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My skin prickles with alarm.
“I’m sure it’s nothing, but next time you see this guy, point your phone at his face and tell him you’re streaming live to Twitter. If it doesn’t scare him off, you’ll at least have a visual to show the guard.”
His voice gets sucked up into more clanging, followed by a heavy crash and multiple voices, all of them shouting. I realize it’s been like this since the start, his voice pushing through loud and chaotic background noise.
“Babe, why does it sound like you’re at fight club?”
“I’m at the shop on Bolling Way. There was a fire.”
My stomach drops at his words. Bolling Way is Cam’s signature restaurant, a booming scene surrounded by Buckhead’s finest stores, a place that’s packed from noon until midnight.
“How bad was it?”
“On a scale of one to ten? Four hundred and fifty-seven.” He sighs, and it occurs to me that the concern I thought I heard in his voice wasn’t for me and the kids, but disaster at his most profitable restaurant. A torched Buckhead kitchen means a big, giant hole in our income. “I’m here with Flavio. We’re talking through our options.”
Flavio is the location’s general manager, and Cam’s highest paid employee.
I’m opening my mouth to respond when I spot the clock on the dash: 3:01. A whole minute late, and to pick up a child who loses her shit at the tiniest adjustment to her daily schedule. “Oh crap, gotta go. Call me later.”
I hang up, swipe my bag from the floor and Bax from the back seat, and race to the double glass doors of the building, looking over my shoulder the entire way.
I look for him after. Instead of turning left for home, I point my car right, steering past the spot where I saw him last, leaning against the sign. Four times I hold up traffic to search him out of the crowd, twice headed in the wrong direction, then two more times on the drive back past the building. I press my iPhone to the window and ride the brake the entire time, creeping by the entrance to the lot so slowly that more than one impatient driver honks.
But he’s not there. The patch of trampled grass by the sign is empty. The man-bunned man is gone.
Baxter pushes up in his booster seat, straining to see out the window. “Mommy, where are we going?”
“We’re going home.” I’m headed in the right direction, but my hunt took too long. Now we’re stuck in traffic.
“Then why do you keep turning around?”
“And why are you going so slow?” Beatrix adds before I can explain. She swipes a wet finger down the back window, pointing at two women speed walking past us. “Are you sure we’re not going backward?”
Beatrix knows we’re not going backward, but she enjoys being a smart-ass. Too clever for her nine years. Too sassy and energetic, too, and as tightly wound as the composite core strings on her DZ Strad violin—at least that’s according to her teachers.
And as much as I love my daughter, they’re not wrong. Beatrix has been a handful since the second she came into this world, bloodred and hopping mad. Colic. Sleeping issues. Sinewy muscles that hated to be swaddled. My pediatrician called her a high-needs baby, patted me on the shoulder and promised me most grow into normal, well-adjusted kids.
Something that for Beatrix will never happen.
My daughter is a musical genius, something I accidentally discovered when she was four, when after a quick dash through Fresh Market she hummed a perfectly pitched concerto all the way home. A few weeks later at Target, she picked out the melody with two chubby fingers on a keyboard, but it was the pink toy violin she begged to take home. Within a few months, I managed to find a teacher willing to give formal lessons to such a young student. The woman, a stern grandmotherly type, emerged from their first session pink-cheeked and throwing around the wordprodigy.
My Beatrix is special. Thanks to an accident of fate and chance and random genes, she will never grow into that normal child the pediatrician promised. She has this astonishing, one-in-a-million gift, but one that comes with an ear that hears her every mistake. A perfectionist with mile-high standards for herself, quick to become frustrated and anxious when her fingers don’t cooperate.
But when they do, it is magical.
I grab two packets of Goldfish from the glove compartment, then pass them to the back seat. We’re only a few miles from home, but I have learned to always come prepared. Juice boxes, snacks, iPads with every movie known to man. I’m not above parenting by distraction.
“Help Bax open his, will you?” I say to Beatrix, but I’m too late. They’re already playing tug-of-war with the bag.
“Give it to me. I can open it on my own.” Baxter kicks the back of my seat in protest.
“You can’t do it by yourself,” Beatrix says, her voice matter-of-fact. “You’re too little.”
“I’m not little! Give it here.” Baxter swipes at the bag, but his big sister is too strong. He can’t pry the packet from Beatrix’s fingers. “Mommy, Beatrix won’t give me my Goldfish. Make her give me my Goldfish!”
This happens hundreds of times a day, relentless bickering over anything, everything, nothing.
I take a deep, deep breath and try not to death-grip the steering wheel. How does this happen? How can it be that I spend every second my kids are out of sight missing them terribly, picturing their adorable little faces all day long, seeing their sweet smiles, imagining the feel of their bony arms around me, then I have them for ten minutes in the car and I’m counting the seconds until bedtime.