Carolyn McSparren - Listen to the Child

Kit glanced at Mac, who looked away quickly. “Maybe he’ll take you to the park. Thank Dr. Mac and let’s go.”

As he locked the front door behind the pair, he felt a pleasant glow. He hadn’t done too badly with the child. Obviously unusually intelligent and mature. And her mother was either separated or divorced. He’d bet on divorced.

The child would be off at her daddy’s tonight.

He wondered if he could think up a reason to call Kit up and maybe take her to dinner.

Call her up? Just how in the hell did he expect to do that? Even if she had a light on the phone and picked it up, she wouldn’t be able to hear a word he said.

“EM,” Kit called up the stairs. “Your dad’s here.” Then she turned to the tall, handsome man who stood just inside the door. “You’re late, Jimmy. It’s almost three.”

He grinned sheepishly and shoved an unruly shock of sandy hair back from his forehead. Once that gesture and that grin had won him forgiveness for every lie he told, but they no longer had the power to charm her.

“Sorry, babe. Saturday night, you know how it is.”

You bet she did. Cop bars, pitchers of beer, too much laughter invariably leading to some sort of confrontation. She’d dragged Jimmy away too many times not to remember.

Jimmy’s shifting eyes and even broader grin told her that Emma had come down the stairs behind her. That was one of the things she most hated about her deafness—Godzilla could walk up behind her and she’d never know until he bit her head off.

Emma grabbed her mother’s arm and turned her around so that she stared directly into Emma’s eyes. “Mom, will you be all right by yourself?”

“I think I can just about handle it, thank you.”

“You going to Granddad’s for dinner?”

“I can probably manage to microwave something all by my very own self.” But she smiled to show she was kidding.

“Oh, Mother,” Emma said. “Come on, Daddy. Can we go to the park?”

“Yeah, well, about that…” He pointedly turned away so that Kit couldn’t read his lips. She could, however, see Emma’s face and the look of resignation that came over it.

“Jimmy, playing video games while you sleep on the sofa is not much fun for a child. Couldn’t you do something Emma wants to do for a change?”

He turned back to face her. This time he didn’t smile. “Hey, she’s my kid too, okay? You don’t run my life any longer, okay?”

Kit bit down a reply. Not in front of Emma. “When will you be back? Emma has school tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I do remember about school. Eight, maybe nine.”

“Try seven, maybe eight. She has to be in bed by nine.”

He didn’t say anything else as he herded Emma out the door and into the front seat of his yellow Mustang.

Kit leaned on the door. The psychologists said that divorced parents weren’t supposed to let the child hear them snap at one another or say nasty things about each other. They were especially not to fight over the child. Kit tried hard.

Emma was too smart. When Kit and Jimmy had finally put an end to a marriage that both had known—almost from the start—was a mistake, Emma had been devastated. She’d been Daddy’s girl. Jimmy could do no wrong. The breakup was all Kit’s fault.

Kit knew that the divorce rate for cops was higher than for the rest of the population, but when she and Jimmy met at the police academy and married soon after they graduated, she’d never expected to become a part of that statistic. Now she wasn’t even a cop any longer—just a pensioned-off ex-cop. Jimmy would probably ride a squad car until he retired. That had been part of the problem—she’d had too much ambition to suit Jimmy, while he hadn’t had nearly enough to suit her.

Now Emma had endured two years of Jimmy’s canceled visits and his endless succession of empty-headed girlfriends. They either treated Emma like an interloper or fawned all over her to get close to her father. Just when she’d get used to one girlfriend, the girl would disappear to be replaced by a clone. There were so many that Kit had stopped asking their names, merely calling all of them “New Girl.”

Kit was having a harder and harder time convincing Em to spend Sunday afternoons and alternate Friday nights and Saturdays with her father. Jimmy kept promising that they’d go to see the latest movies, then reneging when New Girl preferred to see something R-rated that was unsuitable for Emma.

Occasionally, he simply got in a baby-sitter and left. At first Emma had refused to admit she’d been left with the sitter. Finally, however, she’d confessed in a welter of tears.

It was far worse, though, when Jimmy dumped Emma at his mother’s Germantown condo for the day. Kit carefully avoided saying anything negative about Mrs. Lockhart to Emma, even if there were times she had to bite her tongue. Jimmy’s mother didn’t keep to the same rules.

Mrs. Lockhart had never liked Kit. Not that she would have liked any woman who married her son. She’d been civil to Kit until the divorce. After Kit threw Jimmy out, Mrs. Lockhart switched from kid gloves to brass knuckles. And used Emma as her punching bag.

Kit remembered the Saturday afternoon when Emma came home from her grandmother’s with her eyes red from crying, slammed the door on her father and announced, “I won’t go to Meemomma’s ever, ever again.”

Since the scene took place shortly before Kit’s accident, she could hear the frustration and fury in her daughter’s voice. It had taken an hour of cajoling for Kit to get the whole story about the afternoon. By that time she was even angrier than Emma.

“All she does is bad-mouth you, Mom.” Emma switched to a Mississippi Delta twang that was such a good imitation of Mrs. Lockhart that Kit was startled. “If your momma took care of her family like a decent woman, your daddy would still be living at home instead of that puny little apartment. I told Jimmy when he said he was gonna marry her, I said, ‘She’s a mean ’un, you mark my words. Never cook you a decent meal or iron your shirts or keep a halfway decent house.’”

Kit had to laugh in spite of her anger. “Don’t you ever let her hear you do her that way, Emma Lockhart. Don’t let your daddy hear you, either.” She wrapped her arms around her daughter and pulled the child into her lap. She could hear Emma’s sniffles against her shoulder. “I don’t care what she says about me, Emma, but you shouldn’t have to listen to that stuff.” She smoothed her daughter’s hair. “She loves you, sweetheart, and she loves your daddy. She’s unhappy, is all.” What Kit actually wanted to say was that the woman was a harpy. “I’ll tell your dad she upset you.”

“No, Mom, you can’t! He’ll just get mad at me for telling. She goes on and on about how Daddy’s perfect, and you’re some kind of monster who goes around shooting people. She says you spent all his money and now he’s poor because he has to pay child support when you already make more than he does. She says I’d be better off living with her. I don’t want to live with her, Mom! I’d die. Where she lives smells like old people, and she hates cats.”

“Don’t you worry about that, baby. I wouldn’t let you live anywhere but with me.” Besides, Jimmy never wanted custody of you. She could never tell Emma that.

Emma touched her mother’s cheek in that way that melted Kit’s heart. It generally got her everything from a new doll to an ice-cream cone before dinner. “You can tell Daddy I don’t have to go back there ever again, right, Mom?”

Kit wished that were possible, but Jimmy would never agree, and once Emma was out of her sight and under his care, he could drop her anywhere he wanted. All she could do was talk to him and tell him that Mrs. Lockhart was making Emma unhappy. If he held true to form, he’d talk to his mother, but it wouldn’t change her behavior for more than one visit. Kit cuddled Emma and rocked her as she had when she was a baby. She ought to feel some sympathy for Mrs. Lockhart. She’d had a hard life. She’d had Jimmy when she was well into her forties in some unpronounceable Delta town in Mississippi.