Free Chance by Kem Nunn Page A

wrist, warm against the heel of his palm. He was aware of his desire, taking him by the throat.

The interventionist
     
    O NCE MORE they had parted on a city sidewalk, and once more he had watched her walk away, but the bit in the café had left him unsettled. He was vulnerable to certain things just now, he thought, even more so than usual, what with his personal and financial life in such total and utter disarray, in the absence of female companionship. Stress was not conducive to clear thinking and one needed to remain cognizant. It was, he concluded, like walking around with a fucking target on one’s fucking back and he arrived ten minutes late at the entrance to his daughter’s school.

     
    The school was located near the Marina with a view of the bay. He found the wind coming up hard and crisp beneath the span of the Golden Gate Bridge as he pulled in before the coral-colored buildings, the bay littered with whitecaps, Alcatraz in the distance. The sight of the old prison conjured images of law enforcement gone awry, the steely gray eyes of Detective Blackstone.
    His daughter, Nicole, was waiting alone beneath a tree. When she saw his car she marched toward him in the manner of the condemned,a notebook held to her chest with folded arms. He was given to understand that his wife had broken the news about the schools. He could only imagine the delivery. Nicole opened the car’s door and got in. He could see that she had been crying. They sat for a moment in the street, cars passing, wind off the bay casting a fine mist across the windshield. Clearly she was determined upon stoicism. “I’m sorry, Nicky,” Chance said finally. “If there had been any other way . . .”
    “How about you just stay with Mom.”
    Chance sighed. He considered it bad form to say it was Mom’s idea and thereby assign blame, though in point of fact it had been Carla’s idea. He wondered if it was possible that Nicole still did not know about the dyslexic personal trainer. Anything, he supposed, was possible. “It’s complicated, Nicole. You may not know all the details, but you do know that it’s complicated.”
    His daughter bit at her lip and stared out the window.
    “I know how much you liked Havenwood. But there are other good schools . . .”
    “Marina South blows.”
    Marina South was the name of the public school in whose district their old house had been. “Yes,” Chance said. “Marina South does blow. I’ve done my homework and I know that. What I was about to say was that there are good schools across the bay, in Berkeley.”
    “Berkeley’s not where we live.”
    “It’s not where we live now. But I’ve been looking into it. If I were to get an apartment over there . . .”
    “You just got an apartment over here.”
    She appeared intent upon making each of these pronouncements to the trees beyond her window, having been very careful not to look at Chance directly since seating herself in his car. Chance covered her hand with his. “Nicole,” he said, then waited until she looked at him. “This is difficult. It’s difficult for all of us. But that’s what life is sometimes. What I want you to know is that I’m doing the best I can for you and I always will. I love you very much.”
    Her eyes got watery once more and she looked away. “I know,” she said, her voice faint. Theatrically so, one might have said but he knew her to be sincere, in both her pain and her stoicism.
    “We’ll get through this,” he told her. “It will all work out. You will see.”
    She nodded. Chance gave her hand a little squeeze. She squeezed back. “I know,” she said once more, even fainter than before. Chance let go her hand and put his car into gear. His heart went out to her. The world she’d known was being broken apart. He’d read somewhere that the family is an instrument of grief and there were times when it seemed to be so and he looked once more to the old prison, ghostlike upon its windswept