by Tom Howard
Fucking fuck, kid.
Wade takes out his phone and calls 911. Realizes he’s still wearing the stocking so he pulls it up off his face. He tells the operator there’s a kid down on the sidewalk by Adelio’s, that he’s hurt bad, and then he hangs up and stares at the phone for a second. Turns it off.
Ah, fuck, kid.
He leans down. The kid’s crying. Hard to tell how bad it is. Maybe he’ll be okay, maybe he won’t. But the kid’s crying. He’s trying to reach his phone, which was thrown aside by the impact. Wade retrieves it and puts it in the kid’s hand, but the kid drops it immediately.
“Can’t,” the kid cries. “Please. Call her.”
Sirens. In Wade’s head, maybe?
“Listen,” he says. “Somebody’s coming, kid. Hang in there.”
“Call her,” the kid says again. “You have to.”
“I can’t stay,” Wade says.
Definitely sirens.
“Please,” the kid says. Crying. Scared.
Damn. Fucking damn, kid. Polly’s age.
He takes the phone.
“Who,” he says. But he doesn’t have to ask. All the calls and all the texts are from the same number.
He calls, and when a woman picks up, he explains. Tries to explain. She cuts him off and tells him that’s she coming, that she’s on her way. Half-mad but coherent enough to tell Wade that he, motherfucking Wade, has one job, and that job is to stay there and make sure Charlie is okay. Nothing he will do in his entire life will ever be as important, she says, as this one thing. Nothing can happen to him. Nothing. Does he understand? Does he understand, cabrón, that nothing bad can happen to this kid? That the fate of the motherfucking universe depends on it? The rest is an eruption of Spanish profanity that Wade unfortunately and completely understands and will remember for the rest of his life.
I understand, he says, I get it.
Hold his motherfucking hand, she says, so he takes Charlie’s hand. He sets the phone down and tells Charlie that she’s on her way. The kid’s still crying.
He can see the ambulance now, and the police cars.
He tosses the stocking to the ground. Thinks that he should probably call Mel. Explain, well, probably too much to explain. Maybe just tell her that he’s fucked everything up pretty bad. That he’s sorry, for whatever that’s worth. Probably nothing.
Jesus, the kid’s such a mess. Still crying but trying not to. Trying to be tough.
“Hold on,” he says.
What the hell. It can’t hurt to say it.
“Everything,” he says, “will be okay.”
TOM HOWARD’S stories have appeared in Ninth Letter, Indiana Review, Cincinnati Review, Willow Springs, Booth, and elsewhere, and have been awarded the Robert and Adele Schiff Award, the Tobias Wolff Award, the Masters Review Short Story Award, and the Indiana Review Fiction Prize. He holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and lives with his wife in Arlington, Virginia.