After by Marita Golden

his children what he has done? He doesn’t want to tell them inside the house. It was enough to tell Bunny in the kitchen. Where in the house would Juwan and Roslyn and Roseanne ever feel safe again if their home was the place he told them he killed a man? He has told the story once inside the walls of the house he and Bunny have turned into what feels to Carson like the only home he has ever had. He won’t do it again.
     
    “If Daddy
is picking us up, then he’s got a surprise for us,” Roslyn tells her shy older brother and her sister as they walk together to their father’s car, parked across the street from the school.
    “But let’s act like we don’t suspect a thing, okay?” she orders Juwan and Roseanne.
    “Hi, Daddy,” Roslyn says as she hugs Carson, settling into the front seat beside him, her knowing, confident smile breaking Carson’s heart. The car is flooded with childish energy, hot and intense. In the backseat Roseanne and Juwan throw their backpacks on the floor and greet him as well.
    “Can we go to McDonald’s, Daddy?” Roslyn asks, settling back in her seat after locking her seat belt. That would be a perfect way to stall, to use up time, to delay, Carson thinks, pulling up behind a school bus exiting the parking lot. But not now.
    “Some other day, okay?”
    “Okay.”
    Where will he take them, he wonders, driving away from the school and heading who knows where. Carson drives past the in-progress housing developments along Church Road, cranes and bulldozers hollowing out acres of trees and foliage to make way for what a sign says will be Harmony Estates. He’s oblivious to the snickering and laughter of Roseanne and Juwan in the backseat. Beside him Roslyn is moving her head to a tune on the radio, her high-pitched, quavering voice singing along with a now-dead young singer named Aaliyah, who, Carson vaguely recalls, married a much older singer when she was fifteen. Didn’t he hear something about that singer, R. Kelly, being sued for taking videos of himself having sex with another underage girl? Aaliyah is sultry and bristling with a throaty sensuality, singing about rocking the boat, working the middle and changing positions. Eyes closed, fingers snapping, Roslyn is transported, and Carson wonders if his daughter knows she is singing about sex.
    The children are not impatient, not asking where they are going, not until Carson has driven past Wal-Mart and Ruby Tuesday’s and the BaySox Baseball Stadium where he and Bunny take them to see Minor League games in the summer, and they seem to have been riding in circles. Not until the children recognize the streets passed ten or fifteen minutes earlier do they begin to fidget with concern.
    Carson is unaware of the uneasiness in the car, of Roslyn’s turning to look at Juwan and Roseanne, her brown eyes big and bulging with uncertainty. It is finally Roseanne, so quiet but as strong-willed as her sister, who asks, “Daddy, where are we going?”
    The question jolts Carson back to the present, and he turns and drives into the parking lot of a mall that’s all restaurants and a twelve-theater cinema. “This is the surprise, I told you,” Roslyn shouts triumphantly, “I told you.” They all begin to clap.
    Carson parks several rows from the entrance to the theater, in a corner of the parking lot, and the children smile at him expectantly as he unbuckles his seat belt. They unbuckle their belts and Roslyn reaches for the door.
    “No, we’re not going to the movies. Not today.”
    “But…” Roslyn begins, the sight of the sorrow in her father’s eyes plunging her into silence.
    Carson will not remember exactly how he tells them when Bunny asks later that evening. Just as he can’t remember exactly how many bullets he fired (he thinks it is four or five, although he clearly saw three and that’s how many shell casings Evidence found), he won’t recall all of the words partly because in the end there were so few words. So few