“Ava, sweetie, it’s time to get up,” Kade said, rocking his daughter gently. She was curled up on the bed like a fetus. Kade stroked her shoulder with his thumb until she opened her eyes and blinked at him. “Guess what day it is.”

She mumbled something inaudible, and then slowly got up.

“It’s yours first day of school, honey.”

“Mhmm.”

Kade stared up at the clock. It was almost eight thirty. A few hours ago he had fallen asleep on the couch, and then he woke up to the sound of birds chirping. “Shit, we’re late!” he said, bolting up the stairs and slipping into Ava’s room.

“Come on, time to get dressed,” he said, helping her up and handing her the clothes she had picked out the other day. The truth was that he knew nothing about girls’ clothes but when Ava said she’d be wearing a pair of green pants over a bright red and yellow striped sweater, he couldn’t help but smile and tell her that she’s beautiful.

“Do you want me to make you breakfast?” Mrs. Carlson asked, stepping into the room. Her hair almost resembled a bird’s nest and her eyes were half-closed, almost swollen.

“That would be great, Mom,” Kade said. “Oh and, um, one more thing. Could you drop Ava off at school today? I can’t be late for work.” It was his first day at his new job, and the last thing he wanted to do was drag his feet into the courthouse at ten AM. Even though he was apprehensive, he was filled with hope that there was a place for him in the world.

I can’t fuck this up, he thought to himself.

“Of course,” Mrs. Carlson said, helping Ava get dressed. She rubbed her eyes and yawned constantly, but then she finally got dressed, tied her hair back and threw her bag over her shoulder.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Kade said before heading out.

“I raised you, didn’t I?” his mother said, rather to herself. As soon as Kade left the house, Ava’s eyes started swelling up with tears and as she watched him through the window of her room, she started sobbing. “It’s okay, sweet Ava. Daddy’ll be back in a couple of hours, but for now we need to go to school.”

“I don’t want to go to school,” she said, her voice quivering. She watched Kade walk down the driveway and disappear, and that was when her sobbing turned into howling, and she crawled up on the bed again, refusing to be moved.

“Come on, honey,” Mrs. Carlson said, putting a hand over her. “Wow, you’re stubborn. Just like your daddy.”

* * *

Kade stomped the gas pedal and flew on his way to the courthouse. Suddenly his phone started ringing. “Hey, Mom. Is everything alright?”

“Ava won’t go to school. She said she wants you to come back.”

“Oh, God,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Let me talk to her.” There was a pause, a bit of crackling on the other end, and then sniffling. Around a year ago, Ava started seeing a grief counselor, a sweet red headed lady who really looked like she knew what she was doing.

“She’ll get over it,” she said with all certainty. Months later Ava was still having night terrors, in fact they were getting progressively worse and more frequent. Kade decided to put in place his own therapy techniques, which mostly included cuddles and promises of a good future. Ava’s counselor, on the other hand, was all about false promises and zero results. She would spend hours talking about the grieving process, how it’s different for kids and how, even though Ava was too young to remember, memories of her mother’s death have wiggled their way into her subconscious.

“Now, go with Grandma, alright?” Kade said as he parked in front of the courthouse. “Do you promise me that you’ll go with Grandma?”

“Mhm,” Ava said.

“Good girl, now … have a great day, munchkin. I can’t wait to hear all about it.”

Kade must’ve spent an eternity trying to parallel park. His brain was on overdrive; all he could think about was Ava fitting in with the rest of the kids. As he gathered his things he took his time to look at the streets, like really look at them. He realized that he needed to walk more often, to explore this little town that he once called home. The truth was that he had forgotten most of it, or perhaps he didn’t know much about it at all. He only remembered where the cinema was, where the park was. Was there a theater, even? Kade loved the theater and he made Ava fall in love with it too.

As he walked up the stairs to the courthouse, he felt a bit uneasy, like something was tugging at him. This was his chance at a new beginning, and he wasn’t about to mess it up. He pulled his suit together and rolled up his sleeves; today was a new day, not just for him but for his daughter, too.

He was told to make his way to the judge’s chambers first thing in the morning. His shoes clicked against the marble floor as he walked; the place was quiet, almost majestic in its silence. Kade looked around, admiring the architecture of the place, but in the back of his mind he was still worrying over his own presumed incompetence. He checked his phone for calls one last time, and when he found none, he breathed a sigh of relief, thinking that Ava had probably gone to school.

A great crystal chandelier hung from the ceiling, grand as it was intimidating. The light came in through stained glass windows, hitting the marble ground with its colorful might. Even though he didn’t have the time to, Kade observed the patterns, trying to make sense of them. Then he turned with the stairs until he got to the presumed floor.

“Good morning,” he said, peeking his head in through the inched open door. Two men were sitting there, one was at the desk and the other was sitting down with his back to the door.

“Mornin’,” they both said in unison. The man spun around in his chair, and the moment his gaze met Kade’s, they both smiled.

“Mr., Mr. Guffaw?” he jumped, his eyes growing wide. “I didn’t know you’d be here!”

“I’m quite surprised, myself,” he said, rising to his feet and walking towards him. He had grown quite a big belly over the years; his hair was long and grey now and his nose had gotten longer and pointier like an old wrinkly boot. “Actually, I take that back. I’m not surprised at al l… I’ve always known I’d run into you here one day.”

He then turned to the other man and gestured towards Kade. “Kade was my student some ten years ago … he was always an assertive kid, spoke his mind on every possible occasion, perhaps he spoke a bit too much,” he smirked at Kade before averting his gaze back to the other man. “I’ll never forget this one time when I thought I had heard him talk in class … so, I turn around, right?” He spun on his heel and faced Kade again. “I turn around, and no one’s doing anything. So I go, You’re disrupting the class. And he asks me, Did you see me? I go, No, but I know it’s you. And guess what he says?” Kade shook his head and stuffed his hands into his pockets. He goes, No evidence, no case!”

The other man burst out laughing and Kade could feel the heat rising to his cheeks. “Looks like you had a little lawyer in class, and you didn’t even know it,” he said.

“Oh, I knew it, alright.”

“That’s right, Mr. Guffaw was the one that pushed me to go to law school. Best decision I ever made,” Kade said, smiling timidly. When he was younger, he always liked to argue with people, teachers included. He would weave his way through debates, diving in and out of loopholes, busting every single logical fallacy and handing it to them. Whenever there was a student debate Kade was there, the only guy in a suit, standing at the podium with a water in his hand.

“He was pretty relentless,” the big-bellied judge said. “He was having existentialist debates by age fifteen, now, isn’t that something?”

The other man just nodded, but at that point his eyes were wandering lazily around the room, like he had more important things to do.

“Well, it was lovely meeting you, Kade,” he said, reaching his hand out to him. “I have a meeting to head to right now, but I’m looking forward to seeing you here again.”

His footsteps loud, and echoing at first, had faded into nothingness, and the room had fallen silent again. “Well, it’s definitely crazy meeting you here.” Kade slumped down on one of the leather chairs and pulled his suit together.

“Remember our last conversation on graduation day? When you told me I should run for judge?”

Kade’s face came to a smile. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Well, there you have it,” he spread his arms out to his sides to show off his robe. “You know, if it weren’t for you, I probably wouldn’t have gone through with it.”

“Really? I was that much of an influential eighteen-year-old?” Kade asked with his eyebrows furrowed. Mr. Guffaw nodded solemnly.

“You know, in all my years of adulthood, I think the smartest thing I’ve done so far is go into teaching.”

“And what about all this?” Kade asked, bringing his hands together above his head and parting them in the shape of an arc.

“This, this is what I’m meant to do. But teaching helped me realize that.” He paused for a moment, clearing his throat. “Our society treats kids like they have no agency, like their thoughts are somehow incomplete. But I keep realizing, over and over again, that children tend to view the world in the most daring ways, you know why?”

“Because they’re naive?”

“No, it’s because they haven’t been exposed to the rules yet. Their opinions are unscathed by them, I think it’s brilliant.”

Kade thought a little about what he said. He thought about Ava, what she must’ve been doing right now. He wondered if she was getting along well with the other kids, if she was mad at him for not dropping her off on her first day. His eyes wandered lazily around the room, until they landed on Mr. Guffaw again.

“You letting that thought sink in?” he asked him.

“Yeah, I’m thinking about my daughter,” Kade told him. “It’s her first day of school today.”

“What, you have a daughter?” the man asked, slumping down on the chair across from him. He stroked his chin for a while, as if in deep contemplation. “Wow, time flies, huh? I’m getting old.” For a while he seemed to get lost in the shapes and patterns created by the stained glass, but then suddenly he snapped out of it. “What’s her name?”

“Her name is Ava, she’s three,” Kade said. The silence descended over them like a heavy rain cloud; Mr. Guffaw was lost in nostalgia, while Kade was drowning in some thoughts of his own.

“So the three of you guys only recently moved here, right?”

“It’s just me and Ava right now,” Kade said through clenched teeth.

“Divorced?”

“No, Ava’s mother died in a car accident a little over a year ago.”

Mr. Guffaw’s jaw dropped a little to reveal a bottom row of jagged teeth. He was a heavy smoker; often a teenaged Kade would catch him on the school’s fire escape, taking one last drag from his cigarette before putting it out. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he whispered before pivoting uneasily in his chair.

“I wouldn’t know what to say, either,” Kade said, his hands clutched in his lap. “Whenever I tell anyone about this, they never know what to say. They just stare at me with pity. That’s what they do.”

“That’s the only thing they can do,” Mr. Guffaw said. “Tell me, has time been treating you well?”

“It could be better,” he replied. “Ava’s constantly getting these nightmares. I don’t know how to get them to stop.” Kade rarely talked about his family anymore, in fact he hadn’t talked to anyone about Scarlett’s death in a long time. But there was something about Mr. Guffaw -perhaps it was his kind eyes or the way that his words flowed like a waterfall- that made Kade want to open up to him, to reveal his greatest secrets, his sorrows, to empty himself to him. “It’s weird because … she was really young when it happened, there’s no way that she could possibly remember.”

“Where was she that day, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“Ava was with me. We were both home, and I was watching a movie. Scarlett was-” He paused for a moment, trying to ignore the lump that was slowly rising in his throat. “Scarlett was at her friend’s bachelorette party. She said she’d be running late. She told me not to wait up.”

“You know, you really don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to,” Mr. Guffaw said, clasping and unclasping his fingers.

“No, it’s ok. I haven’t talked about it in ages now; I need to relive it, so I can let it go.”

The judge nodded and leaned back in his chair. He felt more like a therapist now -- something he had also considered but decided against because it brought him more grief than joy.

“So, I tell her to go have a good time with her friends, then she calls me telling me that she’s leaving now. I ask her if she had been drinking, she said no. She was perfectly sober when it happened.” Kade gulped in the air and let it out through his nose. He closed his eyes and pictured that day for what it was; atrocious and unfair in so many ways. “Then two hours later I got a call from some local policemen. Scarlett had been driving down the highway when a semi lost control and smashed into her.”

“Oh, God.”

“It wasn’t her fault, it was someone else’s. I’ll never know what that other driver was thinking, I don’t even know if he’s alive right now. He was probably drunk and she wasn’t. Scarlett was a responsible person but that other driver, he can go to hell.”

Mr. Guffaw’s eyes glazed over, he bit the inside of his cheeks so he didn’t cry. Kade’s face, on the other hand, had no trace of tears, not in his eyes or in the track marks on his reddening cheeks. His eyes were narrowed, rigid, cold, hard. In that moment Mr. Guffaw knew he was already far away. “Hey, are you sure you want to go on talking about this?”

“Yes,” Kade said with frightening certainty. “So, I get to the hospital and I realize that she’s gone; her car flipped over three times and skidded to the side of the road. Meanwhile, Ava was asleep at home, she wasn’t there for any of it. So how could it be that she’s having nightmares about it every single day? Do you have an answer to that? Because I don’t.”

“You know, Kade, the memory works in mysterious ways. You know what the human mind does? It fills in the gaps, it connects the dots, so the world can make sense.”

“So, do you think Ava just made that stuff up in her head?”

“Well, it obviously happened. She understood the story the way that it was told to her, and then her mind filled in the gaps. Our minds, they work in mysterious ways.”

Kade wished that he was as eloquent as his mentor. He wished he wasn’t so angry so his words could flow better. Kade wished for a lot of things, but for now, he was content with what he had.

“You’re right, you’re absolutely right,” he said after a long pause. “Anyway, I’m sorry if I bummed you out with my rambling.”

“You didn’t bum me out, son,” Mr. Guffaw said. A warmth radiated through Kade’s chest; he gleamed at the realization that this man was sort of like a father to him, and even though the two of them had been apart for years, he still cared about him as though he were family.

“Anyway, I should probably get to work, shouldn’t I?” Kade rose to his feet. “I’m actually ashamed for having sat here for the past hour ranting about my life.”

“It’s alright, it’s your first day, isn’t it? Now-” He shot up from his seat, more enthusiastically this time. “Let’s get down to business. And who knows, maybe one day I’ll pass this on to you.” He popped the collar of his gown, spun around and headed for the door. Kade followed him, smiling to himself, wishing he had caught that on tape. “And you know what, we need to talk a bit more, so how about we meet up for lunch later this week?”

“Sounds great,” Kade said with his hands stuffed into his pockets. The two men exchanged goodbyes and parted ways; Kade headed up the steps again, taking them two at a time, gulping in the air, promising himself good things.