Do Not Pass Go (6 page)

“Deet, where're Mommy and Daddy? Aren't we going to school today?” P. J. asked. Jam must have seen something in his face, because she suddenly looked terrified.

“Did someone die? Is it
Daddy?
” she whispered.

Deet laughed a phony sort of laugh, but before it was finished he'd thought that maybe going to jail was a lot like dying. Maybe even worse, because there was no blame in dying. No shame.

“God, you're silly, Jam. Of course not. I'm going to make us breakfast now, and you guys get dressed. And then we'll play Chutes and Ladders.”

There was no response, though usually playing Chutes and Ladders was their idea of heaven.

“I'll make pancakes,” he said. There wasn't anything they liked better, so that ought to be worth something.

But they were still looking hard at Deet. They'd been happy little girls all their lives, not a worry in the world. They didn't even know that there were troubles in the world. Everything had been wonderful for them, they didn't know anything. And now here was this look on their faces, and he had to tell them something.

Deet cleared his throat and sat up.

“It's like this. Dad did something wrong, against the law, and so he can't come home until it's all taken care of.”

“Is Dad a robber?” asked P. J.

“Jeez, P. J!” Deet exploded. “No! You know Dad wouldn't do something like that!”

Deet thought that he would have said that about drugs as well, but it made him feel almost better for
a second. No matter what, Dad didn't do anything to hurt anyone else. He'd hurt himself, but he didn't rob anyone. Or kill anyone.

They were still waiting, so he swung his feet over the side of the bed and put his elbows on his knees and looked into their faces.

“You remember when Dad was talking about his headlight, and he said it didn't work and he had to get it fixed?”

They both nodded.

“Well, he didn't get it fixed, and the cops stopped him last night. It's against the law to drive with just one light.”
Oh god
, Deet thought.
Now I've done it. I've lied to them. They're going to find out, for sure. They're not so dumb that they'll buy this for long. They'll know you can't go to jail for something like this.

“Silly Daddy,” said P. J. with a frown. She was trying to sound grown-up, Deet knew.

Jam was watching Deet carefully. “When is he coming home? Will the police hurt Daddy? Will they take his truck away? Is Daddy sad?”

Jam could think up a lot of questions fast.

P. J. made a face. “Grandpa is going to be really mad at Dad.”

Deet shot a quick look at P. J. He hadn't known that the girls had picked up on the problems between Dad and Grandpa.

“Yeah,” said Deet. “He'll be mad all right. But we're not mad. Anybody can make a mistake, right? Remember the time I broke the car window with that two-by-four, and remember the time you girls ran the bathwater so high it spilled all over the floor and Dad had to take the floorboards out to fix it? Anybody can make a mistake.”

Jam nodded. “Even Grandpa can make a mistake,” she said. They were all quiet a minute, trying to think of a mistake Grandpa had made, but they couldn't.

They heard the car pull into the driveway, the crunch of tires on packed snow. The girls looked at Deet and he felt sick again. In a few minutes they'd hear things they didn't want to know.

Mom slammed the back door, which was hard to shut because of the frost buildup. Deet needed to scrape the frost away with a kitchen knife again.

She hung her purse up on the hook behind the door and bent down to take her boots off. Deet couldn't see her face.

“Did you kids eat breakfast?” she asked, and Deet could tell she was trying to talk in her normal voice. With her back to them she unzipped her parka and hung it up. She was doing these things more slowly, more deliberately, than she usually did.
Trying to get control,
Deet thought.

“We just got up,” he said. “I'm going to make us some hotcakes.” Deet wished he hadn't mentioned hotcakes. He felt heavy with grief, and everything seemed like too much work.

“Go get dressed, girls,” Mom said.

“Mommy,” P. J. began.

“Get dressed,” Mom said firmly. “I want to talk to Deet for a minute.”

When the girls left, she pulled off her snow pants and then sat heavily in a kitchen chair and began to talk fast.

“There are a lot of steps to go through. It's very complicated, and I don't understand any of it. First of all
is the arraignment, when they decide what to do with Dad, and then there are hearings and all sorts of things.” Her voice took on a higher pitch. “Then a trial. A
trial
. It's not real, it's like a TV show.” Deet was afraid she was going to lose control again. “What did you say to the girls?” she asked.

“That Dad got busted for a broken headlight.”

She gave him an unsatisfied look, and he could tell she was as unhappy as he was to let them think a lie.

“I called Dan to tell him what happened. It was Gary who answered the phone. That creep.”

Deet threw an anxious look at her. He'd never heard her say a mean word about anyone before. She got up to hang up her snow pants, then looked down at her stocking feet and started searching for her shoes among the heap of shoes and slippers by the door. She turned to him suddenly. “I called Grandpa this morning. It was horrible. He started to yell and said they'd have nothing to do with Dad. He said terrible things about him.” Mom began unwrapping the scarf from around her neck, but she stopped as her face suddenly crumpled. “My poor Charley,” she said.

Deet found her shoes and handed them to her.

“When can you see Dad?”

“At two. I'm going at two.”

“Can I come with you?”

Mom gave him a horrified look. “Of
course
not. What are you thinking? The jail is a terrible place, full of terrible people. I can hardly stand to go myself.”

Deet felt immediate relief. “You shouldn't go alone,” he said.
What a phony,
he thought. He didn't want to go. He didn't want to ever leave the house, much less go to a jail, a prison.

She gave him a sad smile, just a sort of tuck in the corners of her mouth, and bent to put her shoes on.

They were at the table eating pancakes, or pretending to eat pancakes, when there was a knock on the back door. Deet and his mother jumped as if they'd never heard a knock at the door before. They looked at each other, wide-eyed with dread. The police? The newspapers? Grandpa? God, don't let it be Grandpa.

Mom wrenched the door open and Sally Chambers from down the street came in with a swirl of icy fog.
She took the empty chair and pulled her coat off. P. J. leaned toward her and said in a whisper, “Dad's in jail.”

“I heard about Charley,” Sally told Mom.

Mom blinked back tears and looked down at the table. “How?”

“You know, Bingo's a friend of Sam's.”

Deet scraped his chair back and got up to leave. Sally frowned at him. “Look at me, Deet. You think this is the end of the world, but it isn't. I spent some time in that jail when I was eighteen. Same reason, too.”

“You didn't get your headlight fixed either, Sally?” asked Jam.

Deet's mom looked at Sally, puzzled. “I didn't know that.”

“Well, I guess it just never came up.” Sally said. “I'm not proud of being so stupid, but I'm not really ashamed of it either. People make mistakes. That's all there is to it.”

“That's just what Deet said,” Jam said thoughtfully.

Deet sat back down and stared at Sally for a minute. How could someone spend time in a nightmare place like jail and it didn't show?

After Sally left, Deet went to his room to try to do some homework. He had some biology drawings to do, but he couldn't even make himself pick up the pencil.

Then he looked up “prison” in the quotation book. There was nothing there, or under “jail,” so he looked under “crime.” There were only two quotations.

Poverty is the mother of crime.

—MARCUS AURELIUS

If poverty is the mother of crimes, want of sense is the father of them.

—JEAN DE LA BRUYERE

Deet sadly read the last one again. That one certainly had it right. He looked under “trouble.”

I have certainly known more men destroyed by the desire to have a wife and child and keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Well, he could sure see that. He wrote that quotation in his notebook, and he chewed on his pencil for a while before he wrote why he liked the quote.

It's really hard to earn a living and try to keep everybody happy. Spend enough time with everyone, buy all those Barbie clothes. Maybe if you're the breadwinner you feel guilty all the time when you think of the things you can't buy for your family. Maybe you feel really jealous when you see those fancy houses, or those big Dodge trucks pulling a trailer with two snowmobiles on it.

After Sally left, Mom got ready
to go to the jail. Everything depended on Dad. Only after she'd seen him would they know how he was, how they would be able to stand this thing.

But Deet couldn't imagine what Dad would be like. He tried to imagine Dad in some other totally extraordinary place: He tried Dad backstage, putting on makeup for a Broadway musical. Or standing up in front of a crowd of people, asking them to vote for him. But Dad in jail just couldn't be imagined.

The lawyer had explained that Mom mustn't be late. The jail was very strict about visiting hours, and you would not be allowed in if you were so much as a minute late. Being on time was not one of Mom's best skills, and it was her experience that no matter how much you wanted to be on time, something would happen
to make you late. The car wouldn't start, or Jam would throw up, or the toilet would overflow, or the clock would stop. So Deet fretted, watching the clock, and Mom dressed carefully, an hour before she had to leave, warmed up the car long before it was necessary, and left with time to spare.

Before she left, Deet finally got the girls involved in a game of Chutes and Ladders, though it was all he could do to sit through it, he was so jumpy. The girls had relaxed, and maybe he had too. A bit.

Deet thought what Sally said had made a difference, had made it all seem more normal. If you take some horrible thing and divide it among a lot of people, it wasn't as horrible anymore. He wondered if there was a quotation about that.

Deet fidgeted the whole time his mom was gone, giving the girls offhand, automatic answers, feeling more like a recording or a robot than a real person. He kept trying not to look nervous to the girls, and that seemed to make him act weirder than ever, his gestures all wrong, his voice up there in some phony-cheery range.

After they heard Mom's car pull into the driveway, it seemed to take her forever to come up the front steps and open the door. Deet scanned Mom's face to see what was there. Nothing. She seemed to have discovered in just one day how to mask her feelings, pretend.

She chattered brightly to the girls as she hung up her clothes on the hooks by the door. “Daddy is fine and sends you his love. He can call you on the phone pretty soon, when he gets his phone privileges.”

“But when can he come
home
,” asked Jam in a whiny kind of way.

“Well, we don't know for sure, but it will be a while.”

“Will he be here for Easter?”

“I just don't know yet.”

When the girls had wandered off to watch TV, Mom poured herself a cup of coffee. She made a face because the coffee was left over from breakfast, had been sitting there all day getting stronger and stronger. Deet wished he'd thought to make her a fresh pot. He seemed to be having a hard time thinking about other people today. He was concentrating too hard on keeping himself together. He seemed on the edge of tears all the time.
Some scrap of music from the radio, something that reminded him of Dad, a magazine cover, a look on Mom's face would set him off. Deet could see that she had lost some of that hard efficiency she'd started out with in the morning, and when she was alone with him, she looked as close to tears as he felt.

“It was horrible,” she said, staring into the murky coffee in the cup. An ugly place, full of guards, and there was this terrible woman at the desk who'd looked at her in a certain way when she signed in. She'd had to say Dad's name out loud when the guard asked who she was visiting, and she couldn't. She'd whispered it, ashamed for everyone to hear his name. And Dad, Dad had looked awful.

“He's in a prison uniform, Deet. Just like everybody else there.”

Deet had a vision of Dad in a striped suit, like the comic books, but the picture was so impossible that it melted away as soon as it had come.