Sanford Crow

CHAPTER 15

The last school bus pulled away. The silhouette of her little body emerged in a cloud of exhaust. He was late again; she knew it and sighed. Her friends had stood with her for as long as they could, waiting to see the van round the corner with its loud and abrupt sputtering engine.

"You guys don't have to wait," Sadie had said to her friends. "He'll be here soon, and I could do without the jokes anyway."

Her friends giggled, knowing they were the only ones who could joke, unlike Susie Strang, who Sadie popped in the face.

"Okay, Sadie, we'll see you later. Are you with your dad all weekend?" one of her friends asked.

"Yup! It's the best, cause he doesn't get I'm a kid. So I eat junk food all weekend, I have ice-cream for breakfast, we watch rated R movies and I go to sleep past midnight."

"Whoa! That's so cool. I wish my dad was like that."

Sadie thought about the other side of her father—the side that's only seen when he thinks he's alone. It was a side of him that scared her. But she wasn't scared for herself; she was scared for his well being, like one day he might do something to hurt himself.

"Yeah, he's pretty cool," she said and meant it. She knew that he always tried, and that meant more to her than anything.

Though as she stood alone in the cold, his trying seemed to be a bit less. The wind carried from the east with a chill, making her time waiting extra miserable. She wore her new Air Jordan's, in which her twig legs shook.

If you compared pictures of her and Sanford as a child, you'd swear it was him dressed as a girl. Her green eyes glowed like his when they caught the sun off the snow. She even dressed somewhat boyishly; on the verge of a tomboy but not quite there with her pigtails tied in pink scrunchies. So when she wore her New York Yankees t-shirts (that drove her father mad), she did so with the dainty quality of a beauty queen.

Where is he?

"Sadie? Are you okay?" Mrs. Mackenzie asked from behind her. She was a tall, lengthy woman, bundled up in layers, leaving the school to warm up her car for the long drive home.

"I'm okay, Mrs. Mack, just waiting for my dad."

"Well, why don't you come inside and wait by the door, so you don't freeze to death out here?"

"I think I'm already frozen in place!" she yelled back.

* * *

The van puttered as Sanford pressed harder on the gas pedal. All that time passed out in a newly made orphan's bed had delayed the job, and now here he was—on the one weekend he had Sadie—late again.

He raced down the Taconic State Parkway. The pedal was pinned to the floor, his grip on the wheel like a vice. It was past three o'clock on a Friday, and the road was thankfully clear, but Sadie's school let out at two, and an hour alone is a long time for a kid. He prayed she didn't call her mother.

By the time he pulled in it was close to 3:30. The buses were long gone, as were most of the cars in the teachers' parking lot. A steady wind blew a loose sheet of paper through the air like a schoolyard tumbleweed. He felt a nervous sweat take hold, layering his skin in a clammy membrane. As he pulled up to the front of the building and saw no Sadie in sight, the slight sweat became a downpour.

The walk to the school's door was a long one. Schools had always bothered him. He saw them more as prisons, where you're forced to read books you'd never read, solve problems you'll never have, and are only let out in the sun for an hour. Growing up, Sanford bounced from school to school, as he did from foster home to foster home, inhabited by a lonely captivity.