Two Sleeping Bags
Part One: Fridays
Every Friday for two months, I drove my son to his best friend’s house at six o’clock.
It was a routine. The kind of routine you stop thinking about after the third week. Finn would pack his blue duffel bag on Friday afternoon. His pajamas, his toothbrush, his Nintendo Switch, a bag of pretzels I knew he’d share with Owen. His dark-blue camping sleeping bag, rolled tight with the straps.
“You don’t need the sleeping bag,” I told him the first week. “Owen has a guest bed.”
“We like the floor,” Finn said.
I didn’t think anything of it.
My name is April Donnelly. I’m thirty-eight years old.
I’m a pharmacist at a Walgreens on the south side of Springfield, Missouri. I work days, Monday through Friday, seven to three-thirty. I live in a small brick ranch house on Cherry Street with my son, Finn, and an elderly beagle named Biscuit who sleeps twenty-two hours a day.
Finn is nine.
His father died when he was five.
It was a car accident. A drunk driver on Highway 65, on a rainy night in February. My husband, Danny, was coming home from his shift at the hospital where he worked as a respiratory therapist.
He never made it home.…
