School lets out at 3:30 p.m. and he’s still a fifteen-, twenty-minute drive away. He sucks the Black & Mild and guzzles the beer, hoping nicotine and carbonation might clear the weed’s fog, but by the time he’s gunning down the street with the windows cranked down and summer chugging over him, he realizes two things: one, the beer has only further thickened the haze, and, two, in this frenzy, he forgot to pump what was left of the twenty dollars’ worth of gas. Just over a gallon in the tank, a puddle in a cave, about as empty as his belly. He crushes the accelerator to the floor.

It’s more freefall than flight the way he’s barreling through traffic, careening into the shoulder and over the median as he plummets past other vehicles. His nerves are jitterbugging in all his pores. He tries quelling the panic by swatting the steering wheel as if it were the wet black nose of an insistent mutt. Down, boy. Down. It does as much good as the language he releases into the truck cab, telling nobody but the fog that it’s okay, it’s all right. Everything’s going to be just fine, buddy, he swears it. He’s coming, he’s right here, and by the time the truck squeals into the school’s drive, the building and its surrounding lawns and walkways have the vacant calm of a graveyard. All the children have been hauled off by yellow buses or minivans. Even the teachers’ lot is almost entirely cleared out. Once the truck humps over the curb closest to the entrance, slamming the brake pedal is like pulling a ripcord. He sprints into the school, the tail of his suit jacket billowing behind him absolutely nothing like a parachute, let alone a hero’s cape.

Inside the elementary school everything is shrunken down pintsized. Bulletin boards at knee level, ceilings low and corded with colorful construction-paper chains. The dairy-like smell of children at play still lingering in the halls. When he goes for a second whiff, the scent curdles, turns putrid. The gutter musk of cigar smoke and the bite of his malnourished body odor overwhelms him. And, judging by the secretary’s narrowed eyelids, she must certainly smell it, too.

“We’ve been trying to get ahold of you for over an hour.”

Even after loading the five dollars onto his phone, he was too distracted by his twenty-buck conquest, then the beer, tobacco, weed, Michelle’s ghost, and traffic to check if it’d charged and turned on. He apologizes profusely, repeatedly, explaining his phone had died and but where is Junior? Where is his son?

The secretary pulls car keys from her purse, jabs a tiny dagger toward the nurse’s office, then leaves.