Arlene James - Most Wanted Dad

That wobbling chin jutted up stubbornly. “Why are you being so mean to me?”

Amy dropped her jaw in comic outrage. “Me, be mean to you? Have I tried to burst your ear drums? Have I filed public nuisance charges? Have I purposefully blasted you out of your own house?” The operative word, and they both knew it, was purposefully.

Mattie dropped her chin to her chest. For some time she said nothing, and Amy sensed that this was a moment when she ought to keep her own mouth shut. Even when Mattie began to quietly cry, Amy kept her silence, and finally Mattie came out with it.

“I don’t know what the matter is with me. I don’t really want to go back to L.A. To tell you the truth, it really wasn’t much better. I just get so lonely sometimes.”

Amy felt an instant, unexpected kinship with this odd girl. If anyone understood loneliness, Amy did. She resisted the uncommon urge to lay a hand on Mattie’s head and said, “I suppose that’s to be expected, but you’ll get used to it.”

“Get used to being lonely?” Mattie said with some surprise.

Amy was taken aback. Had she really said that? Was that what she’d done, resigned herself to loneliness? She shook her head, as much in answer to her own thoughts as Mattie’s. “What I meant to say was that you’ll get used to living in a new place a-and that in a couple weeks you’ll make some new friends and—”

Mattie threw up her hands and uncurled, sending both feet to the floor. “You’re talking about school, but school is so lame! I wouldn’t even go if I didn’t have to.”

“Well, you do have to,” Amy said, sounding for all the world like her own mother, “so why don’t you make the best of it? You might be surprised.”

“Don’t you understand?” Mattie said desperately. “I need more than school chums!”

“That’s right,” Amy said. “You need an education.” Mattie snorted inelegantly at that, and Amy found herself feeding her the same line adults always fed teenagers. “You can’t do anything without an education.” Mattie pressed her mouth into a thin line as if refusing a dose of bitter medicine. Amy rolled her eyes in exasperation. “Don’t you have any plans, any dreams? What do you want to do with your life?”

Mattie shrugged. “I don’t know. I just know that I’m not going to find what I need in some high school.”

“Just give it a chance,” Amy urged.

“I need something more than most kids my age,” Mattie went on. “I need…”

“A mother?” Amy asked softly. Boy, did she know how it felt to need someone who just wasn’t there and never would be.

Mattie got a faraway look in her eye, a look tinged with sadness and laden with memories, a look that spoke volumes about her feelings for and need of her mother, but then she shook her head. “It’s even more than that,” she said huskily. “See, Mom’s always with me.” She tapped her chest. “She’s in here, and nothing can ever take her away. In fact, you could say that she’s more ‘with me’ than Dad is most of the time.”

Aha, thought Amy, we come to the crux of the problem. And she knew just what to do about it, but it wouldn’t do to be too obvious. She put her hands on her hips and looked around her, noting the neatness and cleanliness of the room. Not only did it look clean, it felt clean, even smelled clean, and yet it had a comfortable, homey feel about it. Maybe she ought to move halfway across the country, she thought wryly, but something told her that there was more to it than that. “On second thought,” she said, keeping her face as expressionless as possible, “I really don’t think I can just let this go by. Maybe you’d better show me where the phone is.”

Mattie’s expression was one of confusion. Amy could see that having her father brought home was what Mattie wanted, but the fact that the homecoming was apt to bring acrimony now mattered to her when it hadn’t before. Then the confusion cleared, and Amy saw real regret…and pride. Mattie wasn’t about to beg her not to call. Instead, she lifted a hand and pointed across the room to the formal dining area. “Through there to the kitchen. It’s on the right side of the door.”

Amy nodded her thanks and went off on her own into the other part of the house. The kitchen was larger and brighter than hers and spotless. A bowl of fruit sat in the middle of the table, and decorative tea towels were draped over the handles of the double wall oven. The place smelled of cinnamon and coffee, just as her mother’s kitchen had always done. You didn’t get that by moving.

She turned to the telephone and lifted the receiver. Several numbers were listed on the interior pad beneath. Beside each was a single boxed digit. Evans’s work number was the first. Amy pushed the star button and the number one. When the other party answered, she explained merely that she was Evans’s next-door neighbor and that she needed to speak to him. When the man on the other end of the line asked if she wanted to be “patched through,” she said that she did. Seconds later she was talking to Evans Kincaid himself.

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