The Accident

Kelly nodded. “I don’t want to sit around the house with you all the time.” She bit her lower lip, and added, “No offense.”

“I’ll get my coat.”

I went downstairs and grabbed my jacket from the hall closet. She followed me. “You got everything?”

“Yup,” Kelly said. “Pajamas?”

“Yes.”

“Toothbrush?”

“Yes.”

“Slippers?”

“Yes.”

“Hoppy?” The furry stuffed bunny she still took to bed with her.

“ Daaad. I have everything I need. When you and Mom went away, she was always reminding you what to bring. And it’s not the first time I’ve ever gone on a sleepover.”

That was true. It was just the first time she’d been away overnight since her mother had gotten herself killed in a stupid DUI accident.

It would be a good thing for her to get out, be with her friends. Hanging around me, that couldn’t be good for anyone.

I forced a smile. “Your mom would say to me, have you got this, have you got that, and I’d say, yeah, of course, you think I’m an idiot? And half the things she said, I’d forgotten, and I’d sneak back into the bedroom and get them. One time, we went away and I forgot to pack any extra underwear. How dumb, huh?”

I thought she might return the smile, but no dice. The corners of her mouth hadn’t gone up much in the last sixteen days. Sometimes, when we were snuggled up on the couch watching TV, something funny would happen, she’d start to laugh. But then she’d catch herself, as though she didn’t have the right to laugh anymore, that nothing could ever be funny again. It was as though when something made her start to feel happy, she felt ashamed.

“Got your phone?” I asked once we were in the truck. I’d bought her a cell phone since her mother’s death so she could call me anytime. It also meant I could keep tabs on her, too. I’d thought, when I got it, what an extravagance a phone was for a kid her age, but soon realized she was far from unique. This was Connecticut, after all, where by age eight some kids already had their own shrink, let alone a phone. And a cell phone wasn’t just a phone these days. Kelly had loaded it with songs, taken photos with it, even shot short stretches of video. My phone probably did some of these things, too, but mostly I used it for talking, and taking pictures at job sites.

“I have it,” she said, not looking at me.

“Just checking,” I said. “If you’re uncomfortable, if you want to come home, it doesn’t matter what time it is, you can call me. Even if it’s three in the morning, if you’re not happy with how things are going I’ll come over and-”

“I want to go to a different school,” Kelly said, looking at me hopefully.

“What?”

“I hate my school. I want to go someplace else.”

“Why?”

“Everyone there sucks.”

“I need more than that, honey.”

“Everybody’s mean.”

“What do you mean, everybody? Emily Slocum likes you. She’s having you for a sleepover.”

“Everybody else hates me.”

“Tell me, exactly, what’s happened.”

She swallowed, looked down. “They call me…”

“What, sweetheart? What do they call you?”

“Boozer. Boozer the Loser. You know, because of Mom, and the accident.”

“Your mother was not a-she was not a drunk, or a boozer.”

“Yes, she was,” Kelly said. “That’s why she’s dead. That’s how come she killed the other people. Everyone says so.”

I felt my jaw tighten. And why wouldn’t everyone be saying that? They’d seen the headlines, the six o’clock news. Three Dead in Milford Mother DUI.

“Who’s calling you this name?”

“It doesn’t matter. If I tell you, you’ll go see the principal and they’ll get called down and everyone will have to have a talk and I’d rather just go someplace else. A school where there’s nobody that Mom killed.”

The two people who’d died in the car that hit Sheila’s were Connor Wilkinson, thirty-nine, and his ten-year-old son Brandon.

As if fate hadn’t been cruel enough, Brandon had been a student at Kelly’s school.

Another Wilkinson boy, Brandon’s sixteen-year-old brother Corey, had survived. He’d been sitting in the back seat, belted in. He was looking forward through the front windshield and saw Sheila’s Subaru parked across the off-ramp just as his father screamed “Jesus!” and hit the brakes, but not in time. Corey claimed to have seen Sheila, just before the impact, asleep behind the wheel.

Connor had not bothered with his seatbelt, and half of him was on the car hood when the police got there. His body had been taken away by the time I’d arrived, as had Brandon’s. The boy had been wearing his seatbelt, but had not survived his injuries.

He’d been in sixth grade, three years ahead of Kelly.

I’d had a feeling things would be rough for her when she got back to school. I’d even gone in to talk to the principal. Brandon Wilkinson had been a popular kid, an A-plus student, a great soccer player. I was worried some students might want to take it out on Kelly, that her mother was being blamed for getting one of the school’s most-liked kids killed.