gun?” Raisin asked as he wiped his eyes. He held the Skittles in his hand and stared at the Glock.
“I thought there was an intruder.”
“Cool. Can I hold it?”
“You know how Mommy feels about guns.”
“But you don’t mind when Dad goes shooting.”
“Your dad’s a grown-up and can do whatever he wants. When you become a grown-up, you can do as you please, too.”
“So why do you have one?”
“This gun is for defending ourselves,” she said, nodding toward the Skittles in his palm.
“From what?”
“In the event someone ever tries to break in or hurt us.”
“Why would anyone do that? We have nothing valuable in here.”
“Please, just eat your Skittles,” she said, pointing at the candy in his hand.
Isla waited until he swallowed them. Then she passed him the juice pouch and watched as he sucked all the liquid out through the straw. Her nerves on edge, she waited impatiently for the sugar to kick in while Scout sat quietly on the floor below her. After cleaning the sugar off his fingertips with a wet wipe, she tested him again fifteen minutes later, and this time his blood sugar sat comfortably in the low one hundreds. She grabbed a liver treat out of her pocket and held it out to the miracle dog who’d saved her child’s life more times than she could remember.
“Good dog. Good dog. Treat. Treat,” she said, watching as the Lab wolfed down the reward treat. When he swallowed it, she scratched behind his ears. She turned to see Raisin closing his eyes and slipping back into sleep, as if nothing had happened. And like that, another disaster had yet again been averted thanks to Scout.
She stood at the threshold of Raisin’s bedroom and watched as Scout sat beaming by her son’s bed, his chest out and his head held high. The Lab always appeared proud of himself after his life-saving actions. Smiling, Isla didn’t know what she would do without Scout. The dog had cost twenty-five thousand dollars, but thanks to the generous donations from her church and the community, they had been able to buy this highly trained animal. A dog keenly attuned to the rising and falling blood sugars in her eleven-year-old son, who had suffered from this debilitating disease from the age of three, when a severe bout of strep throat compromised his immune system.
Something shattered downstairs, and she remembered that her father was still roaming around in the kitchen. It chilled her to think that just five minutes ago she had had a fully loaded Glock pointed in his face. She pulled the door shut and proceeded down the hallway until she came to Katie’s room. Her daughter must have been exhausted after her softball team won the state championship yesterday. She twisted the doorknob and peeked inside the darkened room. Light from the hallway streamed inside and illuminated the empty bed. Where had her daughter gone?
Before she could answer that question, she heard a knock on the front door. The night was getting more bizarre by the minute. Could it be Katie? She suddenly remembered that Katie had gone to a party that evening to celebrate the team’s championship season. She breathed a sigh of relief. Now the question was whether she’d ground Katie for breaking curfew or whether she’d cut her some slack. Rules were rules, and yet Shepherd’s Bay had won the only state softball championship in its school’s history. It had been over twenty years since any Shepherd’s Bay team had won a title in Maine.
The Glock. She felt stupid now for taking it out of the safe. And yet its presence next to her all these years had allowed her to sleep soundly at night, especially when Ray slipped out to conduct whatever business venture he happened to be working on at the time.
She went into her bedroom to place the gun back in the safe, reengaged the lock with a push of a button on the keypad, then double-checked that she had securely locked the safe door. She went downstairs, praying that Katie hadn’t drunk alcohol or got in a car with an inebriated friend.
When she returned downstairs, she saw Karl Bjornson, dressed in his police uniform, sitting at the kitchen table with her father. Her father was conversing with Karl as if they were old friends, and he laughed as he recounted old tales about fishing with the cop’s father. Five minutes ago her father had been stumbling around the kitchen in a daze, breaking glasses