” Carla says, timid but forcing her manners to the front. “Thank you for the new diaper bag and whatnot...I have some sweet tea if you’d like some.”
Inside the home the little girl sits in the middle of the floor, playing with the new Barbies I bought her.
I sip sweet tea and study her. Perfect little hands, her bare feet with toes that look like they were rushed to be put on right before she was born, her small elbows and knees that are perfect replicas of our own, how her face is all curves.
“She’s a doll,” I say. I lean back, recall the only Carl Sandburg I know, and I don’t even know why know it. “A baby is God’s opinion that the world should go on.”
“Thank you,” Carla smiles at the poet’s quote. I’ll take credit for it, but it would be my luck she’s his number one fan. Instead, she says, “Absinthe, can you say thank you to Mr. Buckner for the toys?”
The little girl regards me with a very shy sidelong glance. Under her breath I hear her tender voice say “thank you” and then she immediately focuses on something else besides the stranger in her grandma’s house.
“You’re welcome, sweetheart.” I look at Carla. “Her name is Absinthe?”
“Yes.” Rolls her eyes.
“As in the alcoholic spirit Absinthe?”
“Yes.”
“Green? Flavored by green anise and sweet fennel?”
“Yes. Grande wormwood. The Green Fairy. I know. I don’t understand what my daughter was thinking,” Carla says. “Jamie—my daughter, she got pregnant at fifteen. I was so furious. She made it through her sophomore year and then had Absinthe, dropped out. Got a job at a restaurant as a hostess.”
“And the father?”
