A/N: Guess who watched Between Heartbeats last night? This girl. This is just a one-shot inspired by the words of Petar Tomasic.
At seven o'clock a.m. on the dot, Clark was awakened, as always, by an alarm clock followed almost immediately by his mother's voice. In his mind's eye, he could see her standing at the bottom of the staircase, hollering for him to join the family for breakfast. His dad was probably in the kitchen trying to convince Izzy it was okay to eat her fruit even though, at some point before it ended up on the breakfast table, it had been in the dirt. The day before, Clark himself had tried to explain to his little sister that the same rules didn't apply as they did when she dropped an apple slice in the sandbox, but, for the life of him, he couldn't explain it without confusing not only her, but himself as well. He knew his dad would have more luck than he had.
Pulling himself out of the bed and rubbing his sleep-burred eyes, Clark shuffled over to the window. Looking out over the sunbathed street in front of his house, he saw a scene almost identical to the one he saw every morning. The widowed Mrs. Hershey was tending her flowers across the street. Mr. Gable was mowing his lawn a couple houses over.
The morning paper had already been haphazardly thrown in the general direction of the front porches of the houses lining the street. A quick scan told Clark that their copy had landed in a bush and that his dad hadn't collected it for perusal, yet. That meant he was working a later shift today, which would make his mom happy. She liked when she could get everybody sitting at the same table in the morning and still get a couple hours to herself in the office while his dad kept an eye on Izzy.
Wanting to see if anything was going on this weekend, Clark jogged down the stairs intending to fetch the paper and found his gaze drawn to the kitchen table, visible though the kitchen door that had been propped open. The kitchen table set for three, at which his mom and sister were already seated and at which there was one empty seat waiting for him. Then he remembered. He remembered seeing his mother standing outside his classroom clutching his sister's hand with tears in her eyes, tears streaming down her face. He remembered not needing her to tell him what happened in order to know, but needing to hear the words in order to believe. He remembered listening to Greg Parker's solemn words at the funeral, Greg's reference to his father as a member of his family, and thinking that he was being inaccurate.
Ed Lane had a family. He had a son. He had a daughter. He had a wife. He had a brother. He had a family, and that family had lost him to the job he had devoted his life to…to keeping the peace. Wasn't that how Greg had put it? Well, at seven-oh-five a.m., Clark's sense of peace shattered. At seven-oh-five a.m., Clark Lane remembered that his father was gone.