Harder (Caroline & West #2)(9)

“His daddy—my son. Last time he took up with Michelle before this, it ended bad, and West was in the middle of it. West come over here, told me I had to choose sides. Everybody had to choose. Either him and his mom and Frankie, or my Wyatt. Nobody was gonna be neutral anymore.”

She pulls the sugar bowl close and spoons more into her mug.

“I guess you chose your son.”

“I thought West would come around.”

I smile at my fingernails. “West doesn’t really come around.”

“Not for six years, he didn’t.”

I wish I’d taken her up on the coffee. Sleep is an impossibility here, and I’m envious of her steaming mug.

The idea of swallowing that bittersweet heat.

“My son was no good.” She addresses this remark to her clinking coffee spoon, slowly revolving. “I don’t know why. It wasn’t anything I did, I don’t think. The other three came out okay. But Wyatt was always full of himself. A bully.”

She drinks deeply from her coffee, then frowns at it. “Too much sugar now.”

I feel like I’m supposed to say something, so I say, “I’m sorry.”

“Michelle’s no better. You saw what she’s like. She’ll be sniveling for weeks—months, maybe—and never give a single thought to what it does to her daughter or what she leaves her son to deal with.”

It’s eerie when Joan finally looks at me. West’s eyes. A stranger’s face. Familiar strength that I know how to count on. “Did you come to take him back with you?” she asks.

“I don’t know.”

She drains the mug and stands to set it by the sink. Looks through the window at the moon.

“Take him out of here,” she says quietly. “He’s not going to get another chance.”


I spend the next morning washing dishes and shelling peas with Frankie at Joan Leavitt’s kitchen table.

Afterward, Joan tries to teach us both how to knit. Frankie catches on faster than I do. I keep wrapping the yarn around the needle, which makes holes.

Joan says I’m good at making holes.

For lunch, she warms up canned tomato soup and fixes grilled cheese sandwiches with Kraft singles and margarine. There’s a constant stream of traffic in and out of her kitchen—friends, neighbors, extended family, a woman with four children who I eventually figure out from the conversation is from Joan’s AA chapter. Joan is her sponsor.

I’m not introduced. The company ebbs and flows. Joan pops outside for a cigarette and pops back in, running water in the sink, talking on the phone, turning up the radio. Always, if her hands aren’t otherwise occupied, she’s knitting. She has a red bag that snaps to the belt loop of her pants, and she carries the needles in her hands and knits without looking, twelve-inch squares in brown and blue, green and red.

Her living room is draped in her knitting—two afghans on the couch, one on the La-Z-Boy, an overflowing basket of yarn in the corner. There’s a set of stitch pattern reference books tucked beneath the coffee table.

I sit with one thigh touching the afghan wrapped around West’s mom and the other leg pressed up against Frankie, who seems to need that.

All day long, she pushes herself against me.

She’s an alarming blend of kid and woman. Knobby knees and boobs, careful eye makeup and huddled posture. I understand why West loves her. Frankie is everything soft in him, every impulse right at the surface. Loud and funny, hot-tempered, quick to forgive.

Your hair’s so pretty, she tells me.

Show me how you do your makeup.

Teach me how you make your scarf look like that.

She doesn’t say anything more about what she witnessed.

She doesn’t cry.

I wonder if I should tell someone that she saw the shooting, but who would I tell? Her mom knows the truth, whatever it is. Her grandmother, her aunts and uncles—either they know or they don’t. I can’t imagine breaking Frankie’s trust, turning over what she told me to somebody whose allegiances aren’t clear.

The only person I can see myself telling is West, and West isn’t here.

In the afternoon, we hear that Bo has been taken in for questioning again. West’s mom bursts into tears. She cries about Wyatt being dead. She cries about Bo being in jail. I can’t figure out which thing she’s more upset about.

Frankie stares at the TV, her eyes wide and wet.

I put my arm around her, and we watch soap operas.

West doesn’t text. He doesn’t call. He doesn’t come, even though he said he would.

That night, I comb through the online version of the Coos Bay paper on my phone after Frankie’s gone to sleep, trying to fill in the blanks.

Shots reported at the trailer park. A gunshot wound to the chest. Ambulance to the hospital. Dead on arrival.

The neighbors say an argument got out of hand.

The paper says there were only two witnesses: Michelle and Bo.

Bo’s been questioned, released, questioned again.

I want to make a narrative out of these plain, blank facts. I want a story I can tell myself, but there’s only Michelle’s tear-streaked face. Frankie curled into a ball on the couch, her head on my lap as she watches TV. People coming in and out the door into the kitchen, talking to Joan, leaving food, running errands.

I text West.