Page 40 of Obsessed Bratva Daddy
We played the basketball game first. The little hoops moved on a track. She got two in. I got two in and then I missed three on purpose and she watched me miss the third one and narrowed her eyes.
"You're letting me win."
"I'm not."
"You are. Brother. I see you."
"Then win without my help."
She did. She made the next four. I gave her the strip of tickets and she folded it into her pocket.
The claw machine was by the door. Behind the glass, a heap of stuffed animals lay tangled up the way stuffed animals alwayslay tangled up in those machines, like they'd been through a small disaster together. She stood up on her toes to see. I leaned over her shoulder and looked at the angle of the grabber. I read it three times. The grabber sat over the heap at a slight tilt to the left. The bear I wanted was three inches to the right of where the grabber would drop.
I waited. The grabber drifted. It clicked one notch right. I dropped the coin in.
The grabber came down. It caught the bear by the head. It came back up with one ear hanging by a thread.
She squealed. The squeal was the loudest sound she had made in three months.
I bent and pulled the bear out of the chute. It was brown and small and one ear was a tragedy. I handed it to her. She held it against her chest with both hands.
"His name is Beom-Beom," she said. "It means I love him."
"Then that's his name."
She tucked him under her arm. She took my hand again. She didn't let it go for the rest of the mall.
On the bus back, she fell asleep with her head against my arm. The bear was wedged under her chin. The bus was almost empty again. The light coming through the windows had gone the gold color light went in the late part of the afternoon, the kind of gold that made the inside of the bus look warm even though it wasn't.
I looked down at the top of her head. The braids were coming loose. The part down the middle was crooked. She'd done it herself this morning before she came downstairs.
I've never been a brother in any memory I have. I've been a brother for three months.
I let her sleep.
The bus dropped us at the corner. The house was a quarter mile down the country road, past the bend, past the line of treesthat had been losing their leaves since the start of the cold. We started walking. She was carrying the bear by one of his arms. The arm was going to come off if she kept that up. I didn't say anything about it.
We were a hundred yards out when I saw the light.
Blue and red. Rotating. Throwing color against the trunks of the trees up by the curve in the road. I saw it before she did. Something inside my chest that wasn't a memory and wasn't a thought went cold and steady all at once.
I stopped her with a hand at her shoulder.
"Wait."
"What?"
I didn't answer the question. I bent and picked her up and set her on my hip the way you set a child on a hip. She tucked her face into the side of my neck without being told. I didn't look down at her. If I looked down she'd see my face and she'd know.
I kept walking. I walked at the pace of a man who was going home. I didn't change my pace.
Two squad cars on the gravel of the drive. One of them with the lights still going. An ambulance parked at the side, lights off, not running. Yellow tape across the front of the porch, strung from the railing to the corner post. The neighbor from the house at the bend was at the end of the walkway in a robe and slippers with her hand over her mouth. She looked at me. She didn't say anything.
A young deputy was at the bottom of the porch steps. He lifted a hand when he saw me coming.
"Sir, I need you to step back."
"Where are they?"
