PART 2
I called 911 back.
“There’s a 6-year-old girl alone outside the Walmart on Dimond Boulevard. She’s been there six hours. I’m on my way.”
The dispatcher said a patrol car was closer. I drove anyway.
Behind me, the Buick tried to pull out of the lot. The woman in scrubs and the store clerk stepped right in front of it. Duane slammed the brakes.
A police car pulled in thirty seconds later.
Wyatt and I got to the Walmart in eight minutes.
The patrol car was already there, lights on.
A tiny girl in a pink snowsuit was sitting on an overturned bucket next to the cart corral. Her sign said “PLEASE HELP MY FAMILY.” She was holding it with both hands, like she’d been told to never put it down.
A female officer was kneeling in front of her with a blanket.
When Nova saw Wyatt, she jumped off the bucket and ran to him.
“You came back,” she said. “You said you’d come back.”
He’d been looking out for her the whole time.
The officers took Nova to the hospital. Mild frostbite on three fingers. She was hungry and scared, but she would be okay.
Wyatt told the police everything that night, sitting in the back of my truck with a hot chocolate.
It had started in October, right after I left.
Every night after school, Mom and Duane drove the kids to two different stores. Wyatt at the liquor store. Nova at the Walmart. Four hours. Sometimes six.
If Wyatt didn’t bring back $100, he slept in the car.
Nova’s mother was in rehab. Duane had told her family that he and Mom were “taking good care of her.”
They’d made more than $9,000 off those two kids in six weeks. Plus my $2,500 a month.
My mother and Duane were arrested that night.
Child endangerment. Child neglect. Two counts each.
Duane had a warrant in another state. He didn’t come home.
My mother pleaded guilty in February.
I sat in the back of the courtroom. She turned around once and looked at me.
“I’m your mother,” she mouthed.
I didn’t answer.
I never went back to sea.
I sold my share of the boat and took a job running the dock at the Port of Anchorage. Home by six every night.
Nova’s mom finished her program in the spring. She drove up to our house with a casserole and couldn’t stop crying on our porch.
Now Nova comes over every Saturday. She and Wyatt build snow forts in the yard.
Last month, Wyatt made a new sign in art class.
He taped it to our front door.
“MY DAD CAME HOME.”
THE END.
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Sometimes the people we trust most with our children are the ones we need to watch the closest. Check the details. Come home.
What would you have done in that parking lot if you were Cal? Tell us in the replies.