15 Seconds by Andrew Gross

reflection in the glass.
    He’d lost Joycie to cancer about a year and a half ago. Lost his job at the mill a year before that. Medical insurance too. Then he’d fallen behind on the house. Not to mention how he’d been forced to come up here in the first place, thrown to the wolves down south on trumped-up charges he couldn’t defend.
    Life was bleeding him, Vance reflected, one cut at a time.
    But this last one—what had happened to Amanda. Well, that was one more cut than he could bear.
    They brought her out in an orange jumpsuit, hands cuffed in front of her. She looked a little overwhelmed and scared. Who wouldn’t be? Maybe a little afraid of seeing him too. Her hair was all straggly and unkempt. Cheeks sunken and pale. And when she saw him, who it was who had come to visit, she had this cautious look that he took as both worried and even a little ashamed. Like a proud animal not used to being caged. She sat down across from him with a wary smile and shrugged her shoulders slightly.
    “How ya doin’, Daddy?”
    He nodded back, not knowing what to say. “Amanda.”
    Truth be told, Vance hadn’t known what to say to his daughter in years. He saw her as little more than a whining, pathetic child who never owned up to anything she’d done. Who’d always blamed every bit of what went wrong in her life on someone or something else. Which made Vance sick to his soul, since, if he stood on one thing, it was that each of us had to be accountable for what we had done in life.
    No matter how bad.
    Still, she was his daughter. He’d tried to raise her as best he could, knowing he had always had a paucity in the way of softness or understanding, until things started to go downhill in the past year. And he hated that—that he’d let things get away from him. That someone with as clear a ledger when it came to right from wrong had to look through the glass and see his own seed, his wife’s baby, and say, in a corner of his bruised, unforgiving heart, That’s my daughter there.
    “How’s Benji, Daddy?” Amanda asked. Her stupid cat. Not even her cat, just a mangy, scrawny stray who lived in the woods outside and only came around ’cause Amanda was stupid enough to feed it. “Are you leaving a little something out for him? He likes a little raw chop meat maybe. Or maybe some tuna fish.”
    “He’s doing just fine, Amanda, just fine,” Vance said, though he was plainly lying. He’d heard a couple of hopeful purrs a few days back, but now the critter must have wised up and was no longer coming around. “He stops by every couple of nights or so. Been asking for you, ’Manda.”
    That made her smile.
    “I talked to my lawyer,” she said, the momentary lightness in her soft eyes darkening. “They want me to plead, Daddy, to what they’re calling ‘aggravated vehicular manslaughter.’ Otherwise he says they’re going to go for second-degree murder.”
    Vance nodded.
    The whole thing had been played out all over the news, so much that he couldn’t even watch TV anymore. Such a nice, young thing that gal had been, and married to someone serving our country, a Marine in Afghanistan. Not to mention that baby . . . Only eight weeks old. The poor guy hadn’t even seen his son yet. The D.A. wouldn’t let up. Not with Amanda so juiced up and not even knowing what she had done and all. It was clear he was pushing for the max. Vance couldn’t even blame him.
    It was an election year.
    “Sounds like something you ought to weigh carefully, honey.”
    “Aggravated manslaughter’s punishable by twenty years, Daddy!” Her eyes grew scared and wide. “I didn’t mean to hurt no one. I didn’t mean for this to happen. I wasn’t myself. Those things   . . .” She wiped her eyes and pushed back her hair. “We’re talking my whole life, Daddy! I don’t deserve this. I’m scared. You have to help me. You do . . .”
    “I know you’re scared, Amanda,” Vance said, looking at her. “But you’re gonna