Read Ernie's Ark for Free Online

permission.”
    “And you took it,” she says. “That’s how little you ever knew me.”
    Except when you sang
, I want to say. Or, I
want
to want to say. I felt like a child when you sang, and also grateful that you were my child. I did.
    Instead I say, “I don’t see what you hope to accomplish here.”
    “Well, I see that now,” she snaps. “I know how stupid I was to think we could fix everything in a weekend.”
    “So this is Plan B? Cruise enemy territory in a brand-new Mercedes?”
    She shakes her head. “I couldn’t bear to stop, so I just kept driving.” She pulls over about a block from the mill gate, where I can see an idle picket line. I glance at the glowing face of my watch. It’s mid-shift, thank God, so the line is quiet, a small pack of people, all men, holding signs loosely across their shoulders, the smoke from their cigarettes rising around the veiny, burned-looking skin of their faces.
    These people are not, as my daughter believes, noble and bereaved, forced by circumstance to occasionally do the wrong thing. That is a description I find myself wishing she could reserve for me. What these men are is desperate, enraged, and a hair’s breadth from violence. They are also shrewd, they read the papers, they follow their own fates with the practiced eye of a stockholder. They know the players, the rules, and how those rules have been pretzeled into legal documents that they naturally perceive as having been tipped exclusively in my favor.
    “They’re tired,” my daughter tells me. “They’re hard-bitten and lost. What they want is so ordinary. Don’t you see that, Daddy?”
    “The one on the end. Blue-and-red jacket.”
    “What about him?” She’s suspicious now.
    “He bought your braces.”
    She sits back in the driver’s seat and folds her arms, staring ahead.
    “The one right next to him paid for your voice lessons. His son footed the bill for Harvard.”
    “Don’t make me your accomplice, Daddy.”
    “If you want to interrogate some assumptions, my girl, you can start with your own innocence. Why don’t you boycott paper until this is over, put off your dissertation for a few months?”
    “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”
    This is not true. I do not have an answer for my daughter, Emily. I have never had an answer for her, except that I fear her, or rather the ache that comes from recalling the one way I really did fail her: I folded her in with the other Emily and abandoned them both. She did not have to spirit me to the scene of my alleged crimes to teach me this.
    All at once the gate lights come on, activated by the darkening mist. The picket line stirs lightly, a hint of motion that appears to me rife with menace. It is then I remember my vanity plate, the one my daughter sneered at, the one that has been made much of in the news. A sound comes from their midst, a shout of uncertainty mixed with outrage, then the sound takes the shape of a question and the small, edgy pack shifts toward us with the precision of birds changing direction and my daughter is making a sound like a surprised squirrel.
    “Start the car, Emily,” I say. I try messing with the buttons to get out of the cradle of this seat and can’t find the right ones, end up in a perfect position to be stabbed in the belly if someone so desired. “Emily. Start the car.”
    They are upon us now, a ring of faces peering at us from the murk, about six of them, backlighted by the safety lights around the gate, their faces feverish and easy to interpret. I start jabbing buttons at random, trying to get myself worked into a more manly pose. My window sinks soundlessly down.
    I hear my name, hear some expletives and two or three obscenities entirely new to me and regional in a way I didn’t expect. I admit my identity. I tell them just who I am. Out of nowhere, like a magician’s trick, they produce a couple of baseballbats, fine blond small bats of the sort you might see on a Little League