Chapter 3
The gas pump handle was still hanging from my tank, green nozzle dripping onto the asphalt. I hadn't hung it up. I hadn't done anything except lock the doors and keep my foot off the brake so the engine stayed dead. My hand was on the keys, not turning them, just holding them so he couldn't reach through the cracked window and take them.
He was still right outside my door. He'd stepped back maybe a foot after I screamed, but he planted himself between me and the pump, his shadow falling straight across my window. His chest was rising fast. I could see the wedding ring on his left hand where he gripped the top of the door frame, like he owned the car, like he owned the space around it.
A second voice cut in from my left, closer to the front of the store.
"Ma'am? Ma'am, do you need help?"
She was maybe fifty, short gray hair, wearing a navy vest from the gas station, not the clerk who'd been behind the counter but someone else who'd come out when she heard shouting. She didn't come right up to us. She stayed by the ice machine, phone in her hand, eyes flicking between me and him.
He turned his head toward her, his hand still on my door. His voice flipped, suddenly even, suddenly reasonable.
"He's my responsibility," he said. "This is a family thing. We're fine."
I saw his shoulders square, like saying it would make it true. Like if he claimed us loud enough the woman in the vest would nod and go back inside.
My boy made a small sound in the passenger seat. He'd pulled his knees up as far as the seatbelt would let him and had his bruised arm across his face again. The yellow-purple on his left cheek caught the sun through the windshield. I reached my right hand over without looking away from the window, found his knee, and pressed down lightly.
"We have to go," I said. My voice didn't come out loud. It was tight and dry. I said it to her, not to him, and I kept the window cracked just an inch, just enough that she could hear me. "We have to go."
He heard it too and his jaw clenched. He leaned down again, trying to get his face into that crack.
"Diane, don't do this," he said, lower now. "You're making this bigger than it is. Just give me—"
I shifted my body toward the center console, shielding the boy with my shoulder. The keys bit into my palm. I didn't answer him.
The woman in the vest lifted her phone to her ear. "I've got sheriff on the line," she called out. She wasn't talking to me anymore, she was talking to him, and she was talking loud enough for the whole lot to hear. "Dispatch says unit en route. Four minutes out. They want everyone to stay where they are."
Behind her, the clerk had stepped out onto the concrete with the store phone still corded to his hand. He pointed at our SUV, talking fast. Two other customers had stopped by their pumps and were just watching, one with his hand still on his own nozzle, another holding a kid back by the shoulder.
He finally let go of my door frame. He took one step back, then another, and looked over his shoulder at the lot. I watched it register — the woman not going away, the clerk on the phone, the two men staring. His hands opened and closed at his sides. He laughed once, short, without humor.
"This is insane," he said to no one in particular, to everyone. "She's upset. The kid fell at his uncle's. That's all this is."
Nobody answered him. The air felt too bright, too still. The sun beat down on the hood of the Lincoln and made the dust on the dashboard visible. My cut stung where I'd bitten my lip, and my forearm throbbed under the skin where the bruise was.
I didn't roll the window up and I didn't roll it down. I left it cracked that inch and kept my hand over my son's shin. He'd dropped his arm from his face and was staring at the woman by the ice machine like she might be the thing that could get us out. His eyes were wide and wet, but he wasn't crying out loud. He was breathing in quick, shallow pulls.
The woman in the vest didn't move closer. She held up her palm to me, just a small gesture — stay put, help's coming.
May you like
He paced two steps toward the front of my SUV and then back, hands on his hips, looking down the county road where the sheriff would come from. The distance was growing now. People weren't coming to us, but they weren't leaving either. A white pickup had slowed on the road and stopped at the edge of the lot to watch.
We stayed locked inside, engine off, doors locked, window cracked, his shadow no longer on my door but still within reach. The sheriff was four minutes away and every set of eyes on that parking lot was keeping him paused.
