Page 78 of Dear Wife

With my new phone, I navigate eighteen miles to the north, to a park overlooking a bend in the Chattahoochee River. I walk to the edge and stare out over the water, and the sight is both familiar and disappointing. The river you and I grew up on is a wild thing, with dangerous, unpredictable currents and banks that encroach on yards and farms at the slightest hint of rain. Unlike that one, this river is lazy, a gentle stretch of brown water trickling across rocks and lapping at the red clay shores. A fallen tree angles across the stones, stretching almost to the other side.

I slide my old cell, the last of the burners I bought in Pine Bluff, from my bag, look down at the dark screen. I didn’t have to come all this way. I could have tossed it in a dumpster on the opposite side of town, or handed it over to a bum like I did with the other three. I kind of liked the thought of sending whoever’s tracking it on a wild-goose chase, but just like insisting on a McDonald’s for my meeting with Nick, it seemed fitting to give it a watery grave. This chase started along the banks of a river, and it will end at one. Symmetry.

I rear back with an arm, but an unexpected wave of nostalgia sticks my cell to my fingers. This device is the last thing tying me to the people I’ve met here, Miss Sally and the Reverend and Martina. If they’ve tried to reach me, it will have been on this device.

I power it up one last time, my heart kicking when it catches a cell tower, even though by the time anyone tracks it here, I’ll be long gone. The phone beeps, and the messages roll in. Missed calls, unanswered texts from the church, from the Reverend, from a bunch of numbers I don’t recognize. I spot the one I’m looking for, tap it with a thumb.

Two unread messages from Martina, plus a photo.

The picture comes first, and the sight of it catches in my throat. It’s you, back to the camera, walking down the steps of the church. She took it from an awkward angle, through a window in the executive offices, but I recognize your hair, the shape of your ear, the shirt I got you last Christmas. The sight of you rattles my heart.

You’re here.

I scroll down, find the following message:

Is this who you’re running from? Because he was here, looking for you.

And then:

Rosa and Stefan are my babies. Twins I left with my mother back in Mexico. Now you.

Not all that long ago, you told your brother Duke that I was the worst shot to ever pull a trigger. We’d just come from one of our monthly sessions at the gun range, which I always pretended to hate even though they filled me with hope. With power.

“No, the bull’s-eye,” you’d say, berating me for my shaking hands and shoddy aim. “You’re supposed to aim for the bull’s-eye.”

I’d nod and clip an upper corner, folding the paper like a dog ear.

Sometimes, the guys at the range took pity on me. “Keep your body balanced across both feet,” they’d suggest, encouraging my improved stance with a nod. “Keep both eyes focused on the target, and try not to blink at the recoil.”

I’d smile and tell them thanks, my eyes stinging with the stink of gunpowder and disapproval—for the record, yours, not theirs. The more you criticized, the more my shots went wild.

“You are the wife of a police detective,” you’d say after I squeezed out yet another bullet that missed the target entirely. “That paper’s just hanging there. It’s not even moving. How hard can it be?”

I hear your words as clearly as I did all those times you hissed them in my ear, and I wonder what you would say if you were standing beside me now, on this street pocked with potholes on the south side of Atlanta. With a man who calls himself Clyde and a van full of weapons, laid out like prime merchandise across the ratty carpet. A tip from the owner of a downtown pawnshop, after I convinced him I was serious about getting armed.

“That one,” I say to Clyde, pointing to a compact Sig P320.

He picks it up, hands it to me like it’s not a deadly hunk of metal.

I look down the barrel, curl my finger around the trigger, check the slide. The weapon could use a thorough cleaning, but it feels good in my hands. Nice and light. Sturdy. “How much?”

Clyde shrugs. “Two hundred bucks.”

It’s way less than I’d pay in a gun store, not that I could do that with a fake ID. “Do you have another one?”

“Another gun?” He says it likeduh, cutting his gaze to the ones spread across the back of his van.

“Another Sig P320.” I hold up the one in my hand. “I’m shopping for twins.”

“You want two Sigs.”

I nod. I want two Sigs.

With another shrug, Clyde leans across the merchandise, digging through a cardboard box by the wheel well. The Sig he pulls out is not identical to the one in my hand; one is black, the other black and silver, but they’re the same model. “Three fifty for both.”

I could bargain, but considering I’m buying two unregistered weapons out of the back of a van, from a guy who is for sure not named Clyde, I peel off three hundred and fifty from my stash and pass it over.

“Do you need some ammo?”

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