Free The Detective's Garden by Janyce Stefan-Cole

guess. It’s my job to get him away from them.”
    “There’s a lot of kids out there who need help,” Oswell said.
    “Yeah?” Charlie said. “What if somebody had tried to take you away from me?”
    “You wouldn’t have let them.”
    WHEN HIS SON was born, the valley between his wife’s legs had been as hot as a blast furnace. He’d had to stand there in that frail V of flesh. Sarah Tower Sawyer. Her face like burled wood. He’d just come back home.
    After he’d finished basic combat training, he’d gone straight to Ranger school, a brutal sixty-one-day combat course. He’d been so excited. The course had four stages: Benning, mountain, Florida, and desert, and he passed through without recycling, without being sent back to try again. He could do hundreds of push-ups. He could run five miles in under thirty minutes. His body adapted so easily. In a few weeks, he would go back to join the Third Ranger Battalion, Seventy-Fifth Ranger Reg iment. He wasn’t nervous. He could follow orders. His body never failed. He had never been this good at anything before.
    But in the hospital with his wife, he didn’t know whether to sit or to stand. The nurses bumped into him, their hips soft and broad. Sarah’s gold wedding ring sat in the breast pocket of his shirt. Her fingers were too swollen to keep it on. The doctor, a squash-faced man dressed in white, leaned over her. “Push,” he said, and she held her breath and strained and the veins rose against the skin of her neck and face. “That’s good,” the doctor said. Dominick looked at his sun-dark hands and the hooks of grease beneath the nails and he thought, What’s good? He stood there and watched the whole world open up. He thought, We want things to be open? He thought, What comes next? He thought, How far do we want to see? That round of head slowly advanced and withdrew like the shuffle of heavy infan try or like a great bass struggling against the line. He saw the thatch of dark hair between her legs like river moss. A wrinkled face. A warbling mouth and bluish lips and then a long quiver ing wail. How could a young woman give birth to an old man? A thing as wrinkled as used linen. It was slick and bloody and sniveling and his wife was slick and bloody and sniveling, too. But Dominick was sweatless and unbloodied and fairly calm. He imagined it was just like this when you held someone while they died. When the doctor passed the child into his hands, he held it like he’d hold a fish and thought of gutting it or throw ing it back.
    “CLARKE,” KING SAID, “you’re going to stay with Dad and me, aren’t you?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “You’re not going to leave?”
    “I don’t believe the stuff he says,” Clarke said. “Do you?”
    “Some of it’s true.”
    “I don’t know, King,” Clarke said. He paused, picking his words carefully. “Maybe he’s done something bad.”
    “I don’t care. I don’t want you to leave me alone. No matter what.”
    “I won’t,” Clarke said.
    “You promise?”
    They lay in bed until their father woke and rose from the couch. They yawned and stretched and brushed their teeth. By late morning, they decided to head to the grocery store. In the driveway, the neighbor in the dark robe stopped them as they were about to get in the Ford. She came at them so that the sun angled behind her. A cigarette dangled from her lip. Her hands were in the robe’s pockets. She said, “I’m Roseanne Small,” and her mouth wrinkled around the filter and the cigarette burned orange. A paisley scarf covered her white hair.
    Dominick said, “Nice to meet you.” He turned away from her toward the truck.
    She turned to the kids. “What’re your names?”
    “I’m King,” said King. “My brother’s Clarke.”
    “Howland,” Dominick cut in. “I’m Jon Howland.” The kids turned to look at him.
    “You look familiar,” Roseanne Small said. She coughed into a closed fist.
    “This is our first trip to