Apology by Jon Pineda (good novels to read .TXT) 📗

found the rest of the waitstaff at the restaurant talking about the manhunt that had been going on since she had left. No arrests had been made, they said. Her boss mentioned the description of the person the police were hoping to find.

That night, with her daughter on the bed, smiling, the wet gurgling of the child’s laughter warding off the drudgery of the day, the woman talked to her daughter and told her the wanted person was not a black man. She went on to describe the shovel he’d held and the strange way he’d walked. The little girl cooed, and the woman nodded.

“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “He wasn’t wearing a baseball cap, and he wasn’t black, and he had a nose that looked like this . . .” She made a honking sound as she playfully squeezed her daughter’s nose.

The little girl squealed.

I have seen him, the woman thought, and I could set this thing straight. She knew her ex would talk her out of it, and because of that, she was glad he was gone. Besides, how often were there chances to make things right in this world?

Tom went outside to get the paper for his father. His father could not start his day now without trying to finish the paper’s crossword puzzle. He would roll it up and carry it with him to the naval operations base, where he would keep it on his desk and glance at it every now and then.

If he had to go to the piers and inspect one of the ships, he would bring the crossword puzzle with him. The air would be laced with diesel and other noxious fumes, and he would care only for the answer that would allow him to fill in blocks going either up and down or side to side. He checked off the inventory of one delivery in supply, and then had a sailor, newly assigned, drive him to the next destination along the bustling piers while he reassessed the answers to the puzzle so far, thinking perhaps he had chosen wrong letters, which would have sent him guessing in the wrong direction. Sometimes he asked the sailor driving, who was usually a kid from the Midwest. More often than not, the sailor wouldn’t have a clue.

Tom usually didn’t care for the news, but with the manhunt on, he found he wanted to scan the front page of every paper, in hopes of being the first to learn of an arrest. An arrest had the power to change everything. He had been scared, had not been able to go out and play with friends these last weeks, and at school, the other kids wouldn’t talk to him. As if doing so, he thought, would make them a target like Teagan.

When Tom unfolded the morning paper, he found the revised rendering. It was a sketch of an entirely different man. Tom couldn’t believe it. He looked at the face and laughed uncontrollably for a few seconds, all while confusion swirled in his head. Then he felt sick. It was him. Tom knew it. He ran into the house so the others would know it too.

It had been at least a year since they had tried assembling another model.

“I thought you wanted to put this together?” his father said.

Tom folded the directions and placed them on top of the small cardboard box. Sheets of gray plastic parts rattled inside like pieces in a board game. Normally, he would have gone straight for the colorful decals. Red, white, and blue emblems. Elaborate insignias. Now he just wanted to see the plan written out in English, alongside the other languages. Within this collection of words was a sequence they could use.

“Do I have to talk to myself today?” his father said.

Tom smirked.

“Where did Mom take Sissy?”

“Don’t worry about it. It’s just for the day.”

His father rummaged through the bag from the hobby store and pulled out a fresh metal tube of Testors glue.

“To that new place?” Tom said.

His father liked to use a balisong. The butterfly knife. He spun the handle until it split open. His hand blurred as the blade emerged within the practiced twirl. Once he locked the handle at the end, he used the blade to slice each plastic piece free. He started with the largest parts, the halved fuselage, the wings, working his way down to the wheels of the functionless landing gear.

“Don’t you want to do this? I thought you wanted to do this?”

Tom shrugged. He focused on the tiny bottles of paint his father was lining up in a spectrum, from dark to light colors.

“We’re missing yellow for this part here.”

Tom touched the picture on the side of the box. The artist’s rendition of the WWII bomber had it floating among a wisp of clouds.

“We don’t have to use the same color just because they did,” his father said.

“Oh,” Tom said.

Tom looked down at his hands. They were open, with the palms facing up, resting in his lap. He counted his fingers. In a few days, he would be eleven. So would Teagan.

Behind them on the refrigerator was a drawing. It was covered in creases that had been smoothed over. Teagan had made it in school earlier that day, the night she had gone missing.

After the police had shown up and his father had left with others in search of her, the house was eventually held in the steady breathing of his mother and the few who had come to hold vigil. Tom, unable to sleep, had crept into the kitchen, where he grabbed the drawing, scooting away the refrigerator magnets, and carried it back to bed, where he slept with it.

In the morning, it, too, had disappeared. Frantic, he tore through his covers. He eventually found it mashed at the bottom of the bed. It would be years before he would picture the way he must have kicked at it in