The Replacement Child - By Christine Barber Page 0,49

…” he started, ready to question her about it. But instead he said, “I’ll get you a new one.”

He took a few bites of the casserole, then got up to get milk out of the refrigerator. As he pulled the fridge door, the hinge Jammed. The open door settled below the outer frame and pulled the entire weight of the fridge forward.

“Mom, how long has this door been like this?”

“Oh, I don’t know. A month or so.”

He opened and closed the door several more times to see how the hinge was broken so that he could fix it. He also opened the freezer to check its hinges. It was fine. He was about to close the freezer door when the movement dislodged one of the packages in the freezer. It came sliding out slowly. He caught it like a football. The package was wrapped in butcher paper. He saw “10/11” written on it in his father’s big handwriting. Below it was “Brown Trout. Rio Chama.” He remembered when his dad had caught the fish; he had called Gil at college and told him about it, laughing as he remembered how he had slipped into the river as he reeled the fish in. Gil put the package back in its place on top of the other frozen fish. He had never asked his mother why a stack of fish Dad had caught ten years ago was still in the freezer, and he probably never would.

Gil closed the freezer door and went outside to the workshop to get the tools he needed. The workshop was a shed almost attached to the house. It was a small room with two windows. A collection of old fishing rods stood in the corner. There were a few made of hazel and some of ash. His father had believed in using a six-foot rod, saying that it gave him the precision he needed in the fast mountain streams. Gil’s old rod had also been six feet. Susan and the girls had gotten him a new one for Christmas. An eight-and-a-half-foot carbon fiber rod, zero weight, with titanium line rings, a cork grip, and a light trout reel. He hadn’t used it yet.

He found the Phillips screwdriver and took it and the pliers back into the kitchen, shutting off the workshop light behind him.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Wednesday Night

Maxine Baca sat in her car in the driveway, not able to remember why she was there. She had been left alone to sleep while Veronica Cordova went to pick up some groceries. As soon as Veronica closed the front door, Maxine had gotten out of bed and into the car. But she didn’t know why.

She watched her breath on the windows. She thought about driving her car through the closed garage door, but there was no one left who would care if she did. She climbed out of the car and tried to pull open the garage door, remembering too late that Ron had put in an electric door last month. She got back into her car, found the door opener, and pulled her car in.

Still she didn’t get out of her car. She sat in the dark garage and thought about Ernesto. He had built the garage five years after they were married. He had said that he wanted her to have a place to put her washer and dryer, but he’d really built it to have a place to put his worktable. His tools that used to hang on the walls of the garage were at Ron’s mobile home. Almost everything that was Ernesto’s was gone. She had made sure of that. There was only one box left on the shelf in the back of the garage. She shifted in her seat so that she could see it. In it were his awards from the police department and things from his desk at the station.

When she’d heard that Ernesto had been killed, she wanted all his things out of the house. She gave his clothes to the Salvation Army and his car to Manny Cordova. She’d thrown his favorite coffee cup in the trash. She didn’t remember much of his funeral. She remembered being helped by Melissa into a wheelchair she had gotten from somewhere. Melissa had pushed her into the church for the funeral and pushed her into the cemetery for the burial. Ron might have been around somewhere, but she didn’t remember. She thought she remembered Melissa putting her back into bed. The whole thing seemed like