Free Long Drive Home by Will Allison

accident, sooner or later you hire a lawyer to make sure somebody pays.”
    I told her Clarice had said Tawana’s ex was a radiologist. She had a big house in the historic district. She’d already replaced the Jaguar with a BMW.
    “You know as well as I do,” Liz said, “it’s not about the money. It’s about not being able to do anything else.”
    After the accident in Cleveland, we’d have been happy to settle with the insurance company and be done with it, but the guy who hit us didn’t have insurance, and for us to collect on our uninsured motorist coverage, we would have had to sue him first, make him pay what he could. We were in a tough spot. Liz was due in two months, and we didn’t want the hassle.
    Liz’s dad offered to help, but we went to see the guy instead, to see if he wanted to settle out of court. We were looking for just enough money to replace the car and cover the emergency room. The guy didn’t have it, though. He was renting a little two-bedroom place out in Euclid with his wife and kids. The delivery truck was all he owned, and he couldn’t even afford to get the bumper fixed. So we let it go.
    But it’s not like Liz and I were saints. We never talked about it, never said the words, but it was always there between us: if there had been a problem when Sara was born—anything even remotely attributable to the accident—we would have sued him into the ground.
    * * *
    On Thursday, while Sara was at school, I met with a client from the neighborhood, a stockbroker named Carlos who was getting audited. I gave him my standard pep talk. I said some people thought my job was to help clients get away with as much as they could, but the way I saw it, I served them best when they paid exactly what they owed—not a penny more, not a penny less. I would run the numbers every which way, I’d dig up all the tax breaks I could find, I’d turn the code inside out, but in the end, everything had to be legit. Otherwise you risked paying a lot more later.
    “So don’t worry,” I told him. “You’ve already paid what you owed.”
    Back home, going over Carlos’s returns, I was happy to lose myself in the numbers for a while, but at some point my screen saver kicked in, and I found myself watching a slide show: Sara playing tee-ball, Sara learning to ride her bike, Sara touching noses with Chairman Meow. It was impossible not to think of Tawana and what it would be like to look at those pictures knowing I’d never see Sara again.
    I put on a sweatshirt and went outside. The front yard was covered in leaves. I’d been avoiding raking because I didn’t want to be out there when one of Juwan’s friends stopped by, which they’d continued doing since the funeral. But I figured I was safe until school let out. I unfolded a tarp, the one I’d covered the memorial with, and started raking.As I was dragging a load of leaves to the curb, a black sedan came down the street. I thought to duck behind the hedge a moment too late. Rizzo parked and got out, holding a manila folder.
    “Mr. Bauer,” he said. “Spare a minute?”
    I propped the rake against a tree and met him on the sidewalk with what was becoming a familiar sense of dread. I figured he was there about Sara again, maybe hoping I’d changed my mind since the funeral. I steeled myself to tell him I hadn’t.
    “Heard you had a little scene here,” he said, glancing over at the sycamore. The gauze had started to sag, revealing the axe marks. “As if that funeral wasn’t hard enough.”
    “Sara asked us to take her,” I said, not wanting him to think I’d gone out of guilt but probably giving him that impression anyway, blurting out an excuse like that. “She’s still trying to get her head around the fact that he’s gone.”
    “Poor kid,” he said. “Look, never mind about me talking to her. I think we’ve got what we need. Turns out the guy was on his phone. So with the speeding and maybe alcohol too—it should be an open-and-shut