The Accident

After the office was locked up, I went to the nearby ShopRite to pick up a few things. A steak for myself for dinner, some salami and tins of tuna and carrot sticks for lunches for Kelly and me through the week. I wasn’t big on the carrot sticks, but Sheila would have wanted to see them not only in Kelly’s lunch, but mine. It was odd. I was mightily pissed with my late wife, but still wanted to honor her wishes.

When Kelly was attending first grade, the first time she’d had to take a lunch with her every day, she begged Sheila and me to include a bag of potato chips. Her friend Kristen got potato chips every day, so why couldn’t she have them? Well, if Kristen’s mom wants to give her that kind of crap every day, that’s her business, we said. But we’re not doing it.

Kelly asked if Rice Krispie squares would be okay. Even if they had melted marshmallow in them, the cereal was healthy, right? So Sheila had helped her make up a batch. Melted the butter and marshmallow, mixed everything up in an enormous bowl, flattened them out in a pan. The two of them had made a huge mess in the kitchen. Kelly happily took a square to school with her every day.

About a month later, when Kristen was over playing with Kelly, she happened to ask if we could put chocolate chips in the Rice Krispie squares. She really liked them that way. She’d been trading her potato chips for Kelly’s squares every day.

As I was passing through the cereal aisle, the recollection made me smile. It seemed like a long time ago. It would be fun to make some one night with Kelly. Sometime around the start of third grade, she’d actually developed a liking for them herself.

I reached for a box just as someone else-a woman in her late thirties, early forties-decided to do the same. Shopping alongside her was a boy. Dark hair, jeans, and a jean jacket and running shoes with stripes and swirls all over them. I put his age at sixteen or seventeen.

“Excuse me,” I said to the woman when we bumped elbows. “Go ahead.”

Then I looked at her and did a double take. It didn’t take more than half a second to realize who this woman, and the boy with her, were.

Bonnie Wilkinson. Mother of Brandon and husband of Connor.

The two people who died when they crashed into Sheila’s car.

The teenage boy with her had to be her son Corey. His eyes looked dead, as though they’d cried out every tear he’d ever have.

Her blouse and slacks seemed to hang off her, and her face was drawn and gray. Her mouth opened and stayed that way when she realized who I was.

I backed up my cart to wheel it around them. I didn’t need Rice Krispies. Not right now. “Let me get out of your way here,” I said.

Finally, she could speak, although only just barely. “You just wait,” she said.

I stopped. “Excuse me?”

“You’re going to get yours,” she said. “You’re going to get it good.” Her son’s dead eyes bored into me.

I left my half-full cart and walked out of the store.

I picked up what I needed at the Super Stop amp; Shop. And instead of buying Rice Krispies, I bought all the ingredients I thought I’d need to make lasagna. I knew I couldn’t make it as well as Sheila did, but I was going to give it a try.

I took the long way home so I could visit Doug Pinder.

My father had hired him to work at Garber Contracting about the same time I graduated from Bates. At twenty-three, Doug had been a year older. We worked side by side for years, but it was always understood I’d eventually be the guy in charge, even though no one expected it to happen quite so soon.

Dad, overseeing the construction of a ranch house in Bridgeport, had just unloaded two dozen four-by-eight sheets of plywood from a truck when he clutched his chest and dropped to the ground. The paramedics said he was dead before his head landed in the soft grass. I rode in the ambulance with him to the hospital, picking the blades out of his thinning gray hair.

Dad had been sixty-four. I was thirty. I made Doug Pinder my assistant manager.

Doug was a good right-hand man. His area of expertise was carpentry, but he knew enough about all the other aspects of construction to supervise the rest of the trades, and pitch in when needed. And where I was reserved, Doug was outgoing and jovial. When things got tense on a job, Doug knew just what to say and do to keep everyone’s spirits up, better than I could. For years, I don’t know what I would have done without him.

But things hadn’t been right with Doug the last few months. He wasn’t the life of the party anymore, or at least when he tried, it seemed forced. I knew he was under pressure at home, and it didn’t take long to figure out it was financial. When Doug and his wife, Betsy, moved in to a new house four years ago, they’d gotten one of those too-good-to-be-true, subprime mortgages with almost nothing down, and when it had come up for renewal last year their monthly payments had more than doubled.