One More Day by Kelly Simmons Read Free Book Online

If she listened to everybody whose child had not been stolen, well, they all had spidey sense, got a feeling, saw a look, thought they could figure it out. It must have been someone the child knew who grabbed him! Or else why hadn’t he cried? Why hadn’t anyone seen? And how long does it take for a grown woman to find a freaking quarter? And why hadn’t she locked her door anyway?
    Now, Carrie was standing in the kitchen entry, listening to John’s car screech into the driveway, door slamming, feet running, trying to use his key and realizing the front door wasn’t locked, just like the car. Knowing she hadn’t listened to his repeated warnings. Carrie tensed inside, waiting for him to yell at her for that too. Everybody said the same things to her: She needed to lock the doors to keep people out but open her heart to talk to them, to help them, to let them in. But how on earth would she know the difference between who to keep out and who to let in?
    Inside, John’s face was paler than usual, a trickle of sweat sliding down one of his dark sideburns. He put the bag from the farmers’ market on the coffee table.
    â€œYou stopped for food?” she said incredulously.
    â€œI went out earlier,” he said. “Put it in the office fridge.”
    She stood in the entryway of the kitchen. “He’s in here,” she said, as if he couldn’t see that.
    He stepped in. “Oh my God.” His voice cracked. “Benny boy,” he said softly.
    â€œDaddy, Daddy!”
    Ben ran to him, wrapping his arms around his father’s khaki pants, burying his face between his knees. Is he smelling us too? Carrie wondered . Inhaling the memory of metal, the steam iron hovering over the fabric? John closed his eyes for just a moment, as if his lonely knees had missed his son, then bent over and picked him up.
    Ben had a face full of John’s features—small nose, dimpled chin. But his coloring was lighter, more like Carrie’s, as if someone had mixed in sunlight. The best of both families, Carrie’s mother said once to John’s mother, and John’s mother had agreed. Carrie couldn’t always trace the good in her own family tree, but Ben had it. He had the sweetness, the light, that she remembered from her own early youth.
    â€œYou see what I mean,” Carrie said.
    John held him aloft, smiling, then tossed him, caught him, wild giggles in the air. He was both loving him and testing his weight.
    He glanced at his wife but didn’t say anything. Didn’t want to tell her the truth: that he didn’t remember, that some of the details of his son had slipped away, that he had changed the wallpaper on his phone to a picture of Ben just to help him stop that erosion but that it seemed impossible. John carried Ben past the small island, past the pantry door with the vintage Eat sign on it.
    Carrie eyed the half-open pantry door. There, on the molding, the pencil lines that were fading and a little smudged, the evidence even John couldn’t bear to paint over, to erase. They both knew they would own the molding of that door forever, with the marks of their son’s height.
    â€œLet’s measure him,” she said.
    â€œMe big!” Ben said.
    â€œYes, you are, buddy. You’re big. Come on, Carrie. He’s a little bigger; he’s just—”
    â€œNo. Take him upstairs, get the scale. Maybe we should call the pediatrician? Find out what he weighed—”
    â€œNone of that matters, Carrie,” John said. “Let’s call the police, and let’s…just love our son, okay?”
    John’s eyes met Carrie’s over the top of their son’s head, and she nodded.
    But when she nestled Ben back in her arms, she bounced him, trying to remember how heavy he was before. She thought of every time she’d strained to pick him up, balancing a shopping bag on the other hip, thinking he was too big to carry