~
Tina pulled up to the curb in front of the house in time to watch the boy slip in behind Germaine. They left the door wide open.
She forced out a sigh of disapproval and jogged toward the door before the cat, Sugar, got adventurous.
“Germaine, you know Sugar hates it here!” Tina shouted as she pulled the door closed behind her.
“I am sorry, Miss Tina. Germaine said I could have one of these, but only if I beat him to the door.” The boy stood in the dining room and held up a cookie the size of his head.
Tina couldn’t stay angry about the door after seeing the chocolate-stained face of the boy giving such an innocent excuse. She smiled and replied, “Oh, I was only gonna be mad if Germaine did it, anyway.”
They both laughed. Tina walked over to clean up the items left on the dinner table to make more room for the boys to read. Tina picked up the white clutch that was much heavier than she expected. As she grasped it tighter, so not to drop it, a sudden blast came from the small purse.
POW!
The boy fell to the floor. Tina dropped the purse, and it left her hands stinging from the heat and the force of the blast. Germaine ran into the room to discover the boy. His sister was speechless and on the precipice of hysteria.
“Tina! What in the hell?” Germaine shouted as his eyes focused on the purse as it lay smoking on the dining room floor, with one side ripped apart and blackened from whatever exploded inside of it.
Tina got her jaw moving to speak, “I… I don’t know what happened. Something is wrong with the purse. Is he… bleeding?” Tina noticed the boy’s shirt turning red as he bled into its fabric.
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“Go get some blankets from the attic. We have to take him to the hospital!” Germaine directed, while trying to piece it all together in his head.
Tina ran out of the room with great haste. Germaine darted over to the boy and began compressions on his chest. While he used every bit of strength his arms could muster, Germaine noticed the gun sticking halfway out of the hole in the side of the damaged purse. The lifeless boy was not responding to the compressions, and Germaine locked his gaze on the floor to confirm it was a gun that pushed a bullet into his heart. Terror washed over him.
He picked the gun up from the floor and held it in his hands over the boy, staring at it in horror. Germaine heard someone coming down the stairs, dropped the gun, and ran toward the garage.
Gerald swayed on his feet and crept closer to the body, the gun, and the damaged white clutch purse. He took the magazine out of the gun, placed it in his pocket, shoved the clutch down the front of his pants, and tossed the small body over his shoulder. Gerald raced out of the dining room, grabbed the keys to his daughter’s car that were left by the door, opened the trunk, and placed the small-framed boy within it.
Tara stood, silent, on the stairs to the basement after witnessing everything. In horror, she thought to herself, “It’s my gun! It’s my fault!”
Her eyes widened as she came to that tragic realization.
~
The ride home from school was as silent as the morning commute. Tina broke the silence, as usual. “Germaine, we can’t ignore this. We have to go to the police.”
He pursed his lips in obvious frustration and responded to his sister’s demand.
“That was mom’s purse…”
“That was mom’s gun…”
“That was the day she got another DUI…”
“We don’t know what happened to him…”
“She will go to prison, and we will be accomplices for not telling anyone…”
“Maybe he is alive and just missing?” Germain fired out his thoughts in rapid succession.
He looked over to his sister as she pulled her father’s car into the garage and said, “This stays between us. I doubt mom and dad were home. If they were home, why haven’t they said anything to us? It’s too late to change our plan.”