The Sweet Relief of Missing Children by Sarah Braunstein

sometimes wound around her neck and which lent her a decapitated appearance.
    A bowl of dried-up ravioli on the nightstand.
    â€œJudith?” As if she were hiding under the bed. Then, absurdly, Grace lifted the dust ruffle and looked.
    Hank was in the shed, trying in vain to repair the Weed Wacker.
    â€œShe left.”
    â€œWho?” A smear of grease on his cheek. Then: “She’ll be back.”
    â€œI don’t think so.”
    Hank straightened up, wiped his palms on his thighs. He was a bartender: broad, cool, mock-begrudging smile, perennial five o’clock shadow, a man for whom the smallest gesture—a wink, a lift of the chin—communicated everything.
    Now his mouth turned up slightly at the corner. He said, “She’s probably at Shelly’s.”
    â€œI have a feeling.” She was surprised by the force in her voice. “A mother’s intuition.”
    Hank tilted his head, squinted warily, and he was right: she was not a woman who believed in intuition, not a mother who believed she possessed any special sensory connection to her child. She was cynical about such mothers. She was suspicious about such women just as she was suspicious about people who read their horoscopes or went to church. Yet she knew. It was unlike her, but it couldn’t be denied.
    She said, “I’ll call the police, I think.”
    â€œYou’re overreacting.” At the beginning, he was the sober, practical one. “They won’t take you seriously. You’re crying wolf, honey.”
    â€œWolf? No.”
    She saw a road winding through thorny woods, saw their daughter on this road walking in her swaying, confident way, the waitressy swish of her butt. The teeth of a wolf flashed like mica in the darkness. Tick of claws on rock.
    She was sixteen, that was all.
    Hank said, “She’s testing us. She wants to make sure we respect her freedom. When she knows we do, she’ll come home again.”
    It was not true and she said so. The fear, the reality, was the opposite: this had nothing to do with them.
    He went back to his work.
    He was right—they should wait on the police. To go to the police was to confirm a crime.
    A day passed. Grace spent it sitting on the grass in front of the house in her lawn chair, smoking, looking out over the fields.
    â€œJudith!”
    A breath.
    â€œJudith!”
    On and on like that she called to the air.
    Next to her a glass lay on its side, a line of ants along its mouth. A ladybug moved from her calf to her knee. It lifted its wings but did not fly away. Was it true, that the number of spots on a ladybug’s back indicated its age? She had been told this in her youth, by another child. Of course it wasn’t true, but it had stayed with her. In the distance, a tractor. She could make out Judith’s old elementary school, and the roof of the supermarket, the small pond where they sometimes swam on hot days, drifted in inner tubes. Soon these buds would be leaves and the view would be lost.
    The next morning she said to Hank, “We have to do something. We need to see Shelly.”
    He sighed, exasperated. But then, after a beat, as if she was the passive one, he said, “You know, let’s talk to Shelly.”
    She was Judith’s only female friend, a chubby, pug-nosed girl famous for having a brother who skipped town years before with another man’s pregnant wife. Otherwise Shelly was no one. Her mother cleaned motel rooms; her father had been gone forever. She lived on an overgrown dead-end, in a house whose white siding had long ago turned a mottled, mushroomy gray. Grace and Hank drove there before sundown. They walked toward the door, past a wheelbarrow missing its wheel, past a birdbath slicked with algae, past a rusted lounge chair, and the seat of a swing, the head of a hammer, a broken plastic pail. Grace reached for the door knocker, sensed it would come off in her hand, so rapped instead on