Free In Between Days by Andrew Porter

River Oaks, toward Beto’s house, where he is sure, even now, the party is starting.

4
    MURDER . His daughter had actually used that word. She had actually mentioned that as a possibility. If the boy they had hurt didn’t come through, if he ended up dying, this boy she had gotten involved with could be tried for murder, and she for conspiracy, for conspiracy after the fact, simply for knowing him, simply for being his girlfriend and for not reporting what she knew. It was a remote possibility, of course, highly unlikely, but still, just the idea of his daughter even mentioning this word to him, of her using it in a sentence involving her future, it was almost too much to bear.
    Since Tuesday, when they’d met, he had been going over it in his mind, trying to figure out the best possible scenario, the best possible plan. He had talked it over with his lawyer, Albert Dunn, and Albert had told him that the best thing to do right now was to lay low and wait it out, to wait and see what happened. In all probability, he said, they were simply trying to scare her, trying to put her on edge, threatening her with prosecution as a way of getting her to testify against her boyfriend. To do anything too aggressive at this point, Albert thought, would only arouse suspicion. After all, Chloe hadn’t even been questioned yet. Not officially. She had been asked a few questions about her boyfriend, about his friend, and about their involvement, but not about her own. As far as they knew, she had been home in her dorm room studying, which is exactly where Chloe said she was. But still, Elson had known when he’d talked to his daughter earlier that week that she’d been lying, or at least not telling the whole truth, that she was covering something up. She had that look in her eye that she used to get back in high school whenever she’d come home from a party with the smell of alcohol on her breath, claiming to have been at the mall. Back then, he used to laugh it off, smile or shakehis head, but this was a different type of situation altogether. There were dire consequences here, dire stakes.
    When he’d talked to Cadence about it earlier that week, she’d told him to keep his nose out of it, that there was a reason Chloe had waited so long to tell him. “She’s afraid you’ll muck it up,” she’d said, “start making phone calls and inquiries like you usually do.”
    “Well, aren’t you even worried?” Elson had asked.
    “Of course, I’m worried. Do you think there’s a minute that goes by when I’m not thinking about this?”
    “I don’t know,” Elson said. “It’s hard to say.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “Just what I said. It’s hard to tell if you’re worried or not.”
    “Are you kidding?”
    “No.”
    “I’m getting off the phone,” she’d said and hung up.
    He’d regretted that conversation, just as he’d regretted almost every conversation he’d had with Cadence in the past year. He’d wanted to tell her, first and foremost, that he was happy she’d stopped by the hospital to see him, that Lorna had told him that she’d stopped by, and that it had meant a lot to him that she’d done this. But, as usual, there seemed to be an enormous gap between what he wanted to say to Cadence and what he actually said.
    And now, as he sits at the Ginger Man Pub, waiting for his friend Dave Millhauser to return from the john, he considers the extent to which his own family has cut him off. Even his eldest child, Richard, had refused to meet with him earlier that day when he’d called him up to set up a meeting. What had he done, he wonders, what had he done to warrant this type of mistreatment, this type of contempt?
    All around him students from the university are sitting at tables, drinking beer and laughing. The pub itself is warmly lit, welcoming, a place where he has been coming now for almost a year, a place where he and Dave used to come to eat after their weekly tennis matches, but