Page 7 of Second Start: Family
He still shouldn’t have gone off.
The school conferences were on the calendar kept on the refrigerator door, and before he’d headed out this morning he’d promised the girls he’d wear his new blue shirt.
He’d made no promise to Dan, because Dan hadn’t asked.
But the combiner drove every thought from Hall’s mind except the necessity of getting it going without a major bite in the wallet. When the portable light he’d rigged to see into the guts of the combiner also went out, he’d returned to the house planning to grab food, another light, and head right back.
Instead, he’d faced his daughters.
There was nothing on this earth to make a man feel he was a worm, a monster, and a heathen like that pair of tear-stained faces.
The moment they’d turned their pathetic countenances toward him and sighed in stereo, “Oh, Daddy….” he’d have shoved the combiner off a cliff by himself.
In less than five minutes, he’d washed up and high-tailed it to see the teachers, supper-less.
He saw the light in Vicky’s trailer, but he figured he should meet with the other teacher first. Vicky would understand.
No answer to his knock. He’d figured he’d wait a couple minutes for her to return before going to Vicky’s. He’d sat on the steps. He was near certain he hadn’t dozed, but the figure of a woman, her shape silhouetted in the light from Vicky’s trailer, appeared awful sudden.
Okay, maybe he had drifted off.
That new teacher looked at him like he’d come straight out of a mudhole and talked like he’d kept the Queen of Sheba waiting for the fun of it.
He still should have kept a rein on his temper. It wasn’t Molly’s or Lizzie’s fault he’d gotten little sleep last night, wrestled with a combine most of the day, and missed supper. Or that this new teacher they liked so much was a pain in the butt.
Noise from the house jerked him upright in the driver’s seat. Light poured from every window.
Crafty, the border collie who was allowed inside, was outside the back screen door, baying because he was shut out. Benji, a beige mongrel with none of the winsomeness of the original, was on the house side of the back door, barking frantically. Benji was not allowed in the house because he combined a bad habit of depositing small, dead rodents as gifts in empty shoes with a tendency toward incontinence.
Hall shoved the truck door open.
Benji abruptly stopped barking. As if in sympathy, Crafty’s baying ceased.
To Hall, the silence screamed across the night.
He knew sympathy had nothing to do with Crafty’s restraint. Crafty didn’t want to call attention to himself, because the only time Benji stopped asking to be let out was when nature had taken care of that need already.
“Damnation.”
As Hall walked up the pathway to the back door, the silence abruptly splintered into the acrimonious voices of his three older children.
“I told you he had to go out, Dan.”
“And I told you and Lizzie Borden he shouldn’t have been let inside in the first place.”
“We didn’t precisely let him in,” objected Lizzie, who practiced precision like a religion.
“Well, I didn’t let him in precisely or otherwise, so I’ll be damned if I’m cleaning this mess up.”
“You’re not supposed to swear, Dan.”
“Shut up, Molly.”
“You shu—”
“Stop. All of you.” From inside the screen door three faces turned to Hall in unison. “Who let Benji in?”
“Nobody let him in—”
