Wild Child Read Free Page A

Wednesday because Wednesday was Allie’s day off and Martine wasn’t there to do it. Martine was in Paris, doing whatever she pleased. That much was clear. And today—today was Wednesday.
    Angelle remembered waiting for him longer than usual that day.
    He’d been late before—he was almost always late, because of work, because he had such a hectic schedule—but this time she’d already got through half her homework, the blue backpack canted away from her and her notebook spread open across her knees as she sat at the curb, and still he wasn’t there. The sun had sunk into the trees across the street and she felt a chill where she’d sweated through her shorts and T-shirt at soccer. Lisette’s team had finished before hers and for a while her sister had sat beside her, drawing big x’s and o’s in two different colors on a sheet of loose-leaf paper, but she’d got bored and run off to play on the swings with two other kids whose parents were late.
    Every few minutes a car would round the turn at the top of the street, and her eyes would jump to it, but it wasn’t theirs. She watched a black SUV pull up in front of the school and saw Dani Mead and Sarah Schuster burst through the doors, laughing, their backpacks riding up off their shoulders and their hair swaying back and forth as they slid into the cavernous backseat and the door slammed shut. The car’s brake lights flashed and then it rolled slowly out of the parking lot and into the street, and she watched it till it disappeared round the corner. He was always working, she knew that, trying to dig himself out from under all the work he had piled up—that was his phrase, dig himself out, and she pictured him in his office surrounded by towering stacks of papers, papers like the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and a shovel in his hands as if he were one of those men in the orange jackets bent over a hole in the road—but still, she felt impatient. Felt cold. Hungry. And where was he?
    Finally, after the last two kids had been picked up by their mothers and the sun reduced to a streak that ran across the tile roof of the school and up into the crowns of the palms behind it, after Lisette had come back to sit on the curb and whine and pout and complain like the baby she was (He’s just drunk, I bet that’s it, just drunk like Mom said) and she had to tell her she didn’t know what she was talking about, there he was. Lisette saw the car first. It appeared at the top of the street like a mirage, coming so slowly round the turn it might have been rolling under its own power, with nobody in it, and Angelle remembered what her father had told her about always setting the handbrake, always, no matter what. She hadn’t really wanted a lesson—she’d have to be sixteen for that—but they were up in the mountains, at the summer cabin, just after her mother had left for France, and there was nobody around. “You’re a big girl,” he’d told her, and she was, tall for her age—people always mistook her for an eighth grader or even a freshman. “Go ahead, it’s easy,” he told her. “Like bumper cars. Only you don’t bump anything.” And she’d laughed and he laughed and she got behind the wheel with him guiding her and her heart was pounding till she thought she was going to lift right out of the seat. Everything looked different through the windshield, yellow spots and dirt, the world wrapped in a bubble. The sun was in her eyes. The road was a black river, oozing through the dried-out weeds, the trees looming and receding as if a wave had passed through them. And the car crept down the road the way it was creeping now. Too slow. Much too slow.
    When her father pulled up to the curb, she saw right away that something was wrong. He was smiling at them, or trying to smile, but his face was too heavy, his face weighed a thousand tons, carved of rock like the faces of the presidents on Mount Rushmore, and it distorted the smile till it was more like a grimace. A