Free Shoot the Moon by Joseph T. Klempner Page A

now?”
    “Hold on.”
    After a half minute, he hears his daughter’s little voice. “Hi, Daddy.”
    “Hi, angel. How you doing?”
    “I’m scared.”
    “Don’t be scared.”
    “They’re going to put me in a big ma chine.”
    “I’ll be with you, angel,” he tells her. “I’ll take care of you.”
    “Promise?”
    “Promise.”
    “Are you remembering about the story, Daddy?”
    “Absolutely,” he assures her.
    It’s only later that it dawns on him that the only reason his mother-in-law’s so anxious for him to take Kelly for the test is that he’ll end up being the one who has to pay for it. His eyes travel to the duffel bags lying on the floor.
    He decides that even if he’s going to throw the stuff out, he’s not ready to do it quite yet. So he may as well put it away. And since he’s no doubt looking at big jail time if he gets caught with it, putting it away is transformed to hiding it. But where do you hide three pillowcases full of narcotics in a studio apartment?
    He looks around. An amateur, he thinks amateur thoughts: inside the clothes hamper, underneath the sofa, up in the back of his closet, in the oven. He knows just enough to know that those are probably the very first places anyone would look. And yet he can’t come up with anything better.
    As a temporary measure, he removes the pillowcase from the smaller duffel and adds it to the two in the larger duffel, which he takes down to the basement of the building. There, each tenant has been given a small storage locker in exchange for a $7.50 monthly increase in rent. The lockers are cages that you can see into. All Goodman keeps in his are a couple of cartons of books and old tax records. To safeguard them, he went out and bought a cheap combination lock, which he keeps set at 0-0-0 so he won’t forget the numbers. He once figured out that if he lives to be seventy-five, the locker will have cost him about $3,000. Now he figures he might as well start getting something for his money.
    Back upstairs, he fixes himself an American cheese sandwich, with mustard on one slice of bread and mayonnaise on the other. He pops open a can of Pepsi, sits down on his sofa, and clicks on the TV. The first channel he hits, they’re showing Rocky, the original one, where this down-and-out bum of a club fighter gets given a shot at the heavyweight title, a zillion-to-one underdog. It’s one of Goodman’s all-time favorites, and he’s caught it right at the beginning. He kicks off his shoes and settles back.
    Life could be a lot worse, he thinks.

Goodman is up by six. He showers, shaves, and dresses, downs a cup of instant coffee with nondairy creamer and a strawberry Pop-Tart. He’s at his mother-in-law’s apartment a few minutes after eight.
    “You’re early,” she tells him.
    Kelly comes into the room, still in pajamas. She drags Larus with one hand, rubs her eyes with the other. To Goodman, who hasn’t seen her for a week, she looks tiny and frail.
    “Hi, angel,” he says softly. He feels his back twinge when he squats down to be her size, but he deals with it.
    “Hi, Daddy,” she says, folding herself into his arms.
    It turns out the MRS test is really an MRI. Goodman is allowed to stand off to the corner of the room as they slide his daughter into a tremendous machine that reminds him of a photograph he once saw of something called an iron lung, which they used to put polio victims in. She cries the entire time, not (it seems to Goodman) because she’s afraid of the machine, but because they won’t let Larus into it with her.
    Afterward, they tell him the film the MRI machine has made of Kelly’s head will be delivered to her doctor. They’re pleasant enough, but they won’t tell him how it looks, and that worries him.
    At the cashier’s station (and Goodman realizes he must have missed that point at which doctors’ offices started having cashier stations), Kelly dries her tears against Goodman’s shirt while Goodman signs a