Kiss Her Goodbye by Wendy Corsi Staub Page B

Matt didn’t see the sense in replacing it when they moved. Not when voice mail is so economical and convenient.
    Or so he says.
    Frustrated at having missed the call, Kathleen dials the voice mail access number. As she punches in her pin number, she glances at the clock. It’s almost three. Curran and Riley will be getting off the bus in about five minutes, followed by Jen fifteen minutes after that.
    â€œYou have no . . . new . . . messages,” a recorded voice says in staccato cadence.
    Either that . . . or she dialed too soon.
    Still holding the phone, Kathleen walks over to the counter, where she was mixing together a steak marinade between loads of laundry. As she throws a pinch of salt into the oil and vinegar combination in the bowl, she weighs the likelihood that the caller was her father’s nursing home, calling to tell her he’s run away again.
    It’s happened a few times lately. Somehow, her father manages to dress himself and slip out the front door. He never gets far. He’s usually found by the Erasmus staff wandering in the same block, trying to find his way back to his old neighborhood and the house that was sold long ago.
    â€œI just want to go back home, Kathleen,” he says whenever she rushes over after one of those incidents. “Why can’t I go home?”
    The nurses have promised her—several times, now—that it won’t happen again. But maybe it has.
    Or maybe Drew Gallager himself was calling again?
    Kathleen spoke to him less than an hour ago, and promised to visit first thing tomorrow morning—bringing the new socks and underwear he requested. That means a trip to Target on the way, unless she leaves the younger boys with Jen and runs out to the store this afternoon instead.
    She bought Dad new socks and underwear right before Labor Day, when she was doing back to school shopping for the kids. She could swear she bought him some for his birthday in July, too. But when she asked him, he claimed somebody has been stealing them from his bureau.
    For all she knows, he isn’t just paranoid. The private Catholic nursing home isn’t exactly a haven, but it’s affordable.
    Dad is proud of the fact that he worked hard all his life and saved enough to take care of himself in his old age.
    â€œYou know, Katie, I never asked anyone for a penny,” he likes to say, in his more lucid moments.
    No, he never did. And she never asked him for a penny, either.
    Sometimes, Kathleen is tempted to ask Matt if they can have Dad move in here.
    Then she remembers what it was like to live under the same roof with him; remembers all the lonely, deprived years of her childhood.
    She remembers Get Out .
    Those were her father’s final words to her on that awful March day; they rang bitterly in her ears as she closed the front door behind her, locked it, and pocketed the key. Not that she’d be needing it again. Drew Gallagher had made it more than clear that she—and her baby, when it was born—would not be welcome in his house.
    Standing in her suburban kitchen, Katie is swept back to that day, remembering every detail, reliving it as she has so many times through the years.
    She remembers the sting of the wind on her cheeks and the stink of sulfur from a nearby factory. Remembers how she raised the hood on her down parka, picked up her hastily packed suitcase, and descended the sagging front steps. How, when she reached the packed layer of recently plowed snow that marked the sidewalk, she paused.
    Right or left?
    Which way should she go?
    Where the hell was she supposed to turn?
    Aunt Maggie would have taken her in, without a doubt. But her aunt had warned her only months earlier, during Katie’s annual Christmas visit to Chicago, that she was going to find herself in serious trouble if she didn’t straighten out.
    No, she couldn’t go running to Aunt Maggie, Queen of I Told You So.
    Who else was there?
    Maeve