Finding Charlie

Chapter Two

Chapter Two (Wednesday)

In the morning, I found my father in the kitchen, sitting at the island. Against the far wall, the kitchen table sat empty, covered in several layers of clutter. My father was dressed for work like maybe things were back to normal. But he wasn’t reading the paper like normal. He was writing on a yellow legal pad. I stood over his shoulder and tried to make sense of his scribbles.

            “So, I guess you didn’t find her.” I got a mug from the cabinet and poured myself the rest of the coffee.

            He didn’t answer, just forcefully underlined something in his notes. Twice.

            “Are you going in to work?” My father ran his own dental practice and yesterday had been the first day he’d taken off in as long as I could remember.

            He shook his head. “I need you to drive me to Carmen’s. So I can pick up Charlie’s car.” He wasn’t asking. “Do you  know her passwords? For her cell phone or her email?”

            I sat down. “No.”

            He looked up at me then, as if to check if there was dishonesty in my face.

            “I really don’t. I could try talking to Carmen again.” It seemed like she was the true keeper of secrets these days.

            He nodded. “I’d talk to Carmen myself, but you’d probably get more out of her on your own.”

            I agreed. My dad was pretty gruff and came off as intimidating even when he didn’t mean to. He was liable to make Carmen cry.

            My dad cleared his throat and continued looking at his notes on the table. “You’d tell me if you thought she could be . . . pregnant. Or something.”

            I blinked, startled by his bluntness. “I’m sure it’s nothing like that.”

            He grunted into his coffee mug.

            I’d gotten my first period at thirteen, mere months after my mother had left us. Remembering the conversation I’d had to have with my father still made me squirm with discomfort. I wasn’t sure which one of us had been more miserable. He had gone to Walgreens and came back with a dozen different brands and styles of feminine products, like he’d just swiped a random armload into his cart and run from the aisle. In the years that followed, whenever we went to the grocery store, he’d hand over the cart at the end of the trip and let me go get whatever “personal items” I needed.

            When Charlie got her period, she’d had me.

            He stood and carried his empty mug to the sink where he could talk with his back to me. “She’d been kind of sullen the last couple days.”

            “Sullen?”

            “Quieter than usual. She was in her room most of the time she was home. She ate her dinner in there Sunday night.”

            “Was that unusual?”

            He turned and slouched against the counter with his arms folded. I noticed the salt and pepper of his hair was getting saltier.  “We usually eat together on Sunday night. But she made herself a frozen pizza. Said she had to study.” He shrugged. “I didn’t really think anything of it at the time.”

            “And why would you?” He was wracking his brain to find a clue, but that wasn’t anything. Maybe she had been studying or maybe she’d had a fight with this new boyfriend. There was no way to know and it didn’t explain her disappearance either way.