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school where there’s nobody that Mom killed.”
    The two people who’d died in the car that hit Sheila’s were Connor Wilkinson, thirty-nine, and his ten-year-old son Brandon.
    As if fate hadn’t been cruel enough, Brandon had been a student at Kelly’s school.
    Another Wilkinson boy, Brandon’s sixteen-year-old brother Corey, had survived. He’d been sitting in the back seat, belted in. He was looking forward through the front windshield and saw Sheila’s Subaru parked across the off-ramp just as his father screamed “Jesus!” and hit the brakes, but not in time. Corey claimed to have seen Sheila, just before the impact, asleep behind the wheel.
    Connor had not bothered with his seatbelt, and half of him was on the car hood when the police got there. His body had been taken away by the time I’d arrived, as had Brandon’s. The boy had been wearing his seatbelt, but had not survived his injuries.
    He’d been in sixth grade, three years ahead of Kelly.
    I’d had a feeling things would be rough for her when she got back to school. I’d even gone in to talk to the principal. Brandon Wilkinson hadbeen a popular kid, an A-plus student, a great soccer player. I was worried some students might want to take it out on Kelly, that her mother was being blamed for getting one of the school’s most-liked kids killed.
    I got a call Kelly’s first day back at school. Not because of something someone had said to her, but because of something Kelly had done. One of her classmates had asked her if she got to see her mother’s body in the car before they pulled it out, whether she’d been decapitated or anything cool like that, and Kelly’d stomped on the kid’s foot. Hurt so bad the girl had to be sent home.
    “Maybe Kelly’s not ready to resume school,” the principal had told me. I’d had a word with Kelly, even made her demonstrate for me what she’d done. She’d stepped around the front of this other girl, raised her knee, then driven her heel into the top of her classmate’s foot. “She had it coming,” Kelly’d said.
    She promised not to do anything like that again, and returned to school the following day. When I didn’t hear of any further incidents, I’d hoped things were okay. At least as well as could be expected.
    “I’m not putting up with this,” I told her now. “I’m going into that office on Monday and those little bastards who are saying these things to you are—”
    “Can’t I just go to another school?”
    My hands tightened on the steering wheel as we drove down Broad Street, through the center of town, past the Milford Green. “We’ll see. I’ll look into it on Monday, okay? After the weekend?”
    “It’s always ‘we’ll see.’ You say you will but you won’t.”
    “If I say I’m going to do it, I’ll do it. But it means you’ll be with kids who don’t live in your neighborhood.”
    She gave me a look. The “duh” was unspoken.
    “Okay, that’s the point, I get it. And that might seem like a good plan now, but what about in six months, or a year? You end up cutting yourself off from your own community.”
    “I hate her,” Kelly said under her breath.
    “Who? Is it a girl who’s been calling you names?”
    “Mom,” she said. “I hate Mom.”
    I swallowed hard. I’d tried hard to keep my feelings of anger to myself, but why was I surprised Kelly felt betrayed as well? “Don’t say that. You don’t mean that.”
    “I do. She left us, and she got in that dumb accident so everybody hates me.”
    I squeezed the steering wheel. If it had been wood, it would have snapped. “Your mother loved you very much.”
    “Then why’d she do something so stupid and ruin my life?” Kelly asked.
    “Kelly, your mother wasn’t stupid.”
    “Wasn’t getting drunk and parking in the middle of the road stupid?”
    I lost it.
    “Enough!” I made a fist and bounced it off the steering wheel. “Goddamn it, Kelly, you think I have the answers to everything? You don’t