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think I’m going nuts trying to figure out why the hell your mother would do such a dumb thing? You think this is easy for me? You think I like that your mother left me to raise you on my own?”
    “You just said she wasn’t stupid,” Kelly said. Her lip was quivering.
    “Well, okay, what she did , that was stupid. Beyond stupid. It was as stupid a thing as anyone could do, okay? And it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, because your mother would never, ever , drink and drive.” I banged the steering wheel again.
    I could imagine Sheila’s reaction, if she’d heard me say that. She’d have said I knew that wasn’t exactly true.
    It was years ago. We weren’t even engaged. There’d been a party. All the guys from work, their wives, girlfriends. I’d had so much to drink I could barely stand. There was no way I could drive. Sheila probably would have failed a breath test, but she was in way better shape to drive than I was.
    But it wasn’t fair to count that. We were younger then. Stupider. Sheila’d never have done anything like that now.
    Except she had.
    I looked over at Kelly, saw her eyes welling up with tears.
    “If Mom would never do that, why did it happen?” she asked.
    I pulled the truck over to the side of the road. “Come here,” I said.
    “My seatbelt’s on.”
    “Take the damn thing off and scoot over here.”
    “I’m fine here,” she said, hugging the door. The best I could do was reach over and touch her arm.
    “I’m sorry,” I told my daughter. “The thing is, I just don’t know . Yourmother and I spent a lot of years together. I knew her better than anyone else in the world, and I loved her more than anyone else in the world, at least until you came along, and then I loved you just as much. What I’m saying is, this doesn’t make any more sense to me than it does to you.” I stroked her cheek. “But please, please don’t say you hate her.” It made me feel guilty when she said it, because I believed my feelings were rubbing off on her.
    I was furious with Sheila, but I didn’t want to turn her daughter against her.
    “I’m just so mad at Mom,” Kelly said, looking out her window. “And it makes me feel all sick inside, to be mad, when I’m supposed to be sad.”

THREE
    I put the truck back into drive. A short distance later I hit the blinker and turned down Harborside Drive. “Which house is Emily’s again?”
    I should have been able to spot it. Emily’s mother, Ann Slocum, and Sheila had met six or seven years ago when they’d both signed up the girls for an infants’ swim class. They traded tales of being new mothers as they struggled to get their girls in and out of their bathing suits, and had kept in touch since. Because we lived not too far from each other, the girls ended up in the same class at school.
    Chauffeuring Kelly back and forth to Emily’s house had usually been a duty that fell to Sheila, so I didn’t instantly know which place was the Slocums’.
    “That one,” Kelly said, pointing.
    Okay, I knew this house. I’d dropped Kelly here before. A one-story, built mid-sixties, would be my guess. It could have been a nice place if it got some attention. Some of the eaves were sagging, the shingles looked to be nearing the end of their lifespan, and a few of the bricks near the top of the chimney were crumbling from moisture getting into them. The Slocums weren’t alone in putting off household repairs. These days, with money tight, people were letting things go until they couldn’t be ignored any longer, and sometimes even then they weren’t dealing with them. A leaky roof could be fixed with a pail a lot cheaper than new shingles.
    Ann Slocum’s husband, Darren, was living on a cop’s salary, which wasn’t huge, and probably even less than it used to be since the townstarted clamping down on overtime. Ann had lost her job in the circulation department at the New Haven paper sixteen months ago. Even though she’d found some other ways to