Five Days in Summer

David whenever Grandma did that, pulling to the edge of the road and rolling down her window so she could chat with strangers she said were her old friends but whom she only saw if she ran into them in passing. It wasn’t like in Manhattan where you lived in a big building with hundreds of people you saw all the time and made a big point of never talking to. It was different here, really dark, not too many people, but when they turned up you had to act like you knew them.
    When he got close to the main road it was a little lighter and he could see the mailboxes, three for mail and two for newspapers. He started to run again and reached the mailboxes just in time for the sun to break into the sky. Just like that, it went from night to day. He wasn’t sure which newspaper box was theirs so he just took one and ran back down the road with it.
    When he got far enough from the main road so he couldn’t be seen, he stopped. He pulled off the white plastic sleeve and unfolded the newspaper. He held the big paper in front of him and looked over the whole front page. He didn’t see his mother’s picture anywhere.
    He opened to the next page, and there she was.
    In the picture, she looked happy, and that confused him. Then he realized that of course they would have used a picture from before. She was smiling in one direction and looking in another. That was his mom, always doing two things at once. Smiling and looking. He threw the paper down and stamped it into the old dirt road and sat on top of it and started to cry.
    After a few minutes, he got off the paper and shook it out. He sat back down on the dusty road because it didn’t matter — his pajamas were already dirty. He read the words under his mother’s smiling-looking picture. The headline said MISSING SINCE MONDAY and the short article said her name, that she came from New York, that she was visiting her mother on the Cape, that she was a mother of three, that she always wore the same bracelet, and that she hadn’t been seen since she went grocery shopping two days before. There was nothing David didn’t already know. He kept reading.
    The article said that Mrs. Parker’s husband was uncooperative and had hung up the phone. David remembered that, but it hadn’t seemed like a big deal when it happened. People were always calling up asking questions you didn’t want to answer; his parents called them telephone solicitors and said you didn’t have to talk to them. If they called during dinnertime, they either got a nice sorry-but-no-and-a-hang-up or a mean leave-us-alone-and-take-us-off-your-list-and-a-hang-up. Yesterday’s call was a little different because his dad had said something about his mom, David remembered that. But he got frustrated the same way and hung up the same way and it seemed like just another call he didn’t think he deserved. It must have been someone from this newspaper, so he stuck it in the article, how Dad had gotten mad. Dad got mad sometimes, so did everyone, so did Mom, so didDavid. But reading it here made it seem evil, like Dad hung up the phone because he knew where Mom was and didn’t want to say so. David knew his father wanted to find his mother. He knew that. He kept reading.
    In a little box next to the article was the number of people in the country who were missing so far that year and still hadn’t come home: 515,109. Underneath, it said that people who went missing were hardly ever found. It said that people who kidnapped other people hurt them right away, then killed them. It said that if the kidnapper wanted money, they asked for it right away. It said the police were too busy and without any clues they didn’t know where to look, so they moved on to other things. Maybe that was why Dad was talking to that man yesterday. Maybe he had hired his own private detective, like they did sometimes on TV. Maybe they would have to find her all by themselves.
    David bunched up the newspaper and stuck it under his arm so he could run as fast as he could back to the house. He flung open the screen door and the inside door and raced down to his father’s room. He kicked open the bedroom door and turned on the light. His dad sat up right away and stared at David like he was a ghost.
    “What happened?” His dad sounded confused. “What happened? What’s wrong?”
    “I know.” David marched over to the bed with the dusty, crumpled newspaper. He flattened it out and turned to page two. Mom’s face smiled and