The Don II

“She’s really gone?” Don asks.  “That sister of yours is something else, an alcoholic and a gambler, some kind of champion volleyball player, in high school.” 

Ally starts to ramble on about the night and what happened.  All the stuff he’s heard before and has in fact replayed over in his head.  Then there is this other irrational worry that once she sees this sandwich, she’ll want some too, and he doesn’t want to share right now with anybody, and especially not this sandwich.  Not after Ally ruined seconds on dessert and then Grizzly bullied him, a piece of chicken stuck between her two front teeth as she announced in front of all their neighbors, “Great idea, Don, an Encephalitis block party!”  He scratches several large mosquito bites clustered on his ankle and considers that Grizzly wasn’t entirely wrong. 

“And she doesn’t even know her own child is missing?”  Don says.  He’d let Ally handle the fallout from all of that.  Thank you.  He’d seen enough of the woman’s incisors and the food particles that lodged there to last him his whole life.  He pauses when Ally says, “We’re lucky Thom’s find was nothing but a bunch of old Tic Tac’s and that he made that new friend who told him to tell us about it.”  Don nods his head. 

“What friend?” He asks.

“Thom said his name is Mickey, that he’s one of Emily’s friends.”

He’s back from Bora-Bora; the beef and cheese masterpiece he has planned is forgotten too.  And he remembers all their late night conversations about Emily since she came here.  What was it about Mickey in particular and something that had to do with prom?

“Stop,” he says.  He throws all of his mental power at this one task of figuring out who this kid Mickey is and why this matters, why it’s important, and what he really knows.  And then he pretends he didn’t have any beer and says, “I thought we figured out that kid wasn’t real.”