I Will Come for You by Suzanne Phillips Page A

school teacher.” He stuffs his hands into his pockets and rocks back on his heels. “She wasn’t always nice, you know.”
    “You knew her, Randy?”
    “She kept a garden,” Randy confirms. “Peonies in the summer; wild oat in the winter. She tried tomatoes last year but the sea air turned them sour.”
    “But she wasn’t nice?”
    “She was nice to look at.” Randy smiles then thinks better of it. “She had some boys digging up her garden, putting down hummus. Her students, I guess. Some of them didn’t want to be there. She said, ‘You should have thought about pay back before you ripped the pages out of your textbook.’”
    Old school. Graham likes that. Too few kids are made to accept accountability for
    their actions; many of them weave a path to Graham’s door.
    He’ll need to follow up on Randy’s story. Approach the parents of the boys and question Iverson’s relationship with their sons. It could fall either way. Maybe the boys changed out of their dirty clothes after serving their time. Maybe there’s an explanation as easy as that. And maybe not.
    “Whatever happened to detention, right?”              
    “Yeah.” Randy laughs then changes the subject. “How’s Isaac?”
    “He’s good. You should come by and see him sometime.”
    “Yeah, I haven’t been good about that.” He nods and his shaggy hair falls into his eyes. “You know, Alana’s back in town?”
    Randy is afraid of his sister. Although nearly ten years older, Randy never held a position of authority with Alana. Graham remembers in high school, when they first started dating, that Alana’s brother kept his distance. That’s when Randy was around. By their junior year, he was doing a stretch inside Commitment, a mental health facility. It wasn’t his first visit.
    “I didn’t know.”
    But that’s not unusual. Alana often arrives without notice and leaves the same way. Sometimes, Graham finds out days after she’s been here that she passed through. She doesn’t always visit with Isaac when she makes land.
    “I saw her getting into her car outside the Minute Mart. She doesn’t look good,” Randy says.
    Graham can’t remember a time when Alana looked anything but good. Even in her worst moments, she kept her physical beauty. Her constant weeping broke his heart. Her screaming and
    keening , which usually began in the early morning darkness, burrowed into his soul.
    Genetics. Graham hopes none of it shows up in Isaac. A specialist he consulted assured him environment was as big a playing card as DNA. Divorcing Alana became an act of salvation, for him and his son.
    “Keep your distance,” Graham suggests now. “There’s no reason you have to visit with her.”
    “She comes to the house,” he says.             
    Their parents left the house equally to both children, but Alana refused the offer. Last year, the house was vandalized. Nothing was stolen, but windows were smashed. The TV, too. Photographs, many of them of Alana, were pulled out of albums and shredded. The burners on the gas stove were lit and the ashes of paper and the remains of a pair of curtains torn off the kitchen window, were piled on the floor.
    Is Alana crazy enough to do something like that?
    Graham has seen her do worse.
    “You put new locks on the doors, right?”
    “She doesn’t need a key to get in,” Randy says. “You know she doesn’t need anything like that to get where she wants to go.”
    There were times over the four years since he divorced Alana that Graham suspects she entered the house without his knowledge. He came home to the scent of her perfume lingering in the bedrooms and the bathroom. He’s come home to the shower still wet from use. And to an oven that was on. And neither he nor Isaac could explain it.
    “Look,” Graham says. “Keep your doors locked, Okay? Call in if Alana comes around.”
    He places a hand on Randy’s shoulder. The man is thin, but his muscles are wiry. “I