3. JUSTICE
JUSTICE
My head was pounding like somebody was trying to come through my temples with a jackhammer.
That was the effect my oldest daughter had on me lately.
One phone call from that school and every vein in my skull started throbbing in the same rhythm, a countdown to whatever fresh hell she’d cooked up while my back was turned.
When Monica passed, I made myself a promise standing over her casket.
I would raise our girls right. I would be enough for both of them, and I would not let the world get its hands on them, not like it got its hands on everything else soft that ever came into my life.
I meant that promise down to the marrow.
What I did not understand, standing there in my black suit, was that the real danger wasn’t out there in the world.
It was already living in my house. It just had my dead wife’s eyes.
Storie was a field of landmines, and three years after Monica’s death I still couldn’t map the thing. Some days she was sweet as pie, curled up under me on the couch, laughing at my jokes, calling me Daddy in that little-girl voice she saved for when she wanted something.
Other days I’d look into my child’s face and see nothing looking back. A stillness I couldn’t name and didn’t want to. I tried to convince myself it was just grief.
So that’s what I did. I loved her. I loved her with money when the words didn’t reach.
Trips, shopping sprees, anything her little heart wanted.
And when that didn’t work either, I told myself she just needed more time.
More love. A softer hand than mine. Maybe a woman’s touch, since God saw fit to leave me doing this alone.
Her aunts and her grandmother were three hundred miles up the road in Pittsburgh.
I loved them. But I wasn’t about to ship my grief up 76 and call it parenting.
Kira came around. Monica’s best friend, always willing, always there. It helped. It wasn’t enough.
Nothing I did worked. The trips, the money, giving her space, bringing Kira around. None of it changed how Storie treated people. Some nights I wondered if I was trying to fix something that didn’t want fixing.
On a normal day I didn’t do pickups. That’s what Reuben was for, a quiet older cat who ran my girls to and from school every morning and afternoon like clockwork.
Kingsbrook for Storie, all the way across town, and Stonewall Elementary for Dream.
But there was nothing normal about a call that pulls you out a meeting and tells you to come get your child before somebody with a badge gets involved.
A call like that, you show up yourself. So I left Rita and drove out to Kingsbrook to pull Storie out early and look her in her face myself.
Dream was still in school where she belonged, and Reuben would bring her home at regular dismissal, once there was somebody in that house to bring her home to.
She slid into the front seat and I pulled off before I even turned to look at her.
“Storie. Why would you say that shit to your teacher?”
“Because she started it.” Bored. Examining a fingernail.
“She got mad because I corrected her. She said conversate in front of the class like it’s a real word.
It’s not, Daddy. I looked it up. How is that woman standing up there teaching English and she doesn’t even know conversate isn’t a word?
With all the money you pay that place, the least they could do is hire an English teacher who actually speaks English. ”
“I’m not talking about no conversate.” I found her eyes when I looked over and held them. “I’m talking about what you said about that woman’s father. In front of the entire class. Why would you do that?”
Here is what people never understood about my daughter, and what I was only starting to understand about her.
Storie didn’t lash out. Lashing out is a hot, sloppy, thing you do when you lose control, and my child never lost control of anything.
She had a knack for getting under people’s skin.
She liked to find their soft, gooey spots and jab at them with her steel-forked tongue, watching their faces to see it come apart.
“Well.” She said as calm as Sunday morning. “Her father is in prison for kiddie porn. I found the news article. So all I said was, maybe she should worry about her own family before she corrects mine, since her daddy’s a—”
“Storie.” The name came out of me like a slammed door. “That is not okay. You do not put a person’s private business out in front of a class of children. You hear me? That woman didn’t do nothing to you.”
“She embarrassed me.”
“And how do you even know that about her? Why are you digging up somebody’s daddy’s court records?”
She shrugged one shoulder and looked out the window at the world going by. “I Google everything, Daddy. I’m intellectually curious.”
I ran a hand down my face and drove.
I can’t lie, some sick corner of my mind was proud.
Fifteen years old and she moved through people like a scalpel, saw straight through them to the thing that would hurt the most. In my world that is a gift.
In my world that is the difference between the man who walks out the room and the man who gets carried out of it.
I’d built an empire on being able to read what a person was hiding.
I was proud of how sharp she was. But that pride scared the shit out of me. Because a gift like that, in a child with no bottom to her, pointed at whoever made her feel small that day, was not a gift.
If somebody didn’t redirect all that sharpness, my daughter was going to grow into something dangerous.
I’d find her a therapist. Somebody trained to reach down into whatever Monica’s death had cracked open in her and get it right before it completely hardened.
She needed help, not a father who looked at his own baby girl and felt a chill run up his spine.
She was fifteen. She’d lost her mama. That was all this was.
I needed it to be all this was.
By the time we pulled through the gate, I’d already made up my mind about Storie’s punishment.
She already knew it too, and neither one of us said a word about it the whole ride.
The house was quiet when we walked in. Dream wasn’t home yet, still sitting in her little classroom across town waiting on the last bell, and I was almost glad for it.
She didn’t need to see her sister like this, and Storie didn’t need an audience for what came next.
She’d turned fifteen a month before. A milestone birthday, the sweet-sixteen warm-up, the one every girl her age was already planning a production around.
Storie got none of it. No party. No stack of gift bags.
No lil friends screaming through my house so she could floss her new Goyard, or whatever bag the latest raptress had the girls fiendin’ for that month.
What she got was a quiet family dinner at Mastro’s.
Me, her, Dream, Rita and my siblings. Because I’ll be damned if I reward a child for cruelty.
You want the party, you act like you deserve the party.
That’s how we were raised, and that’s how I was raising them.
Storie ate her steak that night without a word, her jaw tight, those flat eyes moving around the table doing math I couldn’t see.
She was furious. She sat in the silence, cold and still, filing it away in whatever ledger she kept behind those pretty eyes.
She’d get over it. At least, that’s what I wanted to believe.
“Go on upstairs,” I told her at the door. “You’re on punishment. No phone, no iPad. And you’re gonna write that teacher an apology, and you’re gonna mean it.”
She didn’t argue. That should have scared me worse than any tantrum. She just looked at me, something moving behind her face, and then she turned and climbed the stairs without a sound.
Dream was a completely different child. Dream was the light. It was later in the evening. Dream had been dropped off. I ordered dinner from an Italian spot they both loved. But I sent Storie back to her room as soon as she was done.
After bath time, I found my baby girl in her room in her unicorn pajamas, hair tucked away in her bonnet, bouncing on the bed with all the joy her big sister didn’t have a drop of. She was only six years old and she looked at the world with such pure wonder. I never wanted that to change for her.
“Daddy, Daddy.” She grabbed my hand the second I sat on the edge of her bed. “My birthday’s coming up!
“I know. You remind me every day.” I laughed.
“Am I getting a pony?” She’d asked me the same thing every night for two weeks, eyes big and shining and dead serious. “You said maybe. Maybe means yes sometimes. Is it a yes maybe or a no maybe?”
I laughed, and it loosened the tension of the day. “It’s a we-gonna-see maybe. Now lay down before you bounce off this bed and hit your head.”
She flopped back onto her pillow grinning up at me.
I pulled her comforter up under her chin and sat there a minute longer than I needed to, just looking at her.
Both my girls raised under the same roof.
Same house, same rules, same love poured into them by the same tired hands.
One of them looked at me like I hung the moon.
The other looked at me like she was still deciding what I was worth.
I bent down and kissed Dream’s forehead. “Goodnight, baby girl.”
“Night, Daddy. Yes maybe.”
“Go to sleep, Dream.”
I stood between their doors for a minute. Everything in the house was quiet, but it didn’t feel settled.
My phone buzzed before I made it back downstairs. It was Bryce.
“Talk to me,” I said.
“We got a situation at the casino.” His voice was even, but I heard the edge under it. “Nothing I want to say over the phone. I need you to slide through. Tonight.”
“Give me an hour,” I said, and hung up.
Then I did what I always did when the family needed me and I had two girls under my roof and no wife to leave them with. I called Kira.
She picked up on the first ring. She always picked up on the first ring for me.
”Hey, you.” She sounded excited, like she’d been sitting by the phone waiting on it to be me. “Everything okay?”
“I need a favor. Something came up with the business, I gotta ride out for a few hours. Can you sit with the girls?”
“Of course. Anything you need, Justice. You know that.” I could hear the hope in her voice. “I can be there in twenty.”
“’Preciate you. Dream’s already down. Storie’s on punishment, so she should stay in her room.”
“I got them. Go handle your business.” Another pause. “Take your time. However late.”
I told her thank you and ended the call, and I didn’t dwell on how ready that woman always was to come running when I whistled. Monica’s best friend, standing in the gaps my dead wife left behind. I knew what it was. I knew what she wanted it to be. Tonight I wasn’t thinking about either one.
I grabbed my keys off the counter and went to go handle the family’s business. I left my daughters in that house. And I believed they were safe with Kira.