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Chloe. If that was something you wanted, we’d take her to court. They’d have her evaluated.
    Mom’s great, I said. She’s having her friend Evelyn over tomorrow. I get to play with Evelyn’s son, Barry.
    ( Blah blah goo goo, I thought. Booby dooby zo zo . Barry talk.)
    I looked at my father’s face as I told him these things. If he had wanted to pursue it, I might have said more—told him who Barry was, and how my mother and Evelyn spent their time when she came over, the plan they had to maybe get a farm in the country together, where they could homeschool their children and grow their own vegetables. Follow a macrobiotic diet to reactivate Barry’s brain cells, the ones that didn’t work so well at the moment. Run the lights off solar power. Or wind power, or this machine Barry’s mother had seen on Evening Magazine, where you stored up energy to run your refrigerator by pedaling for an hour every morning on this bicycle-type contraption. Save money on the electric bill and slim down, all at once. Not that my mother needed that, but Evelyn did.
    But my father, hearing my report on my mother’s busy, happy schedule of activities, had looked relieved, the way I knew he would. I knew he didn’t really want me to come live with him and Marjorie, any more than I wanted to go there and live with him and a woman who referred to her two children (and me, when I was with them) as munchkins. Or kidlets, her other favorite term.
    Even though I was his real son, and Richard wasn’t, Richard was more his type. Richard always got on base when he came up to bat at Little League. Where I sat on the bench, until the day when even my father agreed maybe this wasn’t my sport. One thing was for sure: nobody missed me on the Holton Mills Tigers after I quit.
    I just asked because I get the impression she’s depressed, my father said. And I wouldn’t want you suffering through some kind of traumatic experience there. I want you to have someone around who can take care of you properly.
    My mom takes care of me great, I said. We do fun things all the time. People come over. We have hobbies.
    We’re learning Spanish, I told him.

Chapter 4
    T HEY WERE LOOKING FOR HIM all over town of course. Frank. We only got a couple channels on our TV, but even before the regular news came on at six, they interrupted the program to tell about it. The theory was that, given his injuries, and the fact that the police had roadblocks up within an hour of his escape—and in our town, there was basically only one road in and one out—he could not have gone far.
    There was his face on the screen. It was funny, seeing this person on your TV who was also sitting in your living room. Like how that girl Rachel might have felt if she was over at my house, which she never would be, and a rerun of Gilligan’s Island came on just at the moment my mother came into the room with a plate of cookies for us, which was also not happening, and she still believed my mother was actually that actress.
    â€œWe have a celebrity in our midst,” Marjorie had said the night she and my dad took me out for a sundae after my performance as Rip Van Winkle. Only this time it would have been real.
    Now they were interviewing the head of the Highway Patrol, who said the escaped man had been spotted over at the shopping plaza. They were calling Frank dangerous, possibly armed, though we knew he wasn’t. I’d already asked him if he had a gun. When he told me no, I was disappointed.
    If you see this individual, contact the authorities immediately, the anchorwoman said. Then a phone number flashed on the screen. My mother didn’t write it down.
    Evidently he’d had his appendix surgery the day before. They said something about how he’d tied up the nurse who was supposed to be watching him and jumped out a window, but we knew that part already, and we also knew he’d let the nurse go before