-1- 

Why in the world my mother wants to marry this guy is beyond me. I don’t like him and I don’t trust him. Just looking at him makes me want to throw up. I mean, you can see little hairs waving in his nose when he breathes – yuck, and he wears those glasses that when you look at him, his eyes look way bigger than they’re supposed to. It’s a little scary actually. He’s tall, but not in that good, hunky way. His kind of tall makes him – what’s the word? A vocab word from last week? Oh yeah: loom, that’s it. The guy’s always around, looming, and it’s creepy. He’s just creepy. And boring. OMG he is so boring! For example, take running. He talks about it all the time and the “bennies” of it. He actually said that once, “bennies”, like trying to be cool. Not! God, just say “benefit”, dude. Then last night, he started talking about his running shoes. The man is possessed. We were having dinner – if you can call it that, my mom’s not the greatest cook – and old blabber mouth went on and on about how it took him forever to find his perfect ones. Like I could care about his stupid shoes, like anybody could. Then, bingo, just like every time he talks about running, he started going on about eating only foods that promote a strong body and mind. Mrs. Sparn’s health class is more interesting than that, and she’s an idiot. 

So, this morning I’d like him to drink one last disgusting glass of his puke-colored smoothies, then lace up his precious pink and yellow Nikes and run. Away. Leaving me and my mom to ourselves. I mean, aren’t we fine the way we’ve been for the last twelve years – tight, just the two of us? Come on, don’t people even say how much we look alike? I know she likes that. Just the other day in Forever 21 when she was paying for that dope jacket with the fringe –which I know she’ll totally borrow – didn’t the salesperson say I looked just like a smaller version of her? It’s not such a stretch really to think that either, because my dear ole mama’s not that much older than me since she had me the day before her seventeenth birthday. We celebrate together. 

But this guy, this Art Johnson, what an old fart. Bottom line, I just can’t take anything he does or says. Like his pervy invitations to do things together. “One-on-one, honey,” he said last week, his voice all slimey. Don’t call me honey, jackass! “For getting to know each other,” he said, practically begging. “So we can work on forging our own relationship.” Spare me. I can think of something I’d like to forge, like a sword, to chase him off with. And it’s so twisted how he tries to suck up to me with all his little suck-up gifts, as if I don’t know he’s trying to worm his way in to what my mom and I have going. I thought it was pretty funny how hurt he looked when, after he’d given me that bracelet with the creepy heart charm, I didn’t say thanks, just left it sitting there on the coffee table and walked away. No way I want that stupid bracelet, and for sure I don’t want any of his little get-togethers. I do not want him in our lives! 

The worst is that my mom’s no help. It’s clear to me the woman’s totally lost her mind. So a man wants to marry her, big deal. Well, if I had a dad, or knew who he was, no question I’d for sure be on my way right now to live with him. 

-2-  

My daughter is mad at me, spitting mad, and I don’t know what to do. Sure, we’ve had little disagreements before, but this one is not little. It’s about as big as it gets. My Hailey has never been good about sharing and now that she’s having to share me, she’s turned ugly. And it’s really messing up our lives. It’s just been the two of us since she was born, but now that I have Art in my life – thank the Lord or whatever’s up there – she has him in hers too and, man, she is fighting it. Being a single mom is no easy thing, but I’ve tried, done the best I could, but sure, I’ve made mistakes. Maybe, yeah, I see now one of the biggies was how I let us be friends and just wanted us to have fun together. I read the article Art gave me from the New York Times – he’s always pointing out things for me to read – about how mothers should stay mothers, that their daughters need that more than they need another friend. Okay, fine, I get it. Guilty as charged. So now that I’ve finally got this terrific man in my life, all that’s biting me in the butt.  

Look, I was just a kid myself when I got pregnant with her. Fifteen. Where’s the article about how birth control should be required for girls in high school? Me, I had no birth control, wasn’t even on my radar. I’d never even had a boyfriend before getting mixed up with Hailey’s sperm donor. But the guy had such a way about him, gorgeous blue eyes and that long body that wouldn’t stop. And he didn’t, stop, that was the trouble. I was in love, or thought I was. So when I turned up pregnant – God, we only had sex twice before he dumped me – I was shocked. My parents went ape on me. My mother wanted me to get an abortion, but, you know, I couldn’t go that route, kill a baby. Wasn’t a religion thing, it was just a me thing. Something inside told me – like maybe it was Hailey in there tapping out Morris Code? – I had to go ahead with the pregnancy. And keep the baby, though I didn’t say that last out loud. To keep my parents off my back, the whole time I told them I’d give it up. I let them sign me up with the adoption agency and take me to appointments, all that. It was all set up.  

Know what I think? Sometimes good things happen without kids actually thinking something through, like, you know, what it would mean to raise a child. At the time I didn’t see it, but a huge good thing that happened in my keeping Hailey was that she saved me from myself, from going down the path I was on – you know, running around, drinking, drugs. All I knew was I wanted to keep my baby. So believe me, it was World War III with my parents when she was born and I refused the adoption. Boy, did we go at it, but in the end they couldn’t fight their granddaughter. They fell in love and took us both home. That wasn’t easy either. We lived there for the next two tough years while I got my GED early and went to cosmetology school.  

The past ten years, Hailey and I’ve been on our own and done okay. I’ve always been after better situations for us, moved us to better apartments, me to better salons. Boyfriends? Sure, there have been some here and there, a couple a little shady I admit. But not Art. My Art is a prince! He’s a lawyer. Think of that -- me, Nadine Farrar, marrying a lawyer! Who knew you could meet the love of your life giving a haircut? I am so lucky. Hailey’s lucky too, though she doesn’t get that yet. I know Art’ll make a great father, if she’ll just let him. But geeze, she’s fighting this thing tooth and nail. And let me tell you, my kid’s got sharp teeth and long nails and she sure knows how to use them.  

-3- 

It was a lovely, luminous fall morning, a day on which nothing, it seemed, could possibly, or would ever, go wrong. On that day of quietly dazzling beauty, late-season flowers bloomed as if there were no winter in their future, trees of brilliant reds and golds had not yet dropped a single leaf. An early-day breeze of unparalleled purity skipped down a block of North Lombard Avenue as people went about doing all they were meant to do. Over there on the sidewalk, an elderly couple, he hunched, she slightly bowlegged, walked a seriously arthritic collie, glad to allow him to stop and sniff wherever he wanted. Across, at the foot of her driveway, a woman, not long awake, one hand holding closed her robe at the neck, stooped for her blue-sleeved Times. And from three separate houses children lugging backpacks, climbed into the backseats of late-model SUVs and waited to be driven to school. It could have been a morning anywhere on any suburban street in America; it was that kind of morning, promising to be one more of that kind of day. 

The jogger, an ultra-fit man in his fifties, dressed expensively in body-tight black Spandex and color-shock pink-and-yellow Nikes, swept down North Lombard, keeping to its straight center line as if his life depended on it. Eyes trained forward, he no more saw the couple and their dog, the woman picking up her paper or the waiting schoolkids, than they saw him, not really, not until he dropped. Then all those heads snapped up or swung around, all those mouths dropped open to form tight O’s – the couple, the woman in her bathrobe, the children behind their car windows. 

Had there been people close enough to look into his face as the instant seizure of pain stopped him, then dropped him, they could have read alarm, then the protest in his face. Close enough, they could have heard him choke out the words, “No. Not now, so close.”  

By the time the old couple reached him he was already a shade of ashy blue. They knelt, as best their old knees would allow, to peer into his senseless eyes. The collie pushed his long snout in for a sniff until he was told to get back.  

The driveway woman’s robe fell open a little as she, blinking and shaky, pulled a cell phone from her pocket.  

The children in all three cars craned themselves to watch, eyes pinned on the man’s shoes, every single one of them thinking they’d never seen a person die before. 

From the direction he’d come, twenty blocks back, the girl Hailey and her mother were having their morning argument.