Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates

down to her mother, or had not the energy to hurry down to her mother, the rapping would recommence at the rear door.
    Dinah! Are you in there? Where are you? Let me in.
    Let me in, Dinah! Or I will call 911.
    So Dinah had no choice but to hobble downstairs. To let the Fury in.
    Wanting to say
You had your chance to be a good, loving mother and you weren’t interested. Why now?
    Dinah’s mother had many times apologized for being a “distracted” mother when Dinah had been a little girl. The fault had been primarily “your father—you know how he betrayed us.”
    Dinah’s father had separated from her mother when Dinah was ten. Dinah’s impression was that her mother had driven her father away and when he’d gone she’d laughed telling her friends—
Good riddance! He wasn’t half a man, anyhow.
    As long as Geraldine had the house on Summit Drive, Birmingham. As long as Geraldine received monthly alimony and child support.
    She’d never remarried. Possibly she’d never found a
whole man
who’d wanted to support her.
    Since the abduction Dinah’s mother had been interviewed on Ypsilanti–Ann Arbor TV and for the local newspapers. The “terrible anguish” of her beloved grandson being abducted “in broad daylight”—the “frustration” of waiting for law enforcement tofind him—the “faith in God,” that Robbie would certainly be found. Dinah read her mother’s interviews in dread of what her mother might say impulsively—“My daughter did no wrong. She
did not let that child out of her sight for a minute
.”
    Whit read such interviews snorting in derision and tossing the paper down.
    “Your mother is really getting off on this, isn’t she! Like it’s some kind of hobby for her, in her boring life.”
    “Whit! She’s serious. She loves Robbie. This is very hard for her, too.”
    There was drama in Dinah’s mother’s life now. In her circle of friends—of whom most were divorcées like herself, or widows—it was Geraldine McCracken who was the center of attention, invariably.
    She’d had her hair styled and lightened so that it shone now like a synthetic peach. She’d bought new clothes—in which to appear on a local afternoon TV talk show as
the grieving grandmother of missing five-year-old Robbie Whitcomb of Ypsilanti.
    For a week or ten days in late May, there’d been a distraction—Dinah’s mother had discovered a cyst in one of her breasts, that had had to be removed for a biopsy; during this brief time, Dinah’s mother had not visited the house on Seventh Street, nor had she called more than a few times. What relief!
    The cyst had been benign. Dinah’s mother returned.
    Until finally Dinah told her mother please, she couldn’t see her for a while.
    “What do you mean, you ‘can’t see me for a while’? What kind of a thing to say is that, to a woman grieving for her lost grandson? Her only grandchild?”
    “Mother, just go away.”
    “‘Go away’—where?”
    Dinah’s mother had been too astonished to be angry. She’d thought it altogether natural, Dinah supposed, that, in her daughter and son-in-law’s house, she had the right to answer the landline, and to speak knowledgeably to whoever was on the other end, in the matter of Robbie; she had the right to answer reporters’ questions, and to be interviewed, without troubling to learn who a reporter was, and for what publication, if any, he was writing. She had the right, as Dinah overheard her saying, to proclaim
Both my daughter and son-in-law are devout Christians. We are praying for Robbie to be returned and he would be, if the police had more gumption to make arrests.
    “It’s Whit who wants to send me away, isn’t it? Your—‘husband.’”
    Dinah’s mother’s lip curled, at the word
husband
.
    “No, Mother. It isn’t Whit, it’s me. Please will you just
leave
.”
    “You’re sick. You’re not in your right mind. You’ve taken too many pills. How can I leave you alone?”
    “I have not taken