Or whatever.

But jeez. Neither one of those losers was exactly hitting the ball out of the park. For the sake of argument, let’s say that Keith and the cop, choosing to err slightly on the side of pro-activity, had (lightly, performatively) roughed up those two dopes. The one who’d done it? Wouldn’t do it again. The one who hadn’t done it—well, if, in the future, he ever considered doing something out of line, which he probably would, given the life he was leading, he’d think twice. Net result? A safer Church Street. Down which a nice kid like Derek could walk. Derek, in her mind, ambling down this old-timey Church Street, waved to an elderly couple drinking iced tea on their porch. Go around back, lad, use the tire swing on the old apple tree! the husband said. His wife was up there knitting. You remind us of our own son, now a successful doctor! she said, then dropped her yarn ball, which rolled off the porch, and the old guy made a joke about his back as he hobbled down the stairs to fetch it.

Good people.

Salt of the earth.

But Church Street did not belong to them. Or Derek. It belonged to those two freaks, who, because freaky, were somehow the most powerful players in the whole idiotic deal. Why were rejects running the show? Seriously? It was all backward, because nobody wanted to hurt anybody’s feelings, nobody was willing to say what they really thought, nobody cared enough to take a stand for what was right.

And things kept spiraling downward.

They walked to the porch through a pile of leaves. Which was no fun. Not today. Today, it was one more thing they had to do to get to the next not-fun thing. Which was dinner.

This was real. This had happened. A guy had attacked her kid and suffered no consequences whatsoever and was probably off bragging about it to some other deadbeats around a campfire or whatnot.

And what was she doing about it?

Going inside to meekly boil pasta.

After dinner, she started writing some of this down. It was easy. It just flowed. It came straight from the heart. An essay. “Justice,” she called it. Goodbye, can openers with big dreams; goodbye, talking trees; goodbye, Henry the Dutiful Ice-Cream-Truck Tire, that piece of crap she’d worked on for most of last year; goodbye, forced optimism; goodbye, political correctness. This was the real shit. Wow. She knew just what to say. It was like walking across a creek and rocks kept appearing beneath her feet. It was like speaking out loud. But on paper. It was the most honest, original thing she’d ever written. It didn’t sound like her, and yet it was her, for real.

Bang, yes, perfect.

She wrote late into the night.