Times and Seasons Page 4

  “The parents are mostly powerless,” she said in a dull voice. “Children get beaten up at River Ranch all the time.”

  “I’ll bet you’re wrong about that. I’ll bet they have more control over things than you realize.”

  She didn’t want him to be wrong—but she couldn’t entertain a conversation that accepted that Mark was in jail. She couldn’t stand the thought of his sleeping in a cell full of gang members and criminals. She couldn’t stand the thought of the guards yelling at him, or of a cell mate who might be stronger or bigger or angrier. She couldn’t stand the thought of him lying there, afraid, all night.

  It sounded so homey and safe—River Ranch. But it was still a jail. She had toured it with Mark herself, hoping the threat of it would be a deterrent. Apparently it hadn’t frightened him into good behavior. But it had frightened her.

  As Steve turned his car into Cedar Circle, Cathy’s three neighbors were huddled on Brenda’s front porch, as if waiting for her. She wished she could have just gone into the house unnoticed, without saying a word to anyone. She wished she could just crawl under the covers and bury her face in her pillow.

  But while the kids headed into the house, Steve lingered beside her as the three women headed over. Sylvia was in the lead, her face drawn and sympathetic. She just pulled Cathy into a hug. Brenda was next, searching her face for an answer about Mark. Then Tory came up, holding Hannah in her arms. “Where’s Mark?” she asked.

  “Had to spend the night in jail,” Cathy said, leaning back wearily against the car. She was still wearing the pink suit she had worn to the shower, and the pumps were killing her feet. She wondered if they would let Mark keep his clothes, or if they had some kind of uniform for him. She wondered if she should take some clothes to him. “Steve called a lawyer,” she said. “Slater Hanson from church. You know him, don’t you, Sylvia?”

  Sylvia nodded. “He’ll do a good job. What did Mark say?”

  “That he did it,” Cathy said matter-of-factly, though there was nothing matter-of-fact about it. The corners of her lips trembled as she added, “He didn’t mean to. Just wanted to make a few bucks. You know, for the concert.” The sarcasm in her words left a sour taste in her mouth.

  The look on Sylvia’s face was as sick as Cathy’s, but it seemed to Cathy that Brenda wasn’t all that surprised. Maybe Daniel had said things.

  Tory just shook her head. “Someone influenced him, Cathy,” she offered.

  Cathy shrugged. “Well, it sure wasn’t me. Or Brenda, either, for that matter. The only people who have any influence over Mark are his friends.”

  “Some of his friends,” Brenda whispered.

  “Yeah, I had hoped his friendship with Daniel would make a difference.” Cathy sighed. “Does he know?”

  Brenda nodded.

  Cathy rubbed her face, trying hard not to cry. She didn’t want to look weak, beaten. Steve put his hand on her shoulder. She was thankful that he hadn’t said much.

  “We brought your gifts home,” Tory said in a quiet voice. “They’re all in the dining room. Thirty-two of them.”

  Cathy looked down at the concrete beneath her feet. A sprig of grass was growing up through a crack. “Thank you for taking care of that. I hope everyone understood.”

  “We just told them you’d had a family emergency,” Sylvia said.

  Cathy met her eyes. “It’ll be all over town by morning, anyway,” she said. She blinked back the tears. “Even if the judge lets him out, his reputation is shot. Not that it was that good to begin with.” She reached for Steve’s hand on her shoulder, laced her fingers through it, and squeezed hard.

  His grip was strong, reassuring. It promised help and peace in the face of chaos.

  She wished she could believe that promise.

  She reached out to hug Sylvia, then pulled Brenda and Tory into her outstretched arms and held them for a moment. Then she let them go and took a step back. “I need to go in now. I need to talk to the kids, and…I have to call Jerry.”

  They said their quiet good-byes and promised to pray. Slowly, she headed into the house. Steve was right behind her.

  When she turned back and met his eyes, he reached out. “Come here.”

  She went willingly into his arms and soaked in the feeling of love as he held her so tightly that she couldn’t breathe. His face was rough and warm against hers, and his brown hair was soft beneath her fingers. He smelled of early summer and wind and the slightest trace of cigarette smoke from the police station. She tried to blink back her tears but became vaguely aware of how they wet his shirt.

  “When Mark was a baby,” she managed to get out, pulling back from him and looking up into his eyes, “and I was still married to Jerry, he had all these dinner parties and conferences we had to go to together. He insisted I go with him, but I didn’t want to leave my kids so much. I spent three weeks interviewing baby-sitters before I would leave Mark with one of them.”

  She got a glass out of the cabinet, half-filled it with tap water, and swallowed it down. Staring at the glass, she said, “When he was old enough for nursery school, I literally toured fifteen places before I chose one. I was so careful who I left him with. Even in the last year, I’ve only left him with Brenda. And now he’s there with a bunch of kids who stab and shoot each other.”

  “Maybe not,” Steve said. “Maybe they’re just like him.”

  She leaned on the counter, trying not to let herself fall apart. “He’s little, Steve. He can’t defend himself against some of those guys.”

  “Honey, this might be the longest night of your life. I don’t have any Band-Aids to put on this. All I can say is that tomorrow maybe things will turn out better than you think. Maybe he’ll come home and this will be the wake-up call he needs, the scare of his life that will turn him around.”

  “I thought that would happen when he got arrested last year,” she said. “It didn’t work.” She stepped toward the door and looked out the screen, as if she would see Mark heading up the driveway. “If I could just go to that place and sleep outside his cell, I would. Just to know he was all right…”

  She drew in a deep breath and stood straighter, wiped her eyes. “Well, I can’t, and that’s that. Meanwhile, Tracy is probably worried sick, and you need to go update her and relieve your mother.” She covered her eyes. “Oh, I hate for your mother to know this about my son.”

  “My mother’s realistic. She understands what some teenagers go through.”

  “And she knows Mark,” Cathy said.

  He didn’t seem to know what to say to that, so he said nothing.

  “Go,” she said. “You need to take care of Tracy, and I need to talk to the kids and call Jerry. Really, I’m going to be all right.”

  “I know you are.” He crossed the room and took both of her hands in his, brought them to his lips. “I love you,” he whispered. “Call me when you can. If you don’t, I’ll call you. And if you need me, I can be back over in ten minutes.”

  As he headed out to his car, she leaned against the door and stared into the garage.

  She imagined all manner of doubts rushing through his mind as he drove home. He hadn’t bargained for a criminal stepson, or the roller coaster that was Cathy’s life. And he hadn’t bargained for a mother’s confusing mix of rage and grief, self-recrimination and crushing disappointment.

  What would Mark’s situation do to their plans?

  She couldn’t think about that now. Wedding plans didn’t seem so important when her son was sitting in a jail cell.

  CHAPTER

  Eight

  Annie and Rick came into the den when they heard Steve leaving. Rick looked slightly shell-shocked. Annie had been crying. They both sank onto the couch, sudden allies.

  “Mom,” Annie said. “He’s just a kid. He’s not ready for this.”

  “We really didn’t know,” Rick said. “Really. If we had, we would have told you. We wouldn’t have let Mark get himself into this much trouble.”

 
She sat down across from them. “I’m sorry I yelled at you in the car on the way there. It was uncalled for. I was just upset.”

  “We know, Mom,” Annie said. “You always yell when you’re upset.”

  She stared down at her knees for a moment, trying to get a grasp on her emotions. “Well, I need to stop it,” she said. “Maybe that’s part of the problem.”

  Rick let out a loud sigh and jammed his elbows into his knees. “I knew you were going to do this.”

  “Do what?” she asked.

  “Blame yourself. You blame yourself for everything. It’s not your fault, Mom.”

  She pressed her fingers against her tear ducts, but her hands trembled. “I just feel like so many things should have been different in this family.”

  Quiet settled around them again, and she knew they were each counting the ways things could have been different.

  “Mom, somebody needs to call Dad. He needs to know.”

  Cathy had planned to do that, but she couldn’t stand revealing her emotions to her ex-husband. “I need for you to call him and tell him, okay? Rick? Annie?”

  “Why can’t you?” Annie asked.

  “Because I’m…a little volatile right now. If you think I yell with you…”

  Rick frowned. “Mom, you’re not blaming him, are you?”

  She threw up her hands and felt anger quaking through her as tears spilled down her face. “Sometimes I can’t help but wonder what you guys might be like if you had a father in the home. You and Annie, you had him longer than Mark did. He was pretty small when your dad left. I can’t help thinking that if Jerry had just been here, just his presence in the home might have made a difference.”

  Annie’s voice was weak. “I know families with both parents in the home and they still have kids that turn out wrong and do stupid things. Even kids who were raised with big doses of the Bible every day can still turn out bad.”

  “I know that’s true,” Cathy said, her voice wobbling. She wiped the tears with the pads of her thumbs. “I know you’re right. But I’m not the most rational person in the world right now. Just please…do this for me. Tell him what happened, and what time Mark appears in court tomorrow,” she said. “I’m going to be in my room.”

  She hugged each child in turn before she left the living room. As she got to her room, she sat down on her bed and kicked off her shoes. This day had started out so differently. She had gone to church, floating on an air of anticipation, then her hairdresser had done her the favor of fixing her hair on Sunday. She had been excited about the shower, had looked forward to seeing so many friends and hearing their good wishes for her future. Tonight she was supposed to be taking inventory of the wonderful gifts she’d gotten and working on the wedding that was just around the corner. Now what would she do about that?

  She heard the kids on the phone in the living room, and her thoughts went back to her ex-husband. He had played such a part in this, by playing so little a part in their family. She knew the kids didn’t want her to blame him, and she had no right to do so in front of them. But hadn’t he robbed her and the kids of something critical in their lives? Something they may not even know they were missing until an event like today’s occurred?

  Mark was paying dearly for their father’s failings, and Rick and Annie had paid, too. They had all paid.

  But they were paying for their mother’s failings, too.

  She lay back on her pillow, staring up at the ceiling through misty eyes, and thought back to that pivotal week in the life of her family when Jerry had announced he wanted the divorce, that he was leaving her for another woman. There had been no reasoning with him. No logic could have turned his head. It was not something she had counted on in life, nothing she had expected. He didn’t want to be married, so she had been left alone.

  Ironic, that need of his to end the marriage was only to begin another one just weeks after the divorce.

  She had tried to forgive him, especially in the past couple of years since she’d given her life to Christ. But forgiveness was a hard concept. It didn’t come through lip service or intention. It took her heart—and whenever her heart got involved with her ex-husband, it always came out on the wrong side of Christianity.

  Sylvia had said that God would be a husband to Cathy, that he was a husband to widows and orphans, and she supposed, by some stretch of the imagination, that was what she was. A widow with three orphans. She had no doubt God had sent her Steve, a man who would no more betray her than Christ himself would. But if God was ordering things in her life, why had things become such a mess?

  No, it wasn’t God. It had to be her own failure again. She had done so many things wrong. Prayers of repentance couldn’t undo any of them.

  And neither could Mark’s own remorse.

  Now it was all in the hands of God and the circuit court judge.

  CHAPTER

  Nine

  Cathy recognized the knock the moment it started. It wasn’t the polite, neighborly kind of knock, which said comfort was coming, and it wasn’t Steve’s knock, which had a gentle eagerness about it. It was Jerry’s knock, loud and hard and announcing that he was here and they’d better hurry and answer the door.

  Cathy heard Annie get to it first. “Dad! What are you doing here?”

  She heard muffled voices as Rick jogged down the stairs, and quickly she got dressed. She had been lying on the bed in her pajamas, trying to work the whole thing out with God. But she knew Jerry hadn’t made the two-hour drive from Knoxville just to say hello to the kids.

  She went into the living area of the house and saw the drawn, angry look on his face as he spoke to their children. Annie swung around as Cathy came in.

  “Cool,” she said. “I haven’t seen you two together in the same house in years.”

  Cathy didn’t find that particularly refreshing or amusing. “Hi, Jerry. Guess you heard.”

  Her ex-husband was sunburned, as if he’d gotten the news on the golf course. He was dressed in a white polo shirt and a pair of khaki shorts. She hadn’t seen him in a long time and was surprised that his dark hair was receding. A couple more years, and he’d be as bald as his father.

  “Kids, I need to talk to your mother.”

  Rick looked insulted. “Dad, I’m almost twenty years old.”

  Annie stood firm, too. “We kind of wanted to hear what you’re going to do about Mark.”

  She recognized and understood the look of helplessness on his face. “What I’m going to do.” He breathed out a laugh. “Right.”

  He stepped into the living area and looked instantly out of place among the pieces of furniture they had bought together. Cathy remembered how they had agonized over the couch, because they wanted something that would last for years. He looked down at it now and ran his fingers across it thoughtfully, as if to see if it was holding up better than their marriage had.

  “How could he have done this?” he asked, bringing his eyes up to Cathy.

  She didn’t want to share this pain with him, didn’t want to commiserate or mourn together. She had cut off her feelings for him long ago, had prayed for God to anesthetize her to him in spite of her vows to love him for life. Years ago, God had been merciful and answered that prayer.

  “What did he say about it?” he asked when she didn’t answer the first question.

  “He said that he was trying to make enough money for a concert ticket,” she said in a dull voice.

  “A concert ticket?”

  “It was Third Eye Blind,” Annie said, as though that would explain everything. “They’re coming next week. The tickets are sold out, but if you can get them from a scalper—”

  “So he sold drugs to pay for them?” The words came on an incredulous note of accusation, as if Annie had just condoned what he’d done.

  “That’s his story. Dad, don’t look at me like I did it, because I didn’t. I’m just telling you what he told Mom.”

  Cathy sank down into a chair, and Jerry took the couch. “I
want to know what he said to you.”

  Cathy sighed. “He said that he had been set up. That his friend asked him to get him a bag of marijuana, and when he came to buy it, he had somebody in the car with him. Mark didn’t know it was a cop.”

  “Set up.” Jerry had always been a repeater, as if he had to say the words to process them. “And Mark had a bag?”

  “He got it somewhere,” Cathy said. “Bottom line, they’re keeping him tonight, and his arraignment is tomorrow.”

  “What is he pleading?”

  “I’ve been on the phone with the attorney trying to figure that out.” It had been difficult trying to work this out herself. She had to admit that she was glad Jerry could help make the decision. “If he pleads innocent, he’s lying. It’s his third offense. Plus, they caught him red-handed. If he pleads guilty, maybe they’ll go a little easier on him. Maybe community service. It’s also possible that he could plea bargain. In exchange for a guilty plea, maybe they would reduce the charge. And if we could get him to name the person who gave it to him—”

  Jerry was on his feet and laughing bitterly, hands on his hips. “How does he even know people like this?” He turned back to Cathy. “Don’t you watch him?”

  She sat rigid, stunned that he could accuse her of neglect when he played golf on his visitation weekends. “Yes, I’m watching him,” she said. “He’s home-schooled, for heaven’s sake. I took him out of school to get him away from the kids who were influencing him. But I thought I could still let him play baseball. I didn’t know he was at the park making drug deals!”

  “If you’d been there, maybe he couldn’t have. Do you even go to the games?”

  Now she felt like a volcano near eruption. “Yes, I go to the games,” she said, her voice rising. “Every one of them. Unlike you!”

  “Hey, I live in Knoxville. What do you want from me?”

  “How about a little fathering?” she said angrily. “Forget the full-time stuff! How about every other weekend? Or is it too much to ask that you miss a day at the golf course just because your children want to be with you?”