Good Luck, Fatty

ask.
    Duncan chuckles. “It’s not that you fussed, Bobbi. It’s that you wouldn’t quit fussing. And the Ferber method advocated letting you ‘cry it out.’ ” He rolls his eyes at the memory, and Marie mirrors him. “We lasted about seven weeks before we were ready to yank our hair out.”
    This Dr. Ferber sounds like a real tool. I suggest renaming his parenting method the lazy/neglectful/why-bother-giving-a-damn? plan.
    I open my mouth to voice this sentiment, albeit in a watered-down form, but Duncan’s cell phone suddenly starts skittering across the island, pumping out a rap song (Snoop Dog?) at top volume.
    Roy does one of those rigid, startled moves babies sometimes pull for no reason whatsoever. Before I can get my fingers to my ears, Duncan grabs the phone. “Yell-o!” He squints, then scowls. Absently he slinks onto my stool. “Uh-huh…okay, well then…if you’d take a breath, maybe I could…that’s right…the police?...I don’t see any other way…Bobbi?...no, I’ll handle it…all right…try to relax…you’re welcome…bye-bye.”
    Duncan stares into the distance for a moment, as if he’s collecting his thoughts. “There’s been some trouble in Industry,” he tells Marie.
    “What’s going on?” I demand. “Who was that?”
    “There were no injuries,” he reports, as if he’s writing copy for the six o’clock news. “But Denise is pretty shaken up.”
    I glance at Marie, who is busily jostling Roy but remains mute on the matter.
    “Denise?” I say, panic rising in my voice. “Take me home. Now.”
    Marie nods at Duncan, and he simply reaches for his keys.
     

----
     
    There are three police cars stacked on our lawn, their light bars ablaze with blasts of blue and white, when Duncan and I arrive, which explains why I don’t notice the smashed picture window right off. What does draw my eye is the Royale, parked as normally as ever at the front of the driveway with its trunk caved in (I’m picturing baseball bats used, here), its bumper crumpled, and its taillights all but missing.
    “Holy…” I whisper, alarmed by the war-zone look my home has assumed.
    “Just remember,” Duncan tells me as we ease out of the van, repeating the mantra he’s hatched on the way over, “the authorities have things well in hand.”
    I want to say, How do you know? But I bite my tongue.
    As bad as the Royale looks from the back, it’s even worse from the front, which Duncan and I discover when we round the side of the car en route to the house.
    I stop in my tracks and stare. “What does that say?” I wonder aloud (and mostly rhetorically). The Royale is bathed in graffiti so thick I can hardly make out the color of its hood: sun-bleached blue.
    Duncan steers me by the shoulder toward the door, and when we get inside, Denise outright tackles me. “Oh my gosh!” she exclaims, hugging me so hard I stop breathing for a second. She smoothes my hair against my back and squeezes again. “I’m so glad… so glad you’re all right.”
    Why wouldn’t I be all right?
    Past the refrigerator is Orv, hands buried in his pockets, clenching his jaw and staring glassy-eyed into the living room, the source of unfamiliar cop voices. “Um…” I say, gently withdrawing from Denise’s embrace, “…what happened?”
    Denise shrugs, twists her lips sideways. “A bunch of kids…well, uh…they chucked a rock through the front window.” As an afterthought, she adds, “And the car’s wrecked.”
    I turn to Duncan. “You can go if you want,” I say. “There’s probably nothing you can do anyway.”
    “Call your mother later,” he replies on his way out. “She’ll be worried.”
     

----
     
    While the police officers—one stout and burly, the other two lanky and fish-eyed—wrap up their documentation of the scene, Orv disappears into the crawlspace and comes out with a dusty length of cardboard leftover from some long-forgotten purchase of Gramp’s, which he duct tapes over the sizeable hole in the window by his La-Z-Boy.
    Denise ushers the cops outside. From the kitchen table, where I sit scraping a dried gob of Mrs. Butterworth’s off the napkin holder with my thumbnail, I hear the officers reassure Denise that she, Orv, and I are simply the victims of haphazard vandalism. A gang of restless youths with nothing better to do on a Saturday night.
    It’s a tempting theory, but one that leaves me less than convinced. Because all I can hear is Justin White’s agitated