Where Did the Fireflies Go

She handed me her phone before they took her back, and she did it slow, the way you’d hand somebody a baby.

“Don’t look at anything,” she said.

“I’m not going to look at anything.”

“Dad.”

“I’m going to hold it. That’s the entire job.”

The girl at the desk called her again and Kaitie went, and at the door she turned around and pointed at me with two fingers, at me and then at the phone, and then she was gone down the hall in her socks. They make them take their shoes off now. I don’t know why.

I sat back down.

It was a Tuesday and I’d taken the half day, and there were four of us in the waiting room. A woman filling out a clipboard. An old man in a windbreaker who had come in with nobody and would leave with nobody. A boy about six lying across two chairs with his head in his mother’s lap and one shoe off, and she was scrolling with her free hand and rubbing his back with the other, and I thought, there you go. That’s the whole thing right there. One hand for each.

I don’t know why it came to me on the drive. It wasn’t the office. It wasn’t anything she said.

It came the way that does, which is not all at once. I would be in it and then I’d be back — a red light, a cup between my knees, a girl chewing ice with a ball cap down over her eyes.

And I went back.

Somewhere between that light and the highway I was ten years old, standing in a rut of dried clay in nothing but cutoffs, in the middle of a July afternoon with about six hours in front of me and not one thing in them, and no grown person on this earth knew where I was or particularly wanted to.

I know how that sounds.

It was the best I ever felt.

That was the summer of 1985, and it was the last one, and my cousin Red drowned in the third week of June.