“Where did that come from?”Jem said.
“I don’t know.I found it in the pantry.”
“Well, I didn’t buy it.Did you buy it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Then maybe don’t drink it.”
“Oh, I wasn’t going to drink it.I was going to add it to the turkey.Kind of like you do with the salsa sometimes.Only we don’t have any salsa, and this is tomato—”
Jem was proud of himself for keeping his voice steady and not sounding like—what?A hysterical TV mom?What was the name of the mom inMalcolm in the Middle?Were there ever hysterical dads, because if not, that seemed super sexist.“Do you mind if I cook, babe?You know it helps me when I’m in a funk.And Scipio needs more of his favorite dad’s plays.”
“You’re his favorite dad,” Tean said, but he scruffed the Lab’s ears and headed for the back door.“Because he’s a traitor.”
Scipio lingered—he and Jem had a solemn, shared responsibility as the family taste-testers, to make sure everything was good enough for Tean—but when Tean grabbed the bucket of balls, Scipio sprinted for the door.
Traitorwas a good word for him, sometimes.
Once Tean was safely out of the house, Jem dumped the V8 down the sink.A quick check of the fridge and pantry informed him they were out of salsa, but he found tomato paste, cumin, chili powder, garlic—everything he needed.He seasoned the meat and let it simmer.No tortillas, but they had sweet potatoes, so those got forked over and went into the microwave.By the time Tean and Scipio were coming in—Scipio panting from chasing the balls, Tean’s cheeks glowing from the cool evening—dinner was ready.
“This is delicious,” Tean said.“You can’t even taste the V8.”
After cleaning up, they got ready to go.Scipio didn’t like being left at home alone, of course, and Tean always said the best thing was not to make a fuss.So Jem tried not to, but he did promise the Lab two more rounds of fetch, a walk, and three snuggles on the couch to make up for it.
By six, they were on the road in Tean’s truck, crawling south in the tail end of rush hour.Not that it was all that different from the rest of the day.Pretty much everybody had to use I-15, since it was the major north-south corridor through the state, and that meant traffic tended to run the range from bad to awful.It didn’t help that the drivers ran the range from loony to batshit.A woman in the car next to them was reading a book propped against the steering wheel.An older man was trying to get a nose hair with what looked like electric clippers, craning his head to see himself in the rearview mirror.One skinny guy in a suit and fedora was playing the saxophone and trying to steer with his knees.
On either side of them, commercial and light industrial buildings lined the frontage roads, a legacy of Utah’s weird zoning laws that made the I-15 corridor seem like a single, never-ending strip mall.They passed Sprinkler World.They passed a Costco swarming with families.They passed collision centers, bath-fitting supply stores, the occasional stretch of noise barriers with the roofs of houses peeking over them, and The American Boys School, which had an enormous US flag across the front.Jem wasn’t sure, but his gut told him it might be a breeding ground for little conservatives.
At the Shops at Southtown—which everybody just called Southtown, or Southtown Mall—they finally exited the highway, only to find themselves in a slowly snaking line of traffic pastmorestrip malls—a Kneaders, a Valvoline, a sports medicine clinic, the Jordan River Car Wash, which sounded like where Jesus would have gone after he’d gotten his oil changed at the Valvoline.Now, though, there were homes mixed in—small ones at first, old brick ramblers, a few vinyl-sided houses that would probably be described in a real estate listing ascottages.
They worked their way down side streets.There were neighborhoods in South Jordan with alotof money, but this clearly wasn’t one of them—more of the same small homes in brick and vinyl siding, ramblers and split-levels at least fifty years old.
The house where Tean stopped didn’t look like anything special: another brick rambler with an old tree at the corner, a lawn that had gone yellow already, and a flower bed that held nothing but bare mulch.
Tean eased his hands away from the wheel slowly, as though his fingers were stiff.He must have sensed Jem’s question because he said, “I’m fine.”And then his mouth twisted, and he said, “I really don’t want to do this.”
“You can stay here,” Jem said.“I’ll talk to her.”
But Tean shook his head, opened the door, and got out of the truck.
The sun had disappeared, with only a faint afterglow brightening the western edge of the sky.The porch light was off, which left them standing in shadows that deepened by the second.When the wind picked up, Jem shivered inside his jacket; the smell of wet leaves hung on to him even after the air stilled again.For a house that was supposed to be occupied, little light showed behind the lowered blinds, and no sounds reached them.
Tean knocked.Then footsteps moved inside the house, and the door swung open.
The woman who stood there was pretty in a Utah way: White, blond, thin.Her eyes were dark with fatigue or grief or both, but otherwise, she could have been any Instagram mom.She didn’t even seem to notice Jem; she saw Tean first, and she drew her mouth into a line.
“He’s not here.”
Tean hesitated.“I know.I’m sorry to bother you, Lucy, but I think we need to talk.”
She drew in a breath, then let it out again.In one hand, she still clutched the door handle, like she might slam it shut at any moment.“No.No, I don’t think so.I’m busy, Tean.And I don’t know if it—it’s not going to change anything.”
Horror grew slowly in Tean’s face as he realized how she had interpreted his statement.“No, that’s not what I meant.”
“Teancum, I—” Lucy took another of those steadying breaths.“I can’t do this right now.”
“We’re trying to help,” Jem said.
