My daughter’s teacher held a crayon picture of me up to my face, gray with long teeth and claws, standing in Hanna’s doorway, and said, “Honestly, Mr. Booth, I saw you walk in and it all made sense.” The county woman beside her wanted to know what I did outside that door every night. The answer was zipped in my work bag.
The school called at 1:40 on a Thursday, while I was up on a roof tearing off shingles on the east side of Bartlesville.
The lady in the office said Hanna was fine.
She said I needed to get there right now and bring my driver’s license.
She wouldn’t tell me why.
I came down the ladder so fast I left my nail gun up on the ridge.
When I pulled in by the flagpole, a white car with a county seal on the door was parked in the fire lane.
I sat there with the engine running for maybe ten seconds.
I’m six-three and about two-sixty.
When I was nine a neighbor’s dog got hold of my face, and the scar still pulls my top lip up on the left, so one eyetooth shows whether I’m smiling or not.
That afternoon I also had tar to my elbows and a sunburn on the back of my neck.
I know how that looks walking into a building full of six-year-olds.
I’ve known it my whole life.
The receptionist looked at my mouth first.
Then my hands.
She asked me to have a seat, and she picked up her phone without taking her eyes off me.
There was a bowl of peppermints on the counter, and one had come out of its wrapper and stuck itself to the glass.
A woman in a navy blazer came out of the back hallway with a lanyard on.
“Yuki Leblanc,” she said. “County family services.”
She shook my hand, and then she went and stood in front of the hallway door and kept her fingers on the handle.
Hanna’s teacher came in right behind her.
Kayleigh Swanson, the one who sends home the sticker charts.
She had a page of manila paper, and she held it up at me like a sign at the airport.
It was me.
Gray crayon pressed down so hard it shined.
Big white teeth, red eyes, hands with claws like garden rakes.
It stood in a doorway, and behind it was a bed with a little girl under a purple blanket.
Across the top, in Hanna’s big leaning letters, it said DADDY IS THE MONSTER AT MY DOOR.
“Do you recognize this, Mr. Booth?” Kayleigh said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know it.”
She pressed her lips together like I’d just confessed.
“She told her reading group you growl outside her room after dark,” she said. “Every night. Her words.”
Yuki asked if anything was going on at home that Hanna might be scared to say out loud.
Kayleigh didn’t let me answer.
She said Hanna fell asleep on the carpet during story time three days last week.
She said Hanna keeps a flashlight in her backpack and won’t let anybody touch it.
She said when they ran the tornado drill on Tuesday, Hanna crawled under the cubbies and wouldn’t come out, not even for the principal.
Then she looked straight at my scar.
“Honestly?” she said. “I saw you walk in and it all made sense.”
Lined up like that, every one of those things sounded like a dad who belonged in handcuffs.
I wanted to put my fist through the drywall.
I wanted to ask if she had EVER once asked my kid why.
But through the glass in the nurse’s door I could see two purple rain boots swinging off the end of a cot.
Those boots were the only thing in that school I gave a damn about.
So I lifted my work bag onto the counter.
“I can tell you exactly what she drew,” I said.
“Unzip it slow,” Yuki said. “Hands where I can see them.”
I pulled the zipper.
Kayleigh backed up into the copier.
The first thing out was an old hockey goalie mask I’d painted gray, with a row of long white fangs done in paint pen around the mouth and two red reflector stickers for eyes.
Under it were my winter work gloves with felt claws hot-glued to every finger.
Yuki looked at the mask a long time.
Then at me.
“You wear this in her bedroom?” she said.
“NOT in it,” I said. “Outside it. Every night the wind gets up.”
Back in April a storm put a cottonwood limb through Hanna’s ceiling at two in the morning.
It came down across the foot of her bed.
She wasn’t hurt.
I patched that roof myself the next day, and I’ve patched about four hundred roofs, and none of it did a thing for her.
After that, any time the wind picked up she screamed until she threw up.
Her mom’s been gone since Hanna was two.
So it was just me in that hallway at 3 a.m. with a kid who thought the sky was coming in on her.
I tried night-lights.
I tried letting her sleep in my bed.
Then one night I told her the storm was scared of something too.
I told her it was scared of the biggest, ugliest troll in Oklahoma, and the troll worked for her.
“I SIT OUTSIDE HER DOOR IN THAT MASK,” I said. “And I growl at the window till she’s asleep. That’s the growling.”
“And she’s supposed to be fine with that?” Kayleigh said. “A grown man in a mask in the dark?”
“She asked me to bring it today,” I said. “For Brave Things Friday. She wanted the class to see.”
“Friday’s tomorrow,” Kayleigh said.
“I’ve got a roof tomorrow.”
Yuki didn’t say anything to either of us.
She took the drawing out of Kayleigh’s hand, slow, the way you take scissors off somebody.
She turned it over.
There was more crayon on the back.
A LOT more.
Yuki read it standing right there by the copier, and her mouth moved a little on some of the words.
Then she looked up, and she didn’t look at me.
“Ms. Swanson,” she said. “Did you turn this over?”
Kayleigh opened her mouth.
Nothing came out.
Yuki held the paper up with the back facing her.
Kayleigh put one hand flat on the counter like the floor had tipped.
The back of the manila paper
Yuki didn’t give the drawing back to Kayleigh.
She turned and held it out to me, back side up.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Read it out loud, if you can.”
It was Hanna’s leaning letters again, smaller, running downhill toward the corner.
At the top she’d drawn our house with the cottonwood beside it, and a man on the roof holding a hammer as big as he was.
Under that it said THIS IS MY BRAVE THING.
Then, in three crooked lines: WHEN THE WIND COMES THE STORM IS SCARD OF THE MONSTER. THE MONSTER IS MY DADDY. HE SITS BY MY DOOR AND GROWLS AT IT TIL I SLEEP. HE DOES NOT SLEEP.
At the very bottom, squeezed in sideways where she ran out of room, it said MS SWANSON PLEES READ THE BACK TO EVERYBODY FRIDAY.
I read it out loud the first time.
The second time I read it to myself, because my throat quit on me around HE DOES NOT SLEEP.
She’d spelled “everybody” right. She’d been practicing that one at the kitchen table for a week.
“She told me she gave that to you,” I said to Kayleigh. “She said you were going to hang it by the door.”
Kayleigh took her hand off the counter and folded her arms over her cardigan.
“Children write what they think adults want to hear,” she said. “That’s in the training too.”
“When did she give it to you?” Yuki said.
“Monday.”
“Monday,” Yuki said. “And you called us Thursday.”
“I called when I had enough.”
The receptionist had put her phone down. She was looking at Kayleigh now instead of me.
Yuki folded the drawing once, along a crease that was already in it, and slid it inside her blazer.
“Mr. Booth, I believe what’s on this paper,” she said. “I still have to see where she sleeps. Today.”
The green folding chair
Here’s what I’d have told Kayleigh Swanson if she’d ever asked.
The chair is a green metal folding chair out of my dad’s garage. The left hinge bites you if you grab it wrong, and it’s bitten me plenty.
The first night after the limb came through, I sat on the hallway carpet with my back against Hanna’s door.
By the third night my back was shot, so I went and got the chair.
That’s where I’ve been, every night the wind gets up, since mid-April.
I’d sit there in the dark with the hall light off, because she said the hall light made a shape under the door she didn’t like.
I’d hear her in there, breathing too fast, waiting for the next gust to hit the siding.
The troll was a joke at first. Something I said at three in the morning to get her to stop throwing up.
She didn’t take it as a joke.
She wanted to know what he looked like. She wanted to know if he had claws, and how big his teeth were, and whether storms could see him through the wall.
So I made him.
I found the goalie mask at a garage sale on Frank Phillips Boulevard for two dollars. It had somebody’s initials scratched in the chin. I painted over them.
The fangs took me two nights with a paint pen. The reflector stickers came off the back of an old trailer.
The gloves are the same winter gloves I wear on a frosted roof in January. I hot-glued the felt claws on at the kitchen table while she supervised.
She told me the claws needed to be longer. I made them longer.
Then there was the flashlight.
It’s a yellow work light out of my truck, the kind with a hook on the back. I put a strip of duct tape on it, and she wrote TROLL CALL on the tape in marker.
Three clicks meant come now.
She’d click it three times at the crack under her door, and the light would flash on the hallway carpet, and I’d growl. Low, from the chest, aimed at the window at the end of the hall.
That was the whole system.
Some nights she clicked it once and fell asleep. Some nights she clicked it forty times and I growled till my throat was raw and I had to be on a ladder at seven.
She carried that flashlight everywhere. School, the grocery store, her cousin’s birthday at the skating rink.
I never told her she could only use it at night. I figured a kid who’d had a tree come through her ceiling got to decide when she needed help.
Kindergarten went fine. Her teacher last year knew about the storm because I’d told her, and she let Hanna keep the light in her cubby.
First grade started in August.
Meet the Teacher night was August nineteenth. I remember because it was the same week I finished the Methodist church roof, and I had blisters on both palms.
I showered. I put on a collared shirt. I had Hanna by the hand.
Kayleigh Swanson was at the classroom door with a basket of name tags shaped like apples.
She looked at my mouth before she looked at anything else. People do. I’m used to it.
She didn’t shake my hand. She shook Hanna’s.
“Will Mom be doing pickup?” she said.
“Her mom’s gone,” I said. “It’s me.”
She said, “Okay,” and she wrote something on a yellow sticky note and stuck it inside the cover of her clipboard.
I didn’t think about it.
A week later I got an email from the school that Hanna’s pickup was moving from the car line to the front office. “For everyone’s comfort,” it said.
I thought it was a rule. I thought maybe a bunch of kids got moved.
So every afternoon since then, I’ve walked in that front door, and the receptionist has handed my daughter across the counter to me.
The receptionist’s name is Virginia. She’s got a cardigan for every month. She’s never said more than “Here she is” in two and a half months.
That afternoon, with the county car outside, she’d picked up her phone like she’d never seen me before.
I wasn’t thinking about any of that yet. I was looking at those purple rain boots through the nurse’s door.
Yuki let go of the handle and opened it for me.
“Go get your girl,” she said.
Philip Hutchins
Hanna came off that cot like it was on fire.
She had her arms around my neck before I was all the way down on one knee. She smelled of the nurse’s room, that pink soap they use.
“Did they see the troll?” she said into my ear.
“They saw him.”
“Did Ms. Swanson read the back?”
“Somebody did,” I said.
She leaned back and looked at me, and I could tell she knew that wasn’t the same answer.
The nurse was a heavy woman in scrubs with cartoon cats on them. She didn’t look at me at all. She handed me Hanna’s backpack and went back to her computer.
The backpack was light. I put it on my own shoulder.
When I carried Hanna back out into the office, there was a man standing by the copier in a blue tie.
Philip Hutchins. The principal. He was maybe forty, with the kind of haircut you get at the same place every two weeks.
He’d been the one at the drill on Tuesday who couldn’t get her out from under the cubbies.
“Matt,” he said, like we were friends. “Let’s step into my office for a second.”
“I’m taking her home.”
“I understand that. And Ms. Leblanc tells me that’s fine. I just want to make sure we’re all on the same page.”
So I stood in his office with my daughter on my hip and tar on my arms and listened.
He said nobody was accusing anybody of anything.
He said Ms. Swanson was a mandated reporter, and the law is the law, and she didn’t have a choice.
He said it was a new thing for her, being in a classroom on her own. Second year.
He said he could see now it was “a misunderstanding about a costume.”
“So she’ll read it tomorrow,” I said. “The back. Like Hanna asked.”
He looked at the floor between us.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea, given everything,” he said. “And the costume needs to stay home tomorrow. I can’t have a mask like that in front of twenty-four first graders. Some of those kids have their own things going on.”
“She asked to bring it.”
“We’ll find her another brave thing.”
Hanna put her face in my neck.
“I’d like Ms. Swanson to tell her she’s sorry,” I said. “That’s all. To her, not me.”
“I can’t make a teacher say something like that while there’s an open referral,” he said. “You understand. It’d look like the school taking a side.”
“You called the county on me. That’s a side.”
He held up one hand.
“I didn’t call anybody,” he said. “Ms. Swanson called from her classroom phone at eleven-twenty. I found out when Virginia buzzed me that a county car was in the fire lane.”
He said it like it should make me feel better.
“So she didn’t even tell you.”
“She followed the process,” he said. “The process doesn’t require my sign-off.”
Then he straightened his tie, which was already straight.
“And honestly, Matt, if she’d come to me first? I’d have made the same call.”
The hallway on Dewey Avenue
Yuki followed me home in the county car.
Hanna watched it in the side mirror the whole way. She asked me twice if the lady was going to take her.
“No, bug,” I said. “She’s going to look at your room.”
“Is she going to look at the troll?”
“Probably.”
“Is she going to be scared?”
“She’s a grown-up,” I said. “She can handle it.”
Yuki’s car smelled like oranges when she opened the door. There was a peel on the passenger seat.
She stood in the driveway and looked up at the roof first. You can still see where I patched it. The new shingles are a shade darker than the old ones, and the line runs right over Hanna’s window.
Then she looked at the stump.
I cut the cottonwood down the weekend after the storm. It took me and my buddy two days and a rented chipper. The stump’s still there, gray now, with a ring of mushrooms around it.
“That’s the tree?” she said.
“That’s what’s left of it.”
Inside, she did everything she’s supposed to do.
She opened the refrigerator. She looked in the pantry. She asked where the medicine was and checked that it was up high.
She asked to see where I sleep, and I showed her, and she didn’t say anything about the unmade bed.
Then she walked down the hall.
The green chair was folded against the wall outside Hanna’s door. The mask was hanging on the hook I’d put up beside the frame, at grown-up height, with the gloves underneath it on the carpet.
There’s a worn place in the carpet in front of that door. A bare oval about the size of the chair’s feet.
Yuki looked at that for a while.
She went into Hanna’s room and stood under the ceiling. The patch shows from inside too. The drywall tape caught a little, and a seam shows when the light hits it.
“Mr. Booth, I’m going to talk to Hanna by herself now,” she said. “Kitchen table’s fine. You can wait on the porch.”
So I sat on the porch steps for forty minutes.
I picked tar off my forearm with my thumbnail. I called Tucker, who I roof for, and left a message saying I’d be back on the ridge by seven tomorrow to get my nail gun and finish.
Hanna’s voice came through the screen door, but not the words.
Once I heard her laugh. Once I heard her crying, and I got halfway up off the step before I made myself sit back down.
When Yuki came out she sat down on the step beside me, which I didn’t expect.
“I’m not supposed to tell you what a child says in an interview,” she said. “I’m going to tell you one thing, because it’s going in my report and you’ll read it anyway.”
“Okay.”
“Do you know where her flashlight is?”
I looked at the backpack sitting by the door. The light one.
“It’s not in there,” I said.
“No,” Yuki said. “Hanna says it’s in Ms. Swanson’s desk.”
She told me the rest the way you’d read off a parts list.
At the tornado drill on Tuesday, Hanna got under the cubbies and started clicking the flashlight. Three clicks, over and over, at the wall.
Ms. Swanson told her to stop. She didn’t stop.
So Ms. Swanson took it out of her hand and put it in her cardigan pocket.
That was when Hanna wouldn’t come out. Not for the principal, not for anybody.
“She says Ms. Swanson told her she could have it back,” Yuki said, “when her daddy comes in and explains himself.”
I sat there with my hands hanging between my knees.
Kayleigh had stood in that office an hour ago and told a county caseworker my daughter hid under the cubbies on Tuesday. She’d told it like it was something I did.
She’d left out whose hand had the flashlight.
Yuki stood up and brushed off the back of her pants.
“What’s the weather supposed to do tonight?” she said.
I took out my phone and looked.
Wind advisory. Gusts to forty-five after nine o’clock.
Nine-oh-five
The first gust hit the siding at 9:05.
I know because I’d been sitting at the kitchen table looking at the clock on the stove since eight.
I’d already done everything I could think of.
At five I called the school office and got the machine. I left a message for Virginia asking if there was any way somebody could get the yellow flashlight out of Ms. Swanson’s room and leave it at the front desk.
At five-thirty I wrote Kayleigh an email. I wrote it four times. The one I sent said:
Ms. Swanson, Hanna’s flashlight is in your desk. She needs it tonight. There’s wind coming. I can come get it anytime, anywhere. Matt Booth.
I didn’t put anything else in it. I wanted to. I took it out.
At seven I drove to the hardware store and bought a yellow work light that looked exactly like hers. I put a strip of duct tape on it and wrote TROLL CALL on it myself.
Hanna took one look at it and handed it back.
“That’s not him,” she said.
“It’s the same kind, bug.”
“It’s not HIM.”
Then 9:05 came.
The first gust was the kind that makes the gutters tick. The second one bent the crepe myrtle by the porch flat against the window.
She started screaming before I made it down the hall.
I had the mask on by the time I reached the chair. I had the gloves on wrong, the claws on the palm side, and I didn’t stop to fix them.
I sat down. The hinge bit me.
I growled at the window.
Normally that’s when the light comes. Three flashes under the door, and I know she’s there, and she knows I’m there.
There wasn’t any light.
She was on the other side of that door screaming, “Where are you? Where ARE you?” and I was right there, two feet away, and she couldn’t tell.
I growled louder. I banged one glove against the door frame.
Then she started knocking on the floor.
Three knocks. Then three more. She was lying on her stomach on the carpet, I found out later, knocking with her fist where the light used to go.
I knocked back three times and growled, and she knocked three times, and that’s how we did it.
It took two hours and ten minutes. She threw up once, into the trash can I keep by her bed for exactly that.
At 10:52 my phone buzzed in my jeans.
It was Kayleigh.
Mr. Booth, per guidance I will not be communicating with you directly at this time. Personal items will be returned through the office at the appropriate time. Thank you for understanding! Ms. Swanson.
Under her name was a little cartoon apple with a smile on it.
She’d copied Philip Hutchins.
I read it in the hallway in the mask, by the light of my phone, with my daughter knocking on the other side of the door.
At 2:10 the wind finally laid down. Hanna was asleep on the floor with her fist still on the carpet.
I didn’t go to bed.
At 5:40 Tucker texted me. Seven sharp. Homeowner already moved this job twice. You’re not on that ridge, I give it to the other crew. Your gun’s still up there.
It was a twenty-nine-hundred-dollar job. My share was most of a month’s mortgage.
I looked at it for a long time.
Then I wrote back: Give it to them.
I took the mask off, put it in my work bag with the gloves, and zipped it shut.
August nineteenth on a clipboard
Philip Hutchins had said the mask needed to stay home on Friday.
I brought it anyway. It stayed zipped in the bag on the floor by my boot.
Yuki had asked me to meet her in the principal’s office at 7:45, before the bell. She said she needed to finish the school part of her report, and she wanted all of us in one room to do it.
She was already there when I came in. Same navy blazer. A clipboard on her knee with a gray county form on it.
Hutchins sat behind his desk. Kayleigh had the chair by the window, with a travel mug that said WORLD’S OKAYEST TEACHER.
She didn’t look at me.
“Thank you all for coming in early,” Yuki said. “Ms. Swanson, I need to go through a few things from your referral. For my file. This is routine.”
“Of course,” Kayleigh said.
Yuki went down the form.
The date and time of the call. Eleven-twenty, Thursday.
The concerns reported. Sleeping in class. The flashlight. The drill. The drawing. “Statements by the child about nighttime behavior by the father.”
Kayleigh said yes to each one. She sounded almost relieved, like she was finally getting to show her work.
“There’s a box here,” Yuki said, “that asks when the reporter’s concerns first began.”
Kayleigh nodded.
“You wrote August nineteenth.”
The room went the kind of quiet where you notice a heater. It ticked under the window.
August nineteenth.
The apple name tags. The sticky note inside her clipboard.
“That’s Meet the Teacher night,” I said.
It was the only thing I said in that room for a while.
Yuki didn’t look up from the form.
“Ms. Swanson,” she said. “What did you observe on August nineteenth?”
“I’d have to look at my notes,” Kayleigh said.
“I have them,” Yuki said. “You attached them.”
She lifted the top page of the form. Under it was a photocopy, and on the photocopy was a yellow square, copied gray, with handwriting on it.
Yuki read it the way she’d read the back of the drawing. Flat. Her mouth moving a little on the words.
“‘Hanna B. Father only. Very large. Facial scarring, possibly from violence. Intimidating. No mom in picture. Monitor.'”
She set the clipboard down on her knee.
“Mr. Hutchins,” she said. “Whose request moved this child’s pickup to the front office?”
Hutchins rubbed his eyebrow with one finger.
“That was Ms. Swanson’s request,” he said. “She said she’d be more comfortable.”
So that was it. Before Hanna ever drew a troll. Before she ever fell asleep at story time, before the drill, before any of it.
Kayleigh had been waiting since August for my daughter to hand her something.
Kayleigh set her mug down on the windowsill.
“I wrote what I saw,” she said.
The bottom drawer
“Where’s her flashlight?” I said.
Kayleigh turned to Hutchins, not to me.
“Philip, I don’t think I should be having this conversation with him in the room,” she said.
“He’s her father,” Yuki said.
“I’m aware he’s her father.” Kayleigh’s voice went up at the end. “That’s the whole point. That’s the entire reason I’m sitting here at a quarter to eight in the morning instead of setting up my room.”
She picked her mug back up. She didn’t drink from it.
“Do you know what it’s like in there? Twenty-four of them. I have four on IEPs, I have one who bites, I have no aide since September. And I have a little girl falling asleep on my carpet three days a week, carrying a light around like it’s a weapon, telling the whole reading group that her daddy growls at her door in the dark.”
“At the window,” I said.
She kept going like I hadn’t said it.
“I did the training. I did the online module and the in-person one. They tell you, you don’t wait for proof. You don’t investigate. You report. They tell you, if you get a feeling, you write it down. So I wrote it down.”
“You wrote down his face,” Yuki said.
“I wrote down what any person in that doorway would have seen.” She pointed at me with the mug. “Look at him. Look at him and tell me you wouldn’t. I have a duty to these kids. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, and somebody gets a visit and a little embarrassment. If I’m right and I didn’t say anything, I’m on the news.”
“And the flashlight,” Yuki said.
“She was disrupting a safety drill. She was clicking that thing at the wall over and over, and the other kids were getting upset. It was a classroom management decision.”
“You told her she’d get it back when her father came in and explained himself.”
“I never said that.”
“That’s what she told me.”
“She’s six,” Kayleigh said. “She told her reading group a monster lives in her hallway.”
There was a knock on the doorframe.
Virginia stood in the doorway with the visitor log on a clipboard and a pen on a beaded chain. October cardigan, orange, with little pumpkins on the pockets.
“He didn’t sign in this morning, Mr. Hutchins,” she said. “I need him in the book.”
Hutchins waved at me to go sign it. I didn’t move yet.
Virginia didn’t leave either.
She looked at Kayleigh the way she’d looked at me the day before. Like she was waiting to see what somebody’s hands would do.
“I was holding the door to the cubby room on Tuesday,” she said. “For the drill. I’m the one who does the count.”
Nobody said anything.
“I heard you tell that baby she’d get her light back when her daddy came in and explained himself,” Virginia said. “I’ve been sitting at that desk thirty-one years. I know what I heard.”
Kayleigh’s face went red from the collar up.
“So I’m the problem,” she said. “I make one call, the call the state tells me to make, and suddenly I’m the problem, and he’s—” She stopped. “Fine. You know what? Fine.”
She got up. She went out past Virginia without saying excuse me.
We sat there. Hutchins straightened a stack of papers on his desk. Yuki wrote something on the county form and underlined it twice.
I put my thumb on the zipper of the work bag and left it there.
When Kayleigh came back, she had the yellow flashlight. TROLL CALL in Hanna’s marker, the tape curling up at one corner.
She set it on the edge of Hutchins’s desk and took her hand away fast, like it might go off.
“Ms. Swanson,” Hutchins said. “I’m going to need you back in here at three. You can bring your union rep if you want one.”
Kayleigh didn’t answer. She picked up her mug and left.
Yuki closed her clipboard.
“My part of this will be closed as unfounded,” she said. “You’ll get a letter. It’ll take about two weeks. The school’s part is Mr. Hutchins’s.”
Hutchins cleared his throat. He said Hanna would move to the other first grade, down by the gym, starting Monday. He said the other teacher was a good one. He said he was sorry about the misunderstanding.
He didn’t say anything about Brave Things Friday, and I didn’t ask.
That was the cost of it, and I knew it sitting there. Hanna was going to lose her reading group and her cubby and the two girls she ate lunch with. Her drawing was never going to get read out loud to the class it was written for.
I signed Virginia’s book. Time in, 7:41. Time out, 8:20.
Then I took the flashlight down the hall to the classroom by the gym, where Hutchins had walked Hanna ten minutes early.
She saw me through the glass in the door.
She came across that room so fast her boots squeaked, and she took the flashlight out of my hand with both of hers, and she looked at the tape to make sure.
Then she pointed it at me and clicked it three times.
I growled right there in the hallway, and Virginia laughed out loud at her desk.
The first norther
The letter from the county came on a Tuesday, two weeks later, the way Yuki said. It’s on the refrigerator under a pizza magnet. Hanna can read the word UNFOUNDED, and she reads it to anybody who comes in the kitchen, whether they asked or not.
The other crew finished the roof on Silver Lake Road. I drive past it on the way to work. They used the wrong drip edge.
Tucker brought my nail gun back himself. He set it on my tailgate and said the other crew was slower than me, which was as close as Tucker gets.
The first real norther came through the week after Thanksgiving.
I could feel it in the afternoon, up on a roof on the west side. The wind turned around and the temperature dropped twenty degrees in an hour.
That night Hanna came out of her room in her pajamas at 8:30, before the wind even started.
She had a piece of manila paper. She’d brought it home from her new class.
She held it up at my face, right there in the hallway, the way you’d hold a sign at the airport.
It was the troll again. Gray, long teeth, claws like garden rakes. This time he sat on a green chair.
Next to him she’d drawn a lady at a desk with gray hair and a pumpkin sweater and a bowl of something round.
“Turn it over,” Hanna said.
I turned it over.
On the back it said THE STORM IS STILL SCARD.
“That one’s for you,” she said. “You don’t have to read it to anybody.”
I pinned it to the wall by her door, next to the hook.
She got in bed. She put the flashlight on the pillow next to her and pulled the purple blanket up to her chin.
The first gust hit the siding at a quarter to ten.
The light came under the door. Three clicks.
I unfolded the chair, sat down, pulled the mask on, and growled at the window till she was asleep.
If this one got to you, send it to somebody who’s spent a few nights in a hallway for a kid of their own.
For more tense family dramas where first impressions hide a bigger story, read “The Hog Farmer Joke Lasted Until The Estate Manager Said My Name” and “I Spent Two Years of Mornings on That Shepherd’s Glance. Nobody at the Lake Knew.”. And for another story about a child caught in the middle of a neighbor’s cruelty, there’s “My Landlord Told The City The Yellow House Was Empty. Tuan Lives There.”.
