MY INTERNAL CLOCK usually gets me up at 6:00 a.m., and it’s rare that it fails me, but this is one of those damnable mornings. I wake up in an empty bed. Good, I think, and glance over at the clock—6:45 a.m., definitely not good—and I jump out of bed and toss on a robe and yell out “Amelia!” as I go down the hallway.
Then I smell coffee and bacon, and I get to the kitchen, and Ben’s there, grinning, standing by the stove, and Amelia is setting plates and says cheerfully, “Look, Mom, Daddy and I made you breakfast!”
Holy crap, I think. I check the time again and say, “Ben…for Christ’s sake, she’s got to be down at the corner in ten minutes to catch the bus.”
Ben’s face colors. “I thought the bus picked her up at seven fifteen.”
Before I caught you, you fool, and when I swore I would never set foot in that place ever again, is what I think.
I say, “Ben, that was at…the old place.” I turn to Amelia and say, “Your bag all packed? You got money for lunch?”
“Mom—” she starts, and I say, “Hurry up and eat as much as you can.”
And I turn and race back to the bedroom.
Nine minutes later I’m outside with Amelia, dressed, with just a comb through my hair and wearing about 80 percent of what I was wearing yesterday. I’ve made a call to get a pickup from one of the Secret Service staff at H Street. I also make two other phone calls, one to Scotty and one to Pamela Smithson, and both calls confirm what I had suspected: no progress in the search for Grace Fuller Tucker.
“All right,” I tell them both. “Keep at it. I’m going to work matters on this end.”
When I’m done I see the bright-yellow school bus grumbling its way to us in the thick morning traffic. Amelia stands there, looking small, her brightly colored knapsack almost as large as she is. Ben had given her a quick kiss and awkward hug a few minutes earlier before quickly strolling away, shoulders hunched over.
“Hey, hon,” I say, “what’s up?”
“You don’t have to be so mean.”
“Amelia…”
Her head snaps right to my direction. “Daddy came over last night because I was scared! And he helped clean the dishes. And make breakfast. And you weren’t nice to him at all…”
“But Amelia…”
“He came out of your bedroom this morning,” she says. “That means he still loves you, Mommy. Don’t you see? If you stop being so mean to him, we can move back to our real home, and you don’t have to get a divorce and it can all go back to the way things were.”
Her bus comes to a stop, and I note a black Suburban up the way that’s my ride this morning.
“It’s…more complicated than that, honey. And we’re not getting back together. I’m sorry.”
The door to the bus swings open, and she’s now bawling. “If you were nice to him, he’d take us back! He’d take us back, I know he would! We can all be together again!”
“Honey…”
She jumps off the sidewalk, goes up the steps into the school bus, her knapsack bouncing on her little back, and she turns and in a high-pitched voice that always cuts me, no matter how much of a tough mom I think I am, she calls out, “If you weren’t so mean, we’d still be a family! Why do you have to be so mean?”
The door whispers shut. Amelia goes to a seat. The times I’ve waited with her at the bus stop, she’s always turned and waved out the window at me.
Not this morning.
The bus lurches forward into the traffic, and the Suburban stops. I open the door and climb in, and I say to the young driver, “Not a word to me or I’ll toss you out and drive myself.”
Even with his sharp dress and clean-cut looks, he appears scared.
Good.
“Yes, ma’am,” he says.
I fasten my seat belt. “Those were two words. Don’t let it happen again.”
And then we’re off.