He said, “I think that would be a real good plan. Since regular-sized is a great look on you.” He smiled at her, and she smiled back. Another first for today. He hadn’t even smiled when he’d seen her sitting in the car at his gate, had he? He couldn’t remember.
That had just been this morning. It didn’t feel like it.
Dinner was Chinese, Bismarck style, which meant, “Not Chinese enough,” and as soon as they’d eaten and loaded up the dishwasher, Annabelle said, “I’m going to bed.”
He asked, “Want me to come up and talk to you?” With no clue at all what to say.
“No,” she said. “I’m really tired. I just want to go to sleep.” And once again, he wasn’t sure what to do.
Jennifer said, though, when Annabelle had disappeared, “It’s OK. She’s on overload. Sometimes, you need time to process first. Inside, I mean, before you talk about it. Before you even think about it. Don’t you find that?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I do.”
“Like the processing isn’t even happening in your brain,” she said. “Like it’s in your body. Tomorrow’s soon enough. I’m feeling a little that way myself, and I’m just the observer, not the one whose life has just been torn open.” Since she had lines of strain around her mouth now to add to the shadows under her eyes, that wasn’t hard for him to imagine. “You should have another beer, though,” she said. “I’m sure there’s a training regimen, but some nights …” She sat back on the couch in his red sweats, her hands between her knees, and sighed. “Sometimes, you just want to drink it all away until you can forget, don’t you? I think you’d be justified.”
“No,” he said. “I don’t drink when I need to. I drink when I don’t.”
She looked at him with plenty of understanding, but with so much fatigue, and he said, “Go to bed. We’ll talk tomorrow. And—Jennifer.”
“Yes?”
He put out a hand and brushed it over her cheek. “Thanks for coming.”
The next day, he wasn’t doing any of the things he ought to be doing.
He wasn’t taking Annabelle to buy another suitcase, and helping Jennifer shop for something better than his sweats to wear. Something that wouldn’t be loose, because she thought she had to wear that, because she was ashamed to enjoy feeling beautiful. Something that would show off what he now realized was a pregnancy-ripened figure. Not much belly yet that he could see, but a whole lot of breast. He wasn’t sitting on the Boyfriend Chair telling her to try the next size down and having her get all sassy at him. Giving Annabelle something to laugh about, too.
He wasn’t thinking about which way he wanted that DNA test to turn out, either, because he couldn’t. That part of his mind was a tangled mess. It was what she’d said, maybe. Nothing had settled down enough for him to think about it.
He wasn’t talking to his sister Alison, after her interview with Detective I’m-not-nearly-as-relaxed-as-I-look Johnson. He hadn’t even seen Alison yet, in fact. He also wasn’t meeting Vanessa’s flight. Jennifer and Annabelle were doing that right now.
What he was doing was sitting in the kind of room he’d only seen in the movies. The kind with scuffed paint that must once have been white but now just looked dirty, with a white table bisected by a ceiling-to-floor Plexiglas divider, and a telephone receiver mounted on either side of it.
The door opened on the opposite side of the barrier, and he tensed. The figure who came through it was nothing like the hale, hearty, red-faced salesman he would’ve been yesterday. He looked shrunken, his graying blond hair wispy and unkempt, the traffic-cone-orange shirt and pants loose around him.
If that was supposed to make Harlan feel sorry for him, it wasn’t working. He waited, his hands held loosely in his lap by an effort of will, until his father sat down at the table and picked up the receiver. And then he picked up his own.
His dad said, “Hi. Thanks for coming.”
Harlan said, “You said you needed to see me. You said it was urgent. I’ve got Annabelle, and I’ll be taking her home with me, so if you’re worried about her, you don’t have to be. I’ve got her.” His body felt heavy with unsaid words, his hands and mouth clumsy with restraint.
His dad said, “That’s good. But I need you to get me a lawyer.”
Harlan had been blessed from birth with the kind of reflexes that got you chosen for fighter-pilot duty, and he’d honed those reflexes with twenty-five years of hard work. He was a quick thinker, a quick talker, and a quick actor. Right now, though, he was sitting in a bolted-down plastic chair, looking at one of the first faces he’d seen in his life, and he was blank.
Finally, he said, “They must be letting you use the phone. Get a lawyer yourself.”
“I tried. They want twenty thousand just as a retainer. It could be a hundred thousand, in the end. Two hundred. All up front.”
Harlan picked the words up like stones. “You have a house. You have a business. You probably have a retirement account.”
“I’d lose them. I’d lose everything. It could take two years. And how do I work with this hanging over me? How do I make a living?”
“Guess you’d better go with the public defender, then.”
“Son.” His dad never called him “son.” Never. “It’s more than that. I need bail, too. It could be a million bucks. How am I going to pay that? I can’t.”
“There’s such a thing as a bail bond.” This was actually happening. His dad was asking him to bail him out for killing his mom.
Who did that?
“Another hundred thousand,” his father said. “A hundred fifty, even.” He tried a smile, a ghost of his great-guy persona. “What’s that, a quarter of a game for you? Ten minutes, with that new contract?”
“It’s five minutes,” Harlan said. “Which doesn’t mean I’m spending it on you. And they don’t always grant bail for murder. So cheer up. Maybe you won’t have to worry about it.” A question he’d asked the detective yesterday.
“It’s a mistake,” his father said. His face entreating now, sincere. The face of a salesman who was telling you that he’d be losing money on this deal, that he had kids to feed. That this was his very best effort, because he was scraping the bottom of the barrel for you. “You don’t understand, son. This is all a big mistake.”
Harlan looked down at his hand, which was lying on the table now. He had to, because he had to make sure it was there. He couldn’t feel his body anymore. “Yeah?” he said, when he could. “How?”
“You think I killed your mom?” his dad said. “That I planned to kill her? I loved that woman.” The tears filled his eyes. “Why would I do something like that? I need your help to prove it. Please. I can’t stay here.”
Harlan asked, “What are you saying? Somebody else did all that? Who?”
“Anybody else could have done it.” His dad was leaning forward now, urgent with it. “Listen. They break into the office, take the keys. Get a Bobcat, put it on a trailer. That land wasn’t fenced. All they’d have had to do was drive back behind the trees where they’d be out of sight, and then dig the hole. They had all night to do it. Who’s going to see them out there in October?”