It Will Come Back

"Maddy, what do you have under your fingernails?"

Madison stared at her hands with a kind of false confusion only afforded to a five-year-old. The answer was very obvious — he knew it, she knew it, but the answer was going to get her in trouble and therefore she was buying time.

"Um." She paused, drew in a breath, let it out again. "Ummmmm." Stalling, still, and doing a poor job of it.

Paul crossed his arms.

"I don't want to have to ask you again."

"Um," she began, but the fresh batch of 'ums' withered under his glare. "Garbage, I 'spose." Madison smiled, as though she thought the impending punishment could be avoided by a dash of sweetness.

"For god's sake, Maddy." Paul was disappointed to hear himself, the flat impatience in his voice, but damn it, it was the third time that week he'd caught the grubby little thing digging in the trash. "What have I told you about playing in the garbage can?"

"I... shouldn't," she said.

"Yeah. You shouldn't. And yet here you stand before me, fingers caked in it."

Madison held her small hands up before her face, inspecting said fingers.

"Not caked," his daughter pointed out primly. "There's only a little on there, Papa. I'll go wash them off."

He sighed and rubbed at his temples with one hand. "What were you doing in the trash, Maddy? Again?"

"Nothin'." Before Paul could continue his line of questioning she was off down the hall, sneakers thumping on the hardwood floor as she tore towards the bathroom to wash her hands.

He sat down heavily at the table, put his head in his own hands. A patch of sunlight had made that section of the kitchen warm, pleasant, but he could hardly appreciate its comfort.

Madison was acting out. That much was clear. She rarely did, not since her mother's death had become a distant shape in the rearview mirror of her memories. It was hard at first, god knew it had been hard — those constant cries of "Mom, where's Mom, I want Mom" — but then Maddy got older and asked for Mom less and one day stopped asking altogether.

Paul didn't like to admit it but that had been a good day.

It had been hard, sure, but they'd gotten along just fine. Even after everything that had happened, he had clung to his daughter and she to him and together they faced a world that she'd learned, far too young, had a tendency to be cruel rather than kind.

He'd been warned, he read all the books, the ones about single parenting and children of loss and how to explain the unexplainable. "Acting out" — a phrase he'd read with both curiosity and dread — was typical among girls her age, especially in a one-parent household. Maddy was just getting to that part of development where she was owning her individuality, testing her boundaries...

God. He was starting to sound like one of those fucking books. Paul rubbed at his temples uselessly, soothing a headache that wasn't there.

He paused, listening for the telltale rush of water in the bathroom to be sure his daughter really was washing her hands as promised. There was only silence.

"Maddy," he called out irritably, and the water started.

"Sorry, Papa," she replied at once. "I was thinking about something."

Great. Like hell if he even knew what that meant. Or wanted to know, for that matter.

It started a few weeks ago. Paul had noticed a few pieces of trash around the can, nothing serious at first. More like someone had been practicing their basketball with garbage and missed. Just stuff like lunchmeat wrappers, the plastic bags that bread came in.