Free Long Drive Home by Will Allison Page B

ground-floor windows had been sealed off or fitted with bars.
    I didn’t stop to talk with the other parents when I got to school. I went straight to the office, picked up my gear, and set the orange cones in the no-parking zones. I was already working the crosswalks by the time Sara’s class was dismissed. She came over to the fence to say hi, then went to play with Lacy.
    Warren had warned me that afternoons were more hectic than mornings. The high school let out at the same time as Sara’s school. Kids were everywhere, on bikes and skateboards, darting from between cars, crossing the streetin groups. At the pizza place on the corner, the line was out the door, spilling off the sidewalk. There were school buses and parents waiting for parking spots and a convoy of dusty cement trucks from who knew where. I should have been concentrating on making sure nobody got run over, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the Jaguar inside that building, picturing a police mechanic breaking it down piece by piece.
    No getting away from it , Rizzo had said. As if he knew how my mistakes had converged in that no-man’s-land along Thomas Boulevard, a coincidence of geography I couldn’t help being spooked by, looking for meaning where there was none, feeling like the universe itself had it in for me.
    When we got home, I called Liz to tell her Rizzo no longer needed to talk to Sara because it was an open-and-shut case now—Juwan had been on his cell phone. She was more suspicious than relieved.
    “He stopped by for that? Why didn’t he just call?” “He wanted to ask me about some photos too. No big deal.”
    “What photos?”
    I took a deep breath and told her the rest, even though I knew she wouldn’t like it. Then I counted to five-one-thousand, the way you count seconds between lightning and thunder.
    “No big deal?” she said. “Are you kidding me, Glen? He pretty much has it figured out. He knows you started to turn.”
    “He doesn’t know anything. I told him my foot came off the brake when I reached for Sara.”
    “And let me guess,” she said. “You think he believed you.”
    The next morning, I got a call from an attorney in East Orange. I was in the kitchen packing Sara’s lunch, and Liz was upstairs prodding her to get dressed for school. We picked up at the same time, and I asked her to stay on, knowing she’d want to hear for herself whatever he had to say.
    The attorney explained that he’d been engaged by Tawana Richards to explore the possibility of a wrongful death action involving her son. He was wondering if I might stop by his office to talk about the accident.
    “I understand you and your daughter were the only witnesses,” he said.
    “She was with me,” I told him, “but I’m the only one who saw what happened.”
    I knew I wasn’t under any obligation to talk to him, but I also knew it would look bad if I didn’t. I agreed to meet with him the following week. As I hung up, Liz came into the kitchen in a camisole and flannel pajama pants, holding the phone to her chest.
    “See?” she said, her voice barely a whisper.
    I put my arms around her and pointed out that I wasn’t being deposed, that there wasn’t even a lawsuit—this was just an informal thing, what the lawyer had called prelitigation discovery. “It’s a fishing expedition. It’s where he finds out there’s no one to sue.”
    She turned away and spread her hands on the countertop, as if all her strength were needed to keep it in place. “Jesus, Glen,” she said. “We could lose everything.”
    As soon as she got to work, Liz emailed me the name of an attorney that a friend of hers in the bank’s legal department had recommended. She phoned later, that afternoon, to see if I’d followed up. I was in the waiting room at Kim Lee’s office, trying again to listen through the door as Sara told her about the funeral, Tawana, the axe. I stepped out into the hallway and told Liz I didn’t want a lawyer, that it would