Read Baby Please Don't Go: A Novel for Free Online

arranged and re-arranged some papers, but he couldn’t focus his attention on work. He was distracted by the memory of a baseball game he had been excited about when he was fourteen years old.
    Lock had saved up one hundred and sixty dollars—he remembered the precise amount—from cutting lawns and shoveling walks. He had planned to use the money to buy a jet-black mountain bike. But then his father invited him to go to a Sunday afternoon major league game. Upon hearing that, Lock quickly headed to the sporting goods store and bought himself a Richie Ashburn fielder’s mitt, hoping that maybe he’d impress his father with his purchase and how he’d earned every cent of it himself. He didn’t think his father even knew he had a lawn-cutting and snow-shoveling business. Lock fantasized about catching a foul ball right in front of his father. If that happened, that would be the greatest day of his life . For once, his father would have to say something that would let Lock know he was proud of him. That would have been something.
    Another reason being invited out by his father was so important was because, while growing up and living at home, Lock never saw much of him. He was a pretty busy guy. His father wasn’t one of those work-obsessed absentee fathers. It was more like he was always at this bar or that bar, this poker game or that darts tournament. He was around, all right. It wasn’t like he traveled for business, or as if Lock’s parents were separated. It was more that he was a drunken son-of-a-bitch, fully self-absorbed and not really giving a damn about anything other than where he could find the next job to replace the most recent one he’d been fired from, usually for showing up drunk or hungover.
    On the day of the game, Lock’s father was too drunk to go. Lock didn’t know why, but he had been buoyed by the certainty that this time he would, for once, actually get to do something fun with his father. Instead, his father fell asleep at noon in a stupor. Lock teared up as he tried to rouse him. He’d been thinking about the game all week long. Lock tried in vain to reach into his father’s trouser pockets in search of the tickets. His father woke just enough to slap him across the face and then pass out again.
    Lock’s mother was at work. She had been sick for years with kidney problems, and being unhappily married didn’t help her regain her health. But she worked anyway. She waitressed at a Greek diner a few blocks from the house, but Lock wouldn’t have told her about the slapping incident anyway, even if she were home. At fourteen, he had the sense to protect her from his father. Lock’s father caused her more pain than he caused Lock by hitting him all the time. But what hurt the most was the way he ignored his son. So instead of a ball game with his dad, he sat in his room and watched reruns of Star Trek .
    The next morning, on the way to school, Lock dropped the glove into a trashcan behind Greene’s drugstore.
    Fuck Dad, he thought.
     
    Lock sat at his desk, fiddling with some papers. He pushed the memory away and tried to ignore the queasy feeling in his stomach. He knew he should go to the game with Abby, but he thought he wouldn’t. It wasn’t fair to Abby, who had been more of a father than his real dad ever had, but as everyone in the office knew too well, things that happened to kids echoed forward through the rest of their lives.
    Enough , he thought. He dialed the phone number of the Kennett Square police and arranged to meet them in thirty minutes at the U–Rent–a–Space to look for the kids allegedly living there. When he hung up, he noticed a waiting voicemail. From the caller I.D., he recognized Natalie Mannheim’s phone number.
    He listened to the message. She wanted him to return that night, a day earlier than scheduled. She must have canceled her yoga lesson. At first, he didn’t plan on going, but then he got to thinking about her eyes and the way she had watched