Free Going for Kona by Pamela Fagan Hutchins Page A

as a croak, so I tried again. “Yes.”
    “I planned to call you today anyway to tell you, and see if it helped you remember anything else that we could use to find the person who killed your husband.”
    “Okay.”
    “The witness said the car was a white Ford F150 pickup, a few years old, and that the driver was a man in his late teens or early twenties.”
    “Okay.”
    “The paint we found on Adrian’s bicycle is consistent with a white Ford.”
    “What happens next?” My voice rasped like a file against a horse’s hoof, a low and thin sound.
    “We’re investigating the lead. Do you know anyone with a car like that?”
    I shuffled through my mental files. It sounded like half the vehicles on the road. “I don’t know anyone who drives a white Ford F150 of any year.”
    “All right. We’ve put out a BOLO for it, a Be On The Lookout. I’ll call you if I have more questions.”
    I pressed end, but kept the phone in my hand. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I had nothing to worry about. Who better to figure this out than the police, right? But my gut resisted. I walked back into the house.
    My mother looked up when I came in. “You need to donate this food to a Christian homeless shelter before it spoils.”
    My hackles went up. I didn’t like being told what to do in my own kitchen, especially her implication that our help should go only to shelters run by and for Christians. I guess Mom would let the heathens eat cake? Still, it was a good idea. “I’ll get Sam and Belle to do it.”
    I checked my phone again. No messages. I wanted Annabelle home, and to know about these “plans” of her grandmother’s. Adrian and I had never talked about what would happen with our kids if either of us died. I had no idea what to do. Whatever was best for Annabelle, I supposed, but what was best for her? She was about to start her senior year and her friends and her swim team were here. She’d been with us for the last four years. She had stability here. I didn’t know what she’d want if she had a choice, though—to stay with us or go with her elegant grandparents to a swank New York apartment near Central Park?
    Who was I kidding?
    “Get Sam and Belle to do what?” Sam ambled into the kitchen and dropped his dirty baseball glove on the island. He had taken off work for a week, but he insisted on going to practice.
    I wasn’t sure whether I was smelling Sam, his glove, or both of them, but it wasn’t good, no matter what. Then again, I have a bionic nose, which isn’t a good thing, and was most of the reason I didn’t follow Papa into veterinary medicine. “Glove to your room or in your gear bag.” He rolled his eyes but grabbed the glove. “All this food—it’s too much. It’s going to spoil. Gigi hoped you and Belle would take it to a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter.”
    Sam raised his eyebrows. “Not the fried chicken, though, right?”
    I answered before my mother could. “We’re keeping the chicken.”
    “Good, because, since it
is
my sixteenth birthday week and all, I get dibs on food choices all week, don’t I?” His voice dwindled off, and he looked sideways at me, catching a completely blank look on my face.
    I felt almost as guilty about my lack of guile as I did about the undeniable fact that I had forgotten about my own child’s birthday week. Not just any birthday, but his sixteenth birthday. His “how soon can we go get my driver’s license” birthday.
    To realize I was a shitty mother sucked. To have my own mother there to witness it made it worse. I rushed over to Sam, avoiding my mother’s eyes, and reached up to put my hands around his wiry upper arms. “Oh, Sam, oh, I’m so sorry. It’s your birthday, and I can’t believe we forgot—that I forgot—about it.”
    Sam looked down at his very large feet in the Nike practice cleats that he wasn’t supposed to wear in the house. “That’s okay, Mom. I understand. It’s kinda tough right now.”
    I missed Adrian at that