An Overreaction
~ * ~
Friday, June 19, 2026. Super 8 motel Fairleigh
-- 11:05 pm
"Wait, Jack," Mia said.
She was still pulling on her jacket when he started the car, so she jumped in the passenger seat with half of it in her lap.
"-exit nine offa Route 15, just past Newton Hollow, out on beautiful Lake Hessian!" An abrasive radio DJ voice blurted from the sound system. "That's right, I said camp!"
"Her location hasn't moved," she said, looking at the phone, pushing her other hand all the way in the jacket finally. "She's still at the place."
Nothing.
Jack didn't back up to exit the parking spot, instead twisting the wheel all the way right, driving up and over the little concrete stoppers, whatever those are called.
"-at Birchwood Lakes Family Camp I mean cabins, folks, real ones, real beds - you're not SAVAGES! Bonfires every single night, all summer long, s'mores, live music from a guy named Denny who is honestly pretty good, and a private b-"
Jack pushed the volume button, plastic panels creaking under his finger, the radio clicking off. They were out of the Super 8 parking lot.
"Jack?"
Nothing.
He wasn't ignoring her. Ignoring somebody takes effort, a little performance of not listening. There was none of that. He just genuinely seemed like he didn't hear her.
"OK," she said, to no one.
She had been in cars with Jack a lot. He drove like a dad. Blinkers, full stops, one lazy wrist on the wheel. That guy was not in this little car.
Mia watched his hands. Ten and two, strangling the wheel. Forearms like the marble guys at the Met. She'd stared at some Roman wrestler on a class trip. She remembered feeling like the statue might move.
Any other night she would have enjoyed the view.
"That's a stop sign," she said. "Jack. That's a- JESUS!"
They shot the crossing. Empty. Nothing coming either way. Thank God.
"Jesus..." she breathed.
She touched his forearm. It was like laying a hand flat on a washing machine mid-spin. Indifferent to touch.
"Jack. Please slow down."
Nothing.
"Say something."
Nothing.
A kid would be screaming, she thought. A kid would punch the wheel and cry. This was not that. Packed down, wearing a seatbelt, doing sixty through a college town. She was not afraid of him. She checked, looking around inside her own body and couldn't find it. But for the first time she understood that he was a dangerous man. It didn't seem like Jack at all anymore.
She wanted to avoid thinking too much about Beth having sent a literal fucking SOS and the phone it went to having been lying on the floor of a motel room. In this jacket. While Mia had been busy with Jack's...
She rolled the window down an inch and let the air hit her face.
The courtyard came up on the right. String lights between poles, a food truck closing up, just a few people outside.
Beth. Standing. Whole. Fine. Thank God.
Then the rest of it. The tall guy. Jean-Jacques, was it? Standing too close, tipped over her, a cup in his hand. Beth with arms crossed, her weight going backward. A pseudo-smile Mia recognized from a dozen other situations.
"There," Mia said. "She's right there. She's OK."
He took the little car across two parking spots and slammed it into park.
"Jack."
He was out of the car before she got her seatbelt off.
~ * ~
Saturday, June 20, 2026. Maplewood, New Jersey.
Back home. The next afternoon.
-- 3:10 pm
"Hi, buddy. Yes. OK. Hello." Beth let Roscoe walk and jump and wag and push her backward into the hall as they entered. "OK, little buddy, OK! Yes! Good boy! Yeah, you!"
The dog had met them at the door acting like they'd been gone for a year.
The drive home took much longer than it had to. Nobody was in a hurry to get anywhere. After picking up the car from the shop, dropping off the cursed Yaris, waiting for the guy to find the keys to the Range Rover, they stopped at a Wawa for gas. Then stopped at a lake one of the girls found on the map. Jack sat in the shade with a coffee, returning a call from his foreman - a permit inspector had shown up early. Beth and Mia swam out to the buoys and back and lay in the sun for a bit.
By the time they dropped Mia off at her house, the whole thing could almost pass for the trip that had been planned.
Almost.
Beth went off toward the stairs. "I need a shower and then I'm calling Grandma back. And I gotta call Alice with her tax stuff before four."
"OK, sweetie."
Ruby came out of the dining room, removing an earbud and snapping shut the case. She kissed Beth on the head as she passed.
"Just remember they put people in cages for tax evasion," Ruby said. She got a half a laugh out of her daughter, and watched her all the way up the stairs.
Jack knew this part. Twenty years. She wouldn't ask what happened, make a big deal. She'd just read the situation, as a reflex, the way a baby would sense a parent's mood. Or the way someone with an alcoholic for a parent can tell you who's had a few before they've said a single word.
He watched her get to him and stop.
"We're OK," he said.
"Mhm." Her eyes went down to his left hand. The wrap was neat. Two little butterfly tabs, tape folded flat. Not his work. "Let me have a look, alright?"
"Yeah." He motioned his head toward the backyard. "Let's take it outside."
The smell of cut grass, somebody's mower going a street over, Johnson's house likely, he thought. Most other houses had the robots going now. Roscoe pushed past their legs and went off to patrol the fence line.
They sat at the patio table. Ruby took his hand in both of hers and started unwinding the wrap, and Jack started talking.
He told it in order. Mia getting the text, telling him. The drive over. A very quick recap of picking up Beth at the mixer. The after.
~ * ~
Friday, June 19, 2026. Super 8 motel Fairleigh.
-- 11:35 pm
"Go ahead. I want to talk to my dad," Beth said.
She got out of the Yaris and waited.
Nobody had said anything the whole way back.
Mia looked at Jack. Then she went. The door clicked shut behind her, the curtained window lighting up.
The lot was quiet. Moths at the light over the walkway.
"Thank you for coming to get me," Beth said.
Jack put his left hand in his pocket, easy, like he's just... standing around. The cut was open.
"Of course."
He could feel the blood seeping, warm and steady, the pocket lining starting to stick. Long as it stayed in the pocket, it was nobody's problem.
"I mean it. And I'm sorry I lied to you. That was stupid and I knew it as I was doing it, and I'm sorry. I needed help and you came. That's one thing."
"OK."
"You scared me, Dad."
Jack stood, saying nothing. Remembering, for some reason, all the times he'd gotten a talking-to as a kid.
"Look," she said, bending her pinkie open from a closed fist. "He behaved like a bit of a jerk-off, for sure," bending open the ring finger then, "He got a little drunk and he was annoying and he wouldn't take a hint, and I handled it maybe not all the way as I should have, I know all that." Finger by finger, her fist became an open palm.
She continued, "But he didn't do anything. He wasn't gonna do anything."
Jack opened his mouth, made like he had something to say. He did. Jack wanted to say she had no fucking idea what she's talking about and even less of an idea of what that manlet was or wasn't going to fucking do, Beth.
But he swallowed it, because he knew, as he had calmed, that she was mostly - if not all the way - right.
"And I texted Mia. MIA. You know why? Because I wanted my friend to come grab me out of an awkward thing, and tomorrow it's a story we laugh about. That's all I was asking for."
"Beth..."
"Instead my father comes flying. In front of everybody I just met, learned their names and majors and whatnot, shit!" She stopped to compose herself. "People I'm going to school with in September. So now instead of a mostly-personal funny story for my friends and I - right? - I'm the girl whose dad almost killed a TA at the welcome mixer."
Jack stood there. Took it.
"Not to mention you threatened that other kid!" Beth said. Rubbing her forehead with what Jack read as disappointment and exhaustion.
Jack, again, had nothing.
"You made it worse," she said, quieter then. "You came to help me, and you did help me and I love you and you also made it worse. Both of those are true. That's all."
He almost collapsed when Beth said I love you.
He looked at his daughter. Forty-two years old and he'd never learned to do what she was doing just then. She was angry, emotional and somehow still knew exactly what the problem was and could speak about it with clarity and fairness.
"Fair," Jack said.
"That's it? Fair?"
"You want me to fight you on it?"
"No." She hugged him, quick and hard, arms in and out. "Good night, Dad."
"Good night, sweetie."
She went in. Jack stood in the lot a while longer, hand in his pocket, holding the bloody pocket lining tight with his throbbing fist, a piece of his thigh-meat with it.
~ * ~
Jack's room, Super 8 motel Fairleigh
-- a few minutes later
"-born in Switzerland in 1875, the son of a rural pastor," the TV said.
Some documentary Jack hadn't been following.
"-on Lake Zürich in Switzerland, in spring, 1959. At the age of eighty-four-"
He sat on the end of the bed as the dry narration continued, with his shorts in his hands. Blue, white pocket linings. He'd pulled the left pocket inside out. The white cotton had gone deep red, the blue - stained dark now, almost black. Stiff where it had started to dry.
An overreaction. Yeah. You could say that. Beth found herself in an awkward conversation, and then there was blood.
Through the wall, he could hear Beth's voice.
He could make out most words and the rough profile of the sentences.
Why didn't you just get an Uber? Why would you bring my DAD? Now he knows I snuck out AND he made a scene.
He should stop listening.
Mia, lower, harder to catch.
I'm sorry. I panicked. I was worried, B.
Almost true. Completely plausible. Nothing suspicious. He'd made her a liar too.
Next door went quiet. On the TV the dry narrator voice was then replaced by a black and white recording of an old man with a thick foreign accent he thought looked familiar.
"-the type is nothing static. It, it changes within the course of life. But I most certainly was characterized by thinking. I always thought," Or had it been 'over-thought'? Jack couldn't tell. "from early childhood on. I had a great deal of intuition too. And I had a definite difficulty with feeling."
Jack zoned out, his eyes de-focusing on one of the thousands of threads in the bloodied fabric. The old man's voice soothed him.
It came up like heartburn. Like he'd swallowed wrong.
A dull expanding ache in his throat.
No sound, mouth slack.
Air pushed from him, body frozen in a spasm. The room closing in.
Eyes completely blurred over with tears.
The cry didn't last twenty seconds.
Jack wiped his face with his wrist, tossed the shorts in the wastebasket and clicked the TV off.
~ * ~
Saturday, June 20, 2026. Maplewood, New Jersey.
-- about 10 minutes after Jack and Beth got back home
Ruby had the old wrap off and the new one half on. She hadn't said much through the whole thing.
He looked at the fence line. Roscoe was out there lying in the one patch of shade, watching them, then biting down on a wasp and missing.
They had gotten to the motel, where Beth had made Jack realize he'd really shown his ass. That part he'd told her, plain and simple, as it happened. And what he'd overheard through the wall. He skipped his stupid little breakdown.
"OK," Ruby said. "But back up. The mixer itself. You went through that part fast."
Of course, Jack knew she would ask.
"Honestly, some of it's kinda... blurry," Jack said.
"Tell me the blurry version."
~ * ~
Friday, June 19. Rathbone Arts Courtyard, Fairleigh College.
-- 11:15 pm
"Dad?"
He realized it was his daughter's voice after he'd already bulldozed through the patio past the small group of about four kids without even clocking he'd felled a couple of the flimsy chairs on his way. The front of the guy's blazer was in his fists and the guy's back was on the brick of the building, heels off the ground.
"Don't talk," Jack said. "One word, I go to prison."
The guy's mouth stopped moving. Up close he was younger than he'd looked from the parking lot. He smelled of booze.
Somewhere to the left, Beth's voice. It didn't reach him where he was. He wasn't there.
"What are you, fucking twenty five?" Jack said, quiet, into his face. "She's eighteen. I know she gave you an out. And you didn't take it, huh?" Spit flew from Jack's mouth as he spoke. "A grown man, pushing yourself on a girl barely eighteen. You think you're a fucking man? You wanna be a man?" Jack pushed the kid's tits up into his throat with his fists turned up, never loosening for a second. "How about I make one outta you?"
Jack scanned his face, seeing every pore on this guy. Cheeks twitching, making a face like he didn't know what this was all about. Fucking pissant.
Voices around him, Beth, Mia, both saying some version of stop, he assumed.
"A man's game charges a man's price."
Jack imagined watching the life go out of his eyes, feeling the last breath leave the body.
"Man, I don't know... what did I do?" Jean-Jacques said.
Something in the kid's breast pocket. Jack hadn't felt it happen. Crunching in his palm, stinging a little. He squeezed his blazer harder so he wouldn't have to squeeze the pissant.
"Jack. JACK." Mia's voice.
"Look at me, Jack, please." She was at his arm now. He didn't move. "You'll go to jail. You hear me? They'll put you in a cage for this, Jack. Come on. Beth needs you."
Beth, he thought. Fuck.
"Ruby needs you."
What would Ruby say about this? She'd have Jack let him go and find the French pissant later herself and ruin his life in some way he'd never even figure out was being done to him.
"I need you," Mia said.
Jack came back.
He let the guy's heels find the ground.
"OK, buddy," Jack said. He kept his voice level. "The event is dry. Faculty everywhere. You're a TA - hmm? - and you're drunk at a freshman welcome thing - mhmm? - and you drunkenly tried to corner an eighteen year old freshman. One email ends you." He made a face at the pissant to ask him if he understood and the pissant nodded that he did.
"And if that doesn't work for you," Jack said, leaning in one more inch, "I'll just go to prison."
He let go. The blazer stayed crushed in two scrunched up places on Jean-Jacques' chest. The left side darker than the right. The white shirt under it red.
Jack opened his left hand, looked at the blood in the lines of it. He wiped it down the front of the guy's shirt, leaving a large red mark.
He looked behind him. Nobody said anything. The group of four kids hadn't moved. The guys closing up the food truck.
The string lights buzzed.
"Girls. Car."
He saw Mia and Beth as he walked away but didn't look at them directly.
Almost out of the patio he stopped and turned around, realizing then one of the kids had his phone out, filming him.
Jack approached the kid, oversized button down, some kind of winter hat in June. Same kind of sartorial nonsense on the three kids behind him, two guys and a girl, all freshmen, he assumed.
"Would you delete that for me?" Jack said. "Please?"
He looked at the kid, not at the phone between them.
The kid lowered the phone. Looked at Jack, at the phone. Putting it between them, screen up so both could see what's happening. Jack not looking at the phone yet, the kid's eyes jumping up and down between the screen and Jack.
"OK, here," the kid said.
Jack looked down and saw him tap the trash icon and tapped again to confirm.
The kid looked up.
Jack didn't react.
"I deleted it."
Nothing.
"I'm sorry, I... I don't understand?" the kid said.
"Collections. Bottom of the page. Recently deleted."
"Oh." He went into it, and the phone asked for his face, and he put his face down over it, his beanie, or whatever it was, touching Jack's chest. Came back up, a grid of recently deleted videos, including one of Jack, were on screen.
"Select it for me, please, and delete it."
The screen asked one more time. The kid pressed it.
"I really appreciate it, thank you," Jack said. Looking up at the girl then, much more genuine, "My apologies, I hope I haven't fucked up your guys' night."
The girls were waiting for him.
Mia shifted from foot to foot, arms folded tight, chewing her lip.
Beth's face was doing the talking. If he had to guess, it said something like "What the fuck's the matter with you?"
"OK, come on."
~ * ~
Saturday, June 20, 2026. Maplewood, New Jersey.
-- 3:30 pm
"I knew I'd fucked up." Jack was talking to the fence or the table or the vision of Roscoe sniffing through the flowerbeds more than his wife. "It was on Beth's face when I turned around. I was sure before I got to the car."
Ruby had both his hand and the roll of tape, working the last strip down flat over his palm. She didn't look up.
"A man's game charges a man's price?" she said.
"Yeah, I know," Jack said, scoffing. "What a fucking joke."
"It's a good show, babe." Ruby tried not to laugh, looking at him, eyebrows raised.
"I'm no fucking Rust, though."
"Well..." she turned his palm around, "maybe that's a good thing, huh? And in some ways you are."
"Oh yeah?"
"And Marty too."
Jack didn't know how to feel about that. But he knew what she meant.
"And Marty said the line, not Rust. Why didn't Mia just get her an Uber?" Ruby said, not pausing between topics.
Jack looked at his wife.
"Because Mia was in my room when Beth texted her."
Ruby's thumb stopped on the tape. A second, maybe two.
"In your room."
"Yeah."
"So you didn't know Beth was gone," Ruby said, working it out loud the way she did, like she was laying tile, speaking low to not be overheard, "until Mia came and told you."
"Yeah."
"You two, then...?"
"Yeah."
"That's the first time."
"Yeah."
Ruby nodded.
"OK," she said. "Later on, I'll want the details."
She went back to the wrap, and Jack let her.
Ruby taped the last corner down and sat back to look at her work.
"Anything else?"
Jack thought about a Wawa off Route 15.
"I was ugly to Mia," he said. "At a gas station, on the way home. Told her the whole night happened because of her. Basically."
"What'd you say?"
"Doesn't matter. I was cruel. Reduced her to a piece of meat. Apologized right after and meant it. Not her fault at all, of course. And I think she was fine. Understood I was... out of sorts, you know?"
Ruby watched him. This was where she'd usually find it, some half-second pause or a little something in his jaw. His eyes sliding somewhere they shouldn't. She'd have him spit it out. She'd have him name it. He knew he should.
She just nodded and squeezed his taped-up hand once and let it go.
Add another secret to the pile, huh? Not to her, though. He wasn't supposed to do that to her. She was still the best thing that ever happened to him. He couldn't risk it. He needed to say it. Say it. Fucking say it now, moron!
"I know you're in a ton of pain, do you want a pill?"
"No, thank you."
"That palm's all twisted and torn, it's the kind of injury that-"
"It's OK, Rubes."
Ruby sighed. "Don't let it get infected, OK?"
She stood, gathering the old wrap and the scissors into her lap, then off it.
"Beth heard her," she said. "The 'I need you' thing, right?"
"Man, I think so, yeah."
"Has she said anything about it? Since?"
"No."
She went to Jack's side of the table.
"Come here, buddy!" she said, chuckling as she pressed his big head to her stomach, his hands touching her legs down low, reciprocal. Undeserving. "You could learn something from that show."
"What's that?" Jack asked, cheek pulled up on his skull, stuck between his wife's warm belly and his thick stupid head weighing him down.
"Bad men don't concern themselves with questions of right and wrong." She kissed his head. "Let me fix you a snack, hon."
~ * ~
Saturday, June 20, 2026. Wawa, Route 15, New Jersey.
-- 11:20 am
"She's not really talking to me," Mia said.
Beth was inside securing the right kind of gummy bears. Jack had the pump handle in his good hand, watching the numbers climb.
Mia had come around the car to stand near him.
"Beth?"
"Yeah." A short laugh. Not genuine, sounded like. "Not mad-mad. Just short. Clipped. Asked if I wanted the window seat like I was some stranger on a plane she was being polite to."
Jack watched the numbers. Forty-one dollars. Forty-two.
"She'll come around."
"Probably." Mia picked at a rip healing over on her palm. "How are you doing?"
Jack looked down at his hand. The wrap had gone gray and loose overnight. One handed job.
"This whole fucking situation happened because I couldn't pass up a piece of ass!"
Mia's hands went down by her sides.
"Mia..."
"No, it's fine." It wasn't. Her voice had gone thin and careful.
"It's not fine. I didn't mean that. Not you. I meant..."
"I know what you meant." She still wasn't looking at him. "You meant it about yourself, and it came out pointed at me."
Neither of them said anything for a second. Somewhere behind them a pump clicked off.
"I'm sorry," Jack said. He meant it. Really fucking meant it.
Mia looked at him then. Whatever she had found in his face, it was enough.
"It's OK," she said. She smiled. Jack believed it.
To his own great surprise - and, God, relief - he smiled back. Not some fake small talk placation either.
Mia made him smile. Even now.
Her eyes dropped to his hand again.
"Who did that," she said. "A raccoon?"
"I did it." Jack putting on a kid voice, fake proud.
"Give it here, dummy."
Dummy. Not Jack. Or Mr. D, God forbid.
"Here." She had him sit on the concrete curb by the pump while she dug gauze and Neosporin out of her bag on the back seat. She unwound the mess he'd made of it, careful, her knees against his.
"Does..." She turned his hand palm-up in hers, thumb tracing the edges of the cuts. Multiple - stabbed, torn, rotated. "When you get angry. Does it hurt? You know, like... after?"
"Why do you ask?"
She thought about it. "I hate to think you're hurting." She made a face at him. Not pity. Something. Care?
"You stopped me," Jack said, watching her hands work, changing the subject. "Last night."
She squinted at him. "I don't know about that."
"I'm telling you," he said, looking at her. "I should never have put you in that position."
Neither of them said anything else for a while. What the hell had even cut him? Something in the guy's pocket, he thought. Something hard.
"Was it like," Mia said, thinking, reaching in the bag, "like a pen or something?"
Jack looked at her.
"I guess?" he said, after a while.
The pump clicked, and started again on the next island over.
"Oh, fuck. Your meeting."
"What?"
"The gymnastics thing. This morning." He leaned over to check the watch on his wrist, upside down in Mia's hands. "You missed it. Because of me."
"Oh." She kept wrapping, unbothered. "I called them. Said I had a family emergency."
"Mia."
"I'm serious, don't worry about it. Truth is, I didn't really want to go anyway."
He watched her hands work, small and quick and sure of themselves, having patched her own palms so often.
"I wish I could kiss you right now," Jack said.
Between them and Wawa was the Range Rover and they were down low to the ground. Mia smiled up at him, her thumb sliding up and down on the outside of his thick, rough palm.
"You know," Jack said. "I think about you all the time."
Mia opened her mouth to say something.
"They were out of the bears but I got bananas." Beth held one pack of yellow banana shaped gummies draped over Mia's shoulder, waiting for her to grab it. "I know you like 'em."
Mia put her hand on Beth's, smiling up at her. Her face said she was relieved to see Beth not hate her.
"Oh my god, just take the candy, dickhead!" Beth rolled her eyes, then laughed with the rest of them.
Something pulled tight behind Jack's chest then. Quick, like a fist closing partway, pain down his left arm. Must have sat funny on the curb, injury tripping the wires in his hand or something.
It let him go in a bit.
"There," Mia said, taping the end down flat. "All good."
~ * ~
Saturday, June 20, 2026. Maplewood, New Jersey.
-- 3:50 pm
"...can or not. So if the numbers are right, you clear about sixty after shipping," Beth's voice said, muffled through the screen door.
Jack was still sitting where Ruby had left him, the yard gone warm and gold in the afternoon.
Through the kitchen window he could see them. Ruby at the counter buttering bread, then cutting something. Beth behind her, phone wedged between shoulder and ear, punching numbers into his old calculator from the shop, hip against the counter.
Beth said something to Ruby, covering the receiver. He couldn't catch what. Ruby laughed at it.
Beth looked up then, and found him through the glass.
For a second neither of them did anything.
Then Jack smiled at her.
Beth's mouth did something back that wasn't quite a smile but maybe wanted to be. She tipped her head toward the kitchen. You coming?
He nodded yeah.
He figured she was moving on. And why not? To her it's done. She said what she had to say. Now the routine will chip away at the tension until it's back to normal.
His daughter would be none the wiser. Great. Father of the year.
Something closed around his ribs then, sudden. Not quite letting him think or move or breathe. He sat very still and let it pass. Had to be the hand, or the heat. Both, probably.
Beth stealing a slice of pickle from her mother. Tossing it in her mouth quickly and shrugging.
The pain lasted longer now. He took it. It was going to pass, no sense complaining about it.
Beth dodging the incoming dishtowel smack.
The feeling passed.
Jack got up and went inside.
"Ay, kid!"
"What?"
"That's my pickle."
"And?"
"Literally eating away at my margins."
"Just making sure my father's salt intake stays below excessive," Beth said.
"And how do you know this is for you?" Ruby added.
"But I thought..." Jack put on a face, looking down at the ground, swinging his body around, pretending to be a sad little boy and matching his voice: "I thought you were going to make me a snack?"
"Is that supposed to be cute?" Beth said, stuck somewhere between cringing and laughing.
"Are you cringing at me?" Jack's face went serious. "You steal my pickles?" He advanced.
"No, not this shit again, dad!" Beth backed up, putting up a finger.
"You pick away at my snack?" Jack stepped forward, hands coming out, fingers forming into claws. "Like I'm some kind of this and that? You trifle with me?"
"OK, OK!"
"Does he even know what 'trifle' means?" Ruby laughed.
Beth had put the counter between herself and Jack.
"I bet he don'tn't," Beth burst out, as Jack rushed at her, missing her and instead grabbing Ruby.
"And you! Wench!" Jack picked up Ruby by her armpits. "You dare mock me!?"
"Babe!" Ruby shouted, through laughter and twitching. "Your hand!"
"What hand? I have but claws, with which I shred the flesh of insolents such as yourself."
He did his best to dramatize and remember all the weird words he'd read in random old books. The hand killed him, yeah, but the sound of his girls laughing...
Jack laughed with them, louder than he had to.