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She realized she had never been alone with Grandpa before, without Grandma or her mother present. She wasn’t comfortable, and that bothered her, especially because she adored her grandfather. “I was hoping,” she said, “that I could ride my bike with you here to look after me.” She had a perfectly wonderful bicycle, the most expensive thing that was her very own, but she hardly ever got to ride it. Her mother wouldn’t let her go out and ride it off by herself, and the only times she could ride it was when her mother would supervise her, and there were hardly any times like that. She really needed the exercise. Since the weather had started warming up, at school recess the girls (and boys too) had taken to removing their shoes and socks to play their games, but Robin hated to go barefoot. She could understand why other kids liked it and liked the feel of the cool earth or grass under their feet, but Robin couldn’t stand it. So she had been avoiding the recess games, and wasn’t getting enough exercise. When it got too bad, she could always skip her rope by herself, which she often did, alone in the house, in relief against all that sitting-down to manage Robinsville, but skipping rope or even practicing her taekwondo moves wasn’t as much fun as riding the bicycle. Her father one time had taken her to a martial arts class where the taekwondo teacher had told her she would be a black belt within six months if she came to class regularly. But of course her mother wouldn’t let her go, and her father just didn’t come around any more.

“Okey-doke, I reckon,” Grandpa said. “If you’re a-hankerin to ride your bike, I ’spect I could oblige ye.”

So she put on her jacket and got her key and locked the house and Grandpa got in his car and drove it slowly behind her while she rode her bicycle down the road. It felt so good. She liked to pump with her legs and feel the wind in her face. It really wasn’t very cold. She liked to swing the bike frame back and forth as she pumped harder. Soon she had left Grandpa a good ways behind. If only she had her dog running along beside her. But she’d never had a dog, or a cat, because her mother said it was out of the question. She would simply adore having a good dog, and have it now running with its tongue hanging out beside her bicycle. Bicycle riding was really the only time she liked to be outdoors. Not that she was a stay-at-home, and she certainly wasn’t allergic to fresh air, but she just had no appreciation for the world of nature, and woods bothered her. She disliked the few times that the teacher had taken the class on a “nature walk,” and she had no interest whatever in being able to identify trees or plants or flowers or anything. Even the Sunday school teacher had once tried to take the class out into the woods to discover how God was out there in those woods, but she never found Him. If she were God she wouldn’t want to be in the woods. “I have never seen God,” she told her mother later, and from then onward refused to say her prayers at night or anytime.

Now she stopped peddling and squeezed the brakes on the handlebar. Right there up ahead beside the road was that man parked in his pickup truck. She looked behind her to see how far Grandpa’s car was. She couldn’t see it. She shouldn’t look over her shoulder like that while the bike was still moving. She lost her balance and before she could stop the bike or get her balance she had crashed into the earth.

Chapter seven

M
y goodness alive but wasn’t she the pertiest little thing that ever walked God’s earth—or rode a bike on it? He didn’t much believe in God; he’d seen or heard about too damn many plum loco things in this world to believe that nobody as smart as God was supposed to be could possibly have saw fit to allow it, let alone have planned it in the first place, but whenever he laid his eyes upon Robin he was struck all of a heap with the certainty that nobody but God Hisself could have had the cleverness to have created somebody so splendid. Oftentimes he wondered if Louisa had looked like that when she was just a young ’un. He’d seen photos of Louisa looking tiny and cute, but nothing at all like her granddaughter, why, there was scarce even a family resemblance. Of course it was hard to think of Louisa without resentment. Even besides the fact she hadn’t wanted him to touch her for years and years, she was so all-fired churchy and had to go three times a week and drag him along with her, she had also made it hard for him to give Robin all the loving she needed. When that worthless asswipe Billy Kerr had taken to fooling around and then split for good, Leo had wanted to step in and take his place as a kind of daddy for Robin, but Louisa had suspicioned that he had the hots for Karen and wanted to take Billy’s place in bed, which wasn’t true at all, not at all. Karen was a sightly-enough woman, and Leo couldn’t understand why she hadn’t found herself another man, but he didn’t have any sort of attraction to her whatsoever. He just wanted to be a daddy for Robin. He wanted to take her to her martial arts classes that Billy had been taking her to but that Karen couldn’t find the time for. He wanted especially to take her out to the roller rink now and again, because she was already real good at what was called “artistic” skating, and if she got a chance to keep it up, why, there was just no telling how far she could go, maybe even switch to ice skates by and by and become another Sonja Henie or one of those such as Leo liked to watch on the
TV
. But damn her hide, Louisa had not allowed him to follow his intention to do all those things for Robin. The best he could do was buy her toys and things and make sure she had all she needed to follow her interest in paper dolls and paper things. He’d been allowed to help her in that line all he liked. In fact, not only had he started it all when he gave her a book full of paper dolls a few years before, but he had also demonstrated to her something that she ought to have learned from Karen or somebody but nobody had ever bothered to learn her: you can make yourself a whole string of paper dolls holding hands if you just fold up a sheet of paper proper and then cut just the profile of the doll, so that when you unfold your paper you’ve got a whole line of identical ones. As soon as she learned how to do that, Robin had to give a different name to each and every one of the identical dolls in the string, and that was how she got started a-populating her whole town full of little paper people, which she called Robinsville, and wasn’t that clever of her? Robin was not only the pertiest thing he’d ever seen, and the smartest to boot, but she had an imagination that would make you shake your head in wonder and keep on a-shaking it.

Leo had a thing for paper himself. He had also shown her how to take a sheet and fold it just right so that it became an airplane that would really fly. You had to do it just right. It was a trick Leo had learned in the Navy. He wanted to take Robin up one of the hills in Harrison and show her how to launch them paper planes out across the air and watch ’em fly and fly and just fly away. But he had to make do with being allowed to just take her out in the back yard and let her fly her planes back there, and they didn’t go very far without a drift of wind to catch ’em.

Today was the first time he’d ever been truly alone with Robin, and here he was with just a back view of her a-riding along ahead of him, with that golden hair a-streaming out behind her. Personally he liked the hair better in braids, which Karen was real good at fixing when she wasn’t too busy, but now Robin had taken the braids out so she could have her hair blowing in the wind while she rode the bike. And all he could do was foller and watch.

Leo took his foot off the gas, and coasted, and let his thoughts coast too. When he returned his attention to the road, he noticed that Robin had done pedaled right out of sight! He mashed the gas again and cleared the little curve in the road, and Christ all Jesus! If she hadn’t done had a wreck! Her and the bike were all crumpled up flat on the earth.

Leo braked to jump out just at the same time that another feller was rushing up to her. Blamed if it wasn’t that feller he’d seen a little bit before, the one that Robin thought maybe had been knocking on her door. He and the feller got to her at the same moment. Him and the other feller each bent down and took one of her arms.

She wasn’t hurt bad, maybe a scrape or two, and she wasn’t even crying. Leo had never in her life known her to cry, over anything. But she was in great pain, he could tell.

The other feller was trying to lift her up too, and he was a pretty big and stout feller, half again as big as Leo, and sure enough he just lifted her up easy as a loaf of bread and made as if to carry her to his pick-up.

“Grampa,” she says through her big lips that was all twisted in pain.

“Yeah, it’s Grampa,” says the other feller. What the heck? And started a-carrying her toward his truck.

“Hold on!” says Leo and grabbed aholt of one of her arms. “I’m her grampa!”

“The hell you say,” says the feller, tough and mean. “I’m her grampa.”

Leo had never met Billy Kerr’s dad, who lived over in Oklahoma somewheres and had never been to Harrison as far as Leo knew about, and he wondered, could this maybe be Billy Kerr’s daddy? If that was so, then he’d really be her grandfather because Leo wasn’t actually her blood grandfather.

“Well, I got to her first,” Leo says, somewhat lamely, and wraps his arms around her possessively.

“But I picked her up first,” the other feller says, in all truth. “How do I know you’re her grandfather?”

“Ask her?” Leo says.

The feller looked down at Robin and says, “Is this man really your grandfather?”

“Well, no, not really,” Robin says. “But his wife is my grandmother. Oh, I
hurt!
” And she walked to Leo’s car and opened the door and sat down. She made some painful faces and then she bit her lip and says, “Besides, you’re that creep that tried to break into my house!”

“Is that a fact?” Leo wanted to know, and says these words to that man.

“Goshdarn, I wasn’t trying to break into her house. I just wanted to talk to her, and see if she’d maybe seen my lost dog. My damn dog is lost and I can’t find her.”

“Is that a fact?” Leo says. “Then how come you’re a-claimin to be her grandfather?”

“I didn’t know who ye was,” the other feller says to Leo. “For all I knew, ye might’ve been one of them there child molesters, and I was just a-claiming to be her grandfather to get rid of you.”

Leo knew that if the other feller really wanted to, he could whop Leo upside his head and lay him out cold, and make off with Robin as easy as pie. The fact that he wasn’t whopping Leo meant that maybe he really was looking for that pore lost doggie. “Well,” Leo says, “I sure hope you find that there lost dog, and we’ll keep a eye out for it.”

“What’s the dog’s name?” Robin says.

“Bitch,” the feller says, and for a second Leo felt his hackles a-rising, thinking the feller is cussing at Robin. But Leo thought about it for a while and decided the feller wasn’t cussing. Then Leo put Robin’s bike into the trunk of his car, half a-hanging out with a bent wheel and fender that would need some work. He got in the car and drove off with Robin.

He took her back to her house. “I reckon we ort to of ast him what the dog looks like,” Leo says.

“He’s not looking for a dog,” Robin says. “That’s just an old trick that bad men use to lure children with. That’s what Miss Moore told us, anyhow.”

“What if a dog was to show up?” Leo wondered.

Back at the house, after unloading the bike, he got into the medicine cabinet and found some antiseptic ointment and some Band-Aids and tended to Robin’s elbow and her knee. “Say, listen, Cupcake,” he said to her, “if your maw wonders what happened to your knee and elbow, I reckon ye better just tell her you had a accident at school or something. It wouldn’t do for her to know that I allowed you to go out on your bike.”

“Okay,” Robin agreed. “And I’m not going to say anything at all about that man. Mommy said that I can go tomorrow night to a friend’s sleep-over birthday party. She wouldn’t let me go if she knew I’d been bothered by a strange man.”

“I guess not,” Leo said. “I know your momma.” Fact was, Karen Kerr was the awfullest worrywart he’d ever known, and it was a wonder she ever allowed the poor child to do nothing.

“Also,” Robin confided in him, “Kelly’s parents—it’s Kelly’s birthday party—they’re going to take us six girls to the roller rink for a special birthday party there before the slumber party, and I didn’t even tell Mommy about that. She really wouldn’t let me go if she knew about that.”

“I hope ye have a good time,” Leo said, and wondered if there was some excuse he could give Louisa tomorrow evening so’s he could come all the way back into Harrison and go to that roller rink himself. Not to skate, because he’d never been on skates in his life, but just to watch. Thinking of Louisa, he said, “Now I’d best run and get your grandma, and we’ll see you in a bit, maybe before your maw gets home.

He drove to downtown Harrison and Louisa was standing outside the shoe store waiting for him. She had just one box of shoes under her arm, which at least was an accomplishment. Sometimes she spent the whole afternoon in there and never got nothing.

“Where’ve you been?” she wanted to know.

“Aw, I just dropped in at the pool hall to see some buddies,” he said.

“You don’t have any buddies,” she said.

Leo didn’t like that. Matter of fact, he did have fellers all over the place that he could pass the time of day with. Maybe not ary a one of them that he’d lay down his life for, or vicey versa, but Louisa made him out to sound like some kind of hermit.

“Where was it ye aimed to go next?” he asked.

“We might as well get on out to Karen’s,” she said.

He drove on back to Karen and Robin’s place, the second time today. Third, come to think of it, counting the trip down the road behind her bike.

As they were getting out of the car, Louisa said, “Where’s those reams of paper you got for Robin?”

Leo realized he’d already given them to her. “Uh, I reckon I must’ve went off and forgot ’em,” he said.

“What?” Louisa was upset. “We just stopped at the Wal-Mart for them a little while ago.” Louisa peered into the back seat in search of the Wal-Mart sack, which, Leo realized, was probably in plain view on the table at which Robin had spread out Robinsville.