It was 1:45 p.m., as displayed by the Kit Cat Wall Klock Matt had gotten Debbie for Christmas. He’d found it in a vintage store. The clock face was mounted in the cat’s plastic belly. The cat’s eyes and tail wagged back and forth rhythmically.
Debbie loved it, of course.
Nicholas should arrive in fifteen minutes.
Matt sat beside Debbie on her couch. Cleopatra dozed on his lap. Butch and Sundance perched on the back of the couch, on either side of Debbie’s head. Butch batted at Debbie’s hoop earrings.
“And this mystery person helped me get my job back?” Debbie asked, repeating the little bit Matt had told her. “They hurt me and then helped me?”
Matt nodded. That pretty much summed it up. Nicholas had missed his calling. He should have gone into public relations instead of assistant local news production.
Matt heard a car pull into the driveway. He picked Cleopatra off his lap, set her down on the couch, then peered out the window. Nicholas had arrived.
Matt hoped, for Debbie’s sake, that this meeting went well, that she got whatever closure she needed. He didn’t know what that would look like.
In his opinion, people, Christians especially, jumped to the whole forgiveness part, as if that were the only acceptable outcome so you might as well get it over with. He’d seen people on TV, parents whose child had been brutally murdered, offering forgiveness to a stone-cold killer who hadn’t even asked for it. The body’s still warm and here’s the grieving parents forgiving the pedophilic murderer. It just didn’t seem right. Even God didn’t forgive people ‘til they asked for it. Wait too late and you got a one-way ticket to hell.
Anyway, point being that if Debbie just wanted to unload on Nicholas and tell him to go fuck himself, that was her business. Matt had told Nicholas as much.
“You don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,” Matt said to Debbie.
Debbie rolled her eyes. “How else am I gonna know who it is, seeing as you won’t tell me?”
Matt smiled. He was glad to see she still had her spunk.
He planned to stay long enough to gauge how she was doing. He would not hesitate to ask Nicholas to leave if Debbie fell apart. She’d had a rough few weeks.
Matt had another meeting scheduled after that, one to plan Colton’s comeuppance. Colton, at least, was beyond redemption. He had shown no quarter to his victims. There would be none for him.
There was a knock at the door.
Whether or not to knock had been the question Matt pondered when he had finally gone to his parents’ house for Christmas break—on December 22nd, once he knew that Debbie would be rehired. He had not been there since leaving for college in August. His parents had not returned his phone calls, nor had they driven the thirty-mile distance to watch any of his soccer games. By the time he parked his car, he was nursing a serious grudge.
He had slung his duffle bag over his shoulder and marched inside.
His mom had been in the kitchen preparing dinner. His younger brother, Brian, was out with friends. His dad was at work at Tinker Air Force Base. Matt and his mom had the house to themselves.
“Hi mom,” Matt had said in greeting. The word felt odd on his tongue, as if he werebetraying Debbie.
“Hi honey!” his mom had said. She wiped her hands on a towel and rushed him with a hug.
“I’ve been praying you’d come home for Christmas,” she had said. Her eyes were moist. “I made extra just in case. I even made your favorite: beef stroganoff.”
Matt had not expected the hug or the near tears. If anything, based on the four months’ radio silence, he had half expected to find the door bolted against him, to be presented with a No Trespassing Notice like the one Debbie had received from MCU.
He had pulled away from his mother’s embrace. This—this whole Norman Rockwell “welcome home for the holidays, here’s your favorite meal” act did not erase the last four months.
“Let me put my bag away,” Matt had mumbled.
He had carried his bag to his room. Plopped it on the floor. Surveilled the familiar surroundings. The bed, neatly made, blanket stretched tight enough to bounce a quarter on it, the pillow perfectly centered. The little desk where he had done his homework, its top clutter free.
He did not need to look in the closet to know that the shirts all hung facing the same direction, that the shoes were arranged neatly on the floor.
The only wall décor was the mounted baseball bat with its engraved, plaque reading “REAL MEN STEP UP TO THE PLATE.”
Captain Griffith was a lot of things, but subtle was not one of them.
Matt had returned to the kitchen in time to see his mom rummaging in the rear of one of the cabinets. Eventually she retrieved a bottle of wine! Brandished it sheepishly.
