“Are you fucking kidding me?” Brandon was whisper-shouting. “Now we’ve got a five-year-old in the car?”
“Hey! Watch your language, potty mouth.” Ana wagged a finger at Brandon, who threw his arms up in the air.
“Calm down,” Emily said. Brandon continued his rant unabated.
“I mean a dog was bad enough. But now we’ve kidnapped a child? How could this day possibly get any worse?”
“It could be raining,” Ana muttered.
They were standing next to the car in a dry ditch, filled with tall grasses and weeds. Emily had driven as slowly as she could out of the parking lot of Balducci’s, then down the service road along the highway for about a mile before pulling over and convening a meeting with Ana and Brandon. She’d left Artie in the backseat with Pickles, who was curled up on Artie’s lap already fast asleep.
“Actually, it’s worse than rain,” Brandon sputtered. “This isn’t water falling from the sky. This? Is a shit storm. This is a hurricane of calamity. What the hell are we supposed to do now?”
Emily ran a hand through her hair. “Look, I never would have gone through with this whole pickup thing if I’d known that Liz and Chestnut were putting Artie in danger.”
“Ya think?” Brandon was red in the face. He took a deep breath and walked around in a circle. “Okay, so can we please call the police now?”
Emily shook her head. “No. I mean, not yet.”
“Oh? Not yet?” Brandon was mocking her. “What, do we need to have a pony with wings in the car along with the stolen dog and kidnapped child before we consider this a crisis?”
“We can call Chestnut,” Emily said. “We’ll just use Liz’s phone and give him a call and sort all of this out. We can hand over Artie. We can hand over the cash, for all I care.” At this point, Emily just wanted the day, and the experience, to be over. “Okay?”
“Not okay,” Ana said, shaking her head. “First of all, don’t you think Liz would’ve used Chestnut’s phone to call hers if he actually had one.”
“We don’t know that,” Brandon said quickly. “Come on, let me see the phone.”
“Well, you know . . . that’s the other thing,” Ana said as she chewed her lip. “I sort of, kind of, maybe don’t have the phone anymore.”
Emily and Brandon both gawked at her.
“What do you mean?” Emily asked. “How can you not have the phone anymore? We haven’t done anything.”
“I’m not really sure,” Ana said. “I’m guessing I left it on the table at the restaurant.” She held up her slice of pizza. “All of this stress-eating has made me forgetful.”
“Okay, fine,” Brandon said. “The one possible plan we had is no longer viable, meaning the only solution now is to actually call the police.”
Emily shrugged. She felt defeated. She’d tried to let loose, to make things fun and carefree, and look where that had gotten her. Nowhere good, that was for sure. If she could turn back the clock . . . but it didn’t even matter. There was no use thinking that way, because they were already in a situation, and there wasn’t any way they could fix it by going into the past. There wasn’t a time-travel option. So they had to work with what they had, now, in the present, decide what to do.
And there was really only one thing to do after being involved in an armed robbery, dognapping, drug mule-ing, and kidnapping.
Without saying anything, she motioned to the car, then walked around to the driver’s side and slid behind the wheel. Once Ana and Brandon were both inside and the doors were shut, she slowly reached for her phone.
“Who’re you calling?” Artie asked from the backseat, where he was seated next to Brandon.
“The police,” Emily said. “We have to get you home.”
“Mom and Dad probably aren’t there anyway,” he said. Pickles was in his lap and he seemed more concerned about the small dog’s tattered collar than he did his parents’ whereabouts.
“Hey, Artie?” Emily said as she twisted in her seat to look at the boy. “Back in the restaurant, why did you call me ‘Mommy’?”
“Well, you looked like you were in trouble,” he said. “And I expected my mom to be there, but since she wasn’t, and you were, I guessed that she sent you to get me instead. But I didn’t want to get you in trouble.”
“In trouble?”
He nodded. “Yeah. Mom and Dad are robbers, you know? So sometimes they have to work with bad guys, and if the bad guys knew you were the wrong people, then you would’ve been in trouble. Right?”
“Well . . . yeah, I suppose,” Emily said. She couldn’t argue with the logic, though she was surprised, flabbergasted even, that a five-year-old had been able to come to that conclusion so quickly and efficiently.
“So did my mom and dad send you?” he asked.
“Kind of,” Emily said. “We were going to call them, but we don’t have their number . . .”
“Oh, that’s all right,” Artie said. “We can just go see Buck and Blanche.”
“Who’re Buck and Blanche?” Ana asked.
“Do we even want to know?” Brandon mumbled as he stared out the window.
“They’re my grandparents,” Artie said happily. “Sometimes I stay with them while Mom and Dad are doing jobs. It was supposed to be like that today, but I think Dad made a bad deal, and that’s when they had to take me to that restaurant, Balducci’s, to leave me there. As collateral.”
“Why do you know that word?” Brandon asked with obvious disbelief.
Artie seemed to think for a moment, then shrugged. “Must’ve heard someone say it.”
“So, Buck and Blanche,” Emily asked as she turned on the car. “Any chance you know where they live?”
Artie laughed. “Of course I do.” He spouted out the address. “Mom and Dad always say that if there’s ever trouble, I should find a good adult and get to Buck and Blanche’s as soon as possible.”
“A good adult?” Ana asked.
Artie nodded. “Not like the people at Balducci’s. People like you guys.”
Emily glanced at Ana, who shrugged, and then punched the address into the GPS. “Well, I guess we’re off to see Buck and Blanche.”
Artie cheered. “Everything’s going to be great. I can tell.”
Emily just shook her head. At this point, she wasn’t convinced anything would be great ever again.