Free Prime Witness by Steve Martini Page A

had kids and these together with Sarah have trashed the better part of our house. The hallway is a scene of devastation. Ken and Barbie are on the floor, half naked. There is a littered trail of tiny clothes to the living room door and beyond, left as if by some dying tribe of Lilliputians wandering in the desert.
    “Do you have the tickets?” Nikki asks me.
    I check my wallet. They’re not there.
    “I thought you had them,” I say.
    “I gave them to you while you were shaving.”
    I look in the bathroom. There they are on the countertop next to the sink.
    “I have them.”
    I hear Nikki sigh from the other room, something that says I would lose it if my head was not tethered to my body. Lately, she might be right. It seems that work is taking its toll, torn between two offices, living in the schizoid realm, half defense and half prosecution, commuting a million miles between each daily.
    “Did you get cash at the ATM?” she says.
    “Oh shit.” I say it to myself, under my breath, and still she hears this.
    “I told you to get some money on your way home,” she says.
    “I know, I forgot,” I say.
    “Well, what are we going to do for cash?” she says.
    “We’ll take it from grocery money,” I tell her.
    “And forget to put it back,” she says.
    While she talks I am raiding the system of little envelopes in the top drawer of our bedroom dresser, thirty dollars from the envelope marked “Food.”
    “Damn it, Paul.” Nikki is standing behind me in the doorway. “I don’t ask you to do much,” she says. “I run the house, do the cooking on top of a job,” she says. “And you can’t remember to go to the bank on the way home.”
    “OK. I forgot,” I say. “Give me a break.”
    I pass her in the doorway, looking for my tie which I laid on a chair in the living room earlier. Sarah is watching television, the sound muted, CNN. It is the news I left on after dinner. Nikki is oblivious to television, so long as she does not have to listen to the noise. Of late, increasingly, what little time I get, I watch in silent mode only hitting the volume for some seeming world crisis. It is part of the price for peace in our house.
    I find my tie, stop for a moment, and watch my daughter. She is dark locks primped and combed, like a gossamer fairy princess in her costume. Her gaze, sparkling brown eyes, is anchored to the screen. Then I look. Pictures of starving little children in some far-off place, bodies emaciated, in pain, bloated bellies and round, wanting eyes. She fixes on these, intense, absorbed, a communion of the innocent.
    The picture changes, a talking head. Sarah looks over at me. I am struggling with my tie.
    “Daddy, what is wrong with those children?”
    It’s better, I think, to confront this than to sugarcoat it.
    “They don’t have enough to eat,” I say.
    “Why not? Why doesn’t somebody feed them?”
    “There isn’t enough food where they live.”
    “Why doesn’t someone bring food to them?”
    “There are bad men there with guns,” I say.
    “Why doesn’t somebody get rid of the bad men?”
    In a nutshell, the circular debate of nations.
    “That’s complicated,” I say.
    She looks at me, the first thing she has not understood. Like most little ones, Sarah has acquired selfishness only as a competitive instinct when confronted with the rivalry of other children at play. On a more native level she is an ocean of empathy. In the quiet and solitary play that she seems to enjoy, her dolls are nearly always sick, throwing up. They suffer from a physician’s desk reference of maladies. It is any excuse to mother them.
    To Nikki and me, Sarah is a litany of little offerings, crushed petals and broken stems, the gatherings of the garden, scraps of paper colored and punched, certificates of devotion folded and rolled in every hue made by Crayola. Tonight, for Sarah, it is not so much her performance that matters, but that she offers this achievement, as a gift to us. At five,