“She’s a friend,” I said. “She-”

Benson pushed his coffee cup aside. “We’re done here,” he said, shifting his weight across the seat and getting out. “See ya later.”

My cell rang as he walked out the door. I reached into my pocket, flipped it open.

“Zack,” Trixie said, “I’m reading this story of yours in the paper, about these guys trying to get the cops to buy stun guns. Jesus Christ, Zack, do you have any idea who these guys are?”

“Trixie,” I said, “I don’t give a rat’s ass who they are. The meeting here is finished. Benson’s walked out. You set me up. Thanks a fuck of a lot.” I slapped the phone shut and went back downtown.

One day he went too far.

Miranda was in the kitchen, making an after-school snack. It hadn’t been a good day. The guidance counselor wanted a word with her. Brought her in for a meeting. He said he’d tried to reach her mother, to discuss her school performance, but wasn’t having any luck when he phoned the house.

Miranda thought, Good luck. Mom’s there, but she’s probably watching Family Feud and getting smashed.

“Then I tried calling your father at work,” he said.

Oh no, Miranda thought.

“And he was very helpful. Good to talk to. Says you just haven’t been pulling your weight. He knows you could do better if you just put in some effort. You stand to lose your year,” the guidance counselor told her. “You’re failing all of your subjects, with the exception of math. You’re a natural at math. Why can’t you bring that sort of effort to your other subjects, huh, Miranda? What’s the problem? Is it drugs? Are you getting into drugs, Miranda?”

No, she wanted to tell him. My mom’s a drunk and my dad wants to get into my pants. And you think I should give a flying fuck about how I’m doing at school?

Except for math. I like numbers, Miranda thought. At least there’s some order there. Some predictability. You don’t wake up someday and find out that somebody decided fuck it, we’re making two plus two equal five.

So she went home, dumped her backpack at the door, opened the cupboard and looked for something to eat. Her mother was sitting in the living room, a Camel in one hand and a scotch in the other, watching One Miserable Life to Live or As the Fucking World Turns. Didn’t say anything when Miranda came in the door. It was nothing short of a miracle that there was some peanut butter. The Wonder bread was probably a week old, but Miranda managed to find a slice or two without green spots on them, and dropped them into the toaster.

That’s when he came in the door. He was early. He didn’t usually get home from the plant until after six.

“Well, look who’s here,” he said. “I got a call about you today.”

Miranda ignored him, stared at the toaster, watched the tiny elements inside glow red as they browned her slices of stale, white bread.

“Your guidance counselor says you’re flunking everything except math. Here’s what I don’t get. Why do you even try at math? Why don’t you be a total fuckup, instead of a 95 percent fuckup? It’s like you can’t even get that right.”

No wonder he was angry. She’d been blocking her door with a chair every night for weeks. Sometimes, during the day, he’d take the chair out, and she’d have to find one and take it to her room right before bedtime.

“Hey,” he said, slapping her ass, but not too hard, so it was almost a pat. “I’m talking to you here.”

She didn’t know she was going to do it. It just happened. She doesn’t even know how she had the presence of mind to first yank the plug from the wall. But once she’d done that, she reached her fingers into the two slots of the toaster. Her fingers would have been burned worse than they were had the two slices of bread not been there. She jammed her fingers in, almost like it was a rectangular bowling ball, and came around swinging.

Swinging hard.

The toaster caught him just above the right eye, and the connection of metal against bone made a hell of a noise. The move was so unexpected, so out of the blue, he didn’t have time to bring his arms up, but he had them up when she came at him a second time. The toaster bounced off his arm, and Miranda was thrown slightly off balance, staggered up against the counter.

The blood was pouring out of her father’s head and through his fingers as he put his hand up to the wound.

“Jesus!” he shouted, staggering back himself. “Jesus!”

Miranda’s mother came into the room, looked at her husband, at the bloody toaster still in her daughter’s hand, and shouted, “He’s your father! How dare you! This man is your father!”

She ran out of the kitchen. She ran out of the house. She didn’t even have time to pack her things in a paper bag.

THREE TIMES ON MY WAY BACK into the city, Trixie tried to phone me on her cell. When I got back to my desk at the paper, the light on my phone was flashing. I hadn’t even checked the message yet when the phone rang. I picked up.

“Zack,” Trixie said, “I’m sorry about what happened with Benson. Really, I’m sorry about that. But forget about that for now. Those guys, those two in your story. They didn’t always sell stun guns, these guys. They-”

I felt Sarah standing behind me. “I gotta go,” I said, and hung up. I turned around. “’Sup?”

She nodded her head toward Magnuson’s office. “He wants to see us,” she said, and she didn’t look happy.

“Both of us?”

“Apparently.”

“What’s it about? Is he going to apologize for dragging me off the Wickens story and giving it to that asshole Colby?”

“I don’t think so,” Sarah said. “I don’t think that ‘sorry’ is part of Magnuson’s vocabulary.”

I got up, made sure my shirt was well tucked in, and followed Sarah to the far corner of the newsroom, where the managing editor’s corner office looked out over the city.

Even though we could see him in there, sitting at his desk, we didn’t walk right in. Sarah told his secretary we had arrived, as if that were not immediately evident, and she buzzed him. Through the door, we watched him watching us as he picked up his phone. “Send them in,” we heard him say into the phone.

His secretary said, “He’ll see you now.”

We went in. I had a bad feeling.

“Ah, the Walkers,” he said, not getting up to greet us. That seemed like a bad sign to me. “Take a seat,” he said. I would have felt better had he said, “Please, be seated.”

We sat down. Magnuson said, “I didn’t bring you in here because you happen to be married to one another. I brought both of you in because I wanted to speak with you, Mr. Walker, and seeing as how Sarah is your editor, this will impact her as well.” He stared at both of us for a while, but mostly at me.

“I have an old friend,” he said suddenly, “name of Blair Wentworth. We used to work together, as reporters, long ago. Used to get drunk together on a regular basis too. Once, when he’d had a little bit too much one night in the bar, we got into a heated debate about whether Jimmy Carter really had a peanut farm, or whether it was just a load of bullshit, so we walked out, got in a cab, and asked to be taken to Plains, Georgia. Well, that was several hundred, if not thousands, of miles away, and the cabby had some reservations, but we said not to worry, we were newspapermen, and we had expense accounts. Instead of driving us to Georgia, he drove us back to our paper and dropped us off at the front door before we made complete asses of ourselves. If I could find that cabby today, I’d give him a job here. Doing what, I don’t know, but he clearly had more sense than some of the people who work for me here now.”

I blinked.

“Anyway, Blair decided to go off in another direction. He was a pretty business-minded individual, got into community newspapers, worked his way up to publisher of one of them. The Suburban, out in Oakwood. You might have heard of it.”