“Buddy. Where is everybody?”
“I wanted to finish before Grandma Dolores got back,” he said.
That was it. That was the whole answer.
I’m Russell Hale. I’m forty-six, and I appraise antiques and religious art out of a small office in Austin. Estates, churches, insurance claims. I can look at a silver chalice and tell you within fifty years when it was made. I can find a repaired crack in a porcelain figurine under a black light in about nine seconds.
I had not noticed that my son was alone in our house for four days.
I knelt down so we were eye level. He smelled like a kid who’d been rationing showers.
“Talk to me. Please.”
He looked at the floor. Then he leaned in close, like the empty house might overhear him, and whispered:
“Grandma Dolores says my clothes can’t go in with theirs. She says I’m not their blood.”
