For Whom the Minivan Rolls: An Aaron Tucker Mystery - By Jeffrey Cohen Page 0,35
cardio-glide contraption we have in front of the television, which I’ve unaffectionately nicknamed “The Thing.” The look on her face—tired, pinched, beaten-down—was enough to tell me what kind of night it had been.
“Which one?” I asked.
“The boy.” She rolled her eyes. “You’ll hear him banging around up there in a minute.”
I glanced involuntarily up the stairs, sagged onto the couch, and exhaled, rubbing my eyes. “He’s been a joy since his banishment from Nintendo,” I said.
“Yeah. Thanks.”
I wasn’t expecting that, and sat up, my eyes widening. It wasn’t enough that other people’s families were beating me up. Now mine had to get in on the act? “Well, what did you want me to do? He grabbed another kid by the throat.”
“It would have been nice to have been consulted before you laid down the law. That’s all.” Abby got off “The Thing” and wiped the sweat off her face and neck with a towel she’d brought in from the bathroom. She picked up a bottle of spring water from the coffee table— pardon me, the spring water table—and opened it.
“That’s the advantage of my being here, Abby, and the disadvantage. I’m the one who’s here, so I have to react to stuff as it happens. We didn’t have time to discuss this one.”
She put down the water after a long swallow and nodded. “I know. But then you go out and leave me to handle the consequences. You haven’t been home many evenings lately.”
“It’ll all be over by Thursday. Then I can go back to being a writer again.” She sat next to me on the couch, and I couldn’t resist putting my hand on her slightly moist thigh. She wears shorts when she exercises in the house and sweatpants when she goes out. There are advantages to having her stay home.
Abby nestled her head onto my chest and sighed a little. “So what’s with Joel?” she asked.
I caressed the skin on her leg a little more. “He heard something. Says there was a car spinning its wheels outside the house on the night Madlyn left.”
She looked up at me, interested. “So, where does that lead?”
“Well, first, I’ll call Westbrook in the morning and ask if he checked the outside of the house for tire marks or anything like that.”
Abigail curled her lip, and her voice took on a sarcastic tone. “And after he tells you he didn’t?”
“I canvass the neighborhood. Ask the people who live around there if anybody else heard anything. See if some busybody happened to look out the window at the right time. There’s a yenta on every street. Somebody’s bound to have seen something.”
“That’s not much.”
“It’s a hundred percent more than I had before I talked to him.”
“You’ve got a point there,” Abby said. Her expression changed, and now she was looking at me in an altogether more agreeable manner. She snuggled closer. “Maybe you’re cut out for this gumshoe stuff, after all.” She gave me a kiss that was more than agreeable, and I responded with one of my own. We sank down into the couch.
And that, of course, is when my son decided to come stomping down the stairs from his room, unannounced, a look on his face that would unnerve General Patton. Luckily, Ethan is an Asperger’s kid, and didn’t take any notice of what his parents had almost been doing.
The kid has a great sense of timing, though—I’ll give him that.
“Dad?”
I removed my hands from where they wanted to be and sat up straight on the couch, groaning just the way my father used to when he sat up. When I was 22, I never groaned when maneuvering on, onto, or off chairs and couches.
“Whatever it is, Ethan, the answer is ‘go to bed.’”
“I can’t sleep.”
“Read.”
“There’s nothing to read.”
Abigail sat up now, grinding her teeth just a little. It was clear this was the same argument they’d been having before I got home.
“You have a million books up there, Ethan,” she said. “Pick one out and read it.”
Ethan stopped, truly thinking about what she’d said. “I don’t have a million books up there. They wouldn’t all fit.”
Abby took a deep breath and let it out, the only technique she had retained from Lamaze class when she was pregnant with, well, Ethan. “That’s right. I was exaggerating. But you have a lot of. . .”
“I don’t FEEL like reading!” Ah, so it was going to be one of those arguments. I stood up and pointed a finger at my son.