"Then he should go catch it. That's his whole job. That's the one thing he's supposed to do for room and board."
Del turned a page. "Mm."
That was the thing about Del. Mm. You could tell him the cat had been standing on your face at two in the morning, or that the charge nurse had written you up for a medication time that wasn't your fault, or that you'd been lying awake thinking about whether this was all there was going to be, this kitchen, the two of them eating breakfast across from each other like strangers on a bus, and he would say mm. He was just somewhere else, somewhere quiet and level where nothing reached him, and lately she had begun to feel that she was standing outside that place knocking.
She drank her Folgers and watched the window over the sink go from black to charcoal. Across the street, the Doyle house sat dark, the way it had sat dark for two weeks now. Somebody had finally taken down the jack-o'-lantern from the porch, or else it had rotted and fallen off the steps. The yard was full of leaves nobody had raked.
"Anything new on the Doyle boy?" she asked.
Del's paper stopped moving.
"Nothing I heard," he said.
"Bev said the county thinks he's trying to get down to Tennessee. To his dad."
"Could be."
"That's three hundred miles. He's eleven."
"Kids do crazy things." Del folded the paper, finished his coffee, rinsed his bowl and set it upside down in the drainer the way she'd asked him to a thousand times and he had finally, sometime around year eight, started doing. He kissed the top of her head on his way past. His lips were dry and quick. "Have a good shift."
"You too."
The screen door wheezed, the storm door banged, and then she heard the Citation turn over on the third try in the driveway, coughing exhaust into the cold. She sat with her coffee and watched him back out. Across the street, the Doyle house looked at her with its blank windows.
Kevin Doyle. She could see him if she closed her eyes: a skinny kid with a cowlick and a Cincinnati Reds jacket two sizes too big, the sleeves rolled into fat doughnuts at his wrists. He used to sit on his front steps after school waiting for his father's Peterbilt to come growling around the corner from Dayton-Yellow Springs Road. On the days Ray was gone, which were most days, Kevin stayed with a sitter until his dad came home, or sometimes with nobody, a key on a shoelace around his neck.
Then, in late October, Ray Doyle's truck had jackknifed on black ice outside Knoxville, and Ray had gone into a hospital down there with a broken pelvis and a head injury, and the county had come for Kevin. There was no mother; she'd left when Kevin was four, gone to California or Arizona or wherever it was people went. A caseworker had put Kevin in emergency foster care with a family over in Xenia, and four days later Kevin had walked out of their back door in the middle of the night and not come back.
That had been eighteen days ago.
His picture had been in the Dayton Daily News, a school photo with the laser background everybody's kids had that year, blue and pink beams shooting out behind his head. HAVE YOU SEEN ME? On the side of the milk carton in her own refrigerator there was a different child, a girl from Michigan, missing since 1983, smiling with her front teeth gone. Janet turned that carton around so the girl faced the back wall every time she put it away.