Man With A Message

“He and their mom got divorced.”

“Ah. That’s too bad.”

There was a moment’s silence, then Brian announced, “I don’t have one.”

“What? A father?”

“Yeah. I never had one. And he didn’t die and my mom’s not divorced. I mean, he’s probably somewhere, but he’s not my dad.”

Cam nodded empathetically, catching the significance of that detail from the boy’s tone of voice. Brian wanted to adjust to that fact but still hadn’t.

“I had a father,” Cam said, carefully applying pressure to the wrench. “But he was drunk a lot and most of the time it was like I didn’t have one.”

“Did he beat you up?”

“No. Most of the time he didn’t remember I was there.”

“Did you have a cool mom?”

Cam wasn’t sure how far to carry this empathy. He wanted Brian to know he wasn’t alone in an unfair world, but he wasn’t sure what it would serve to tell Brian it could get worse than he knew.

“No,” he replied simply. “She was gone most of the time.”

His mother had been out of jail only three weeks when she and a male friend had been picked up for armed robbery. Cam and his siblings had had the misfortune of being with her at home at the time, their father passed out on the sofa, beer cans and a bottle of whiskey beside him.

With their mother going to jail and their father deemed unfit to raise them, he and his siblings had been placed in foster care. He’d argued zealously that he’d taken care of himself and his brother and sister most of his life—that all the other times his mother had gone to jail his father had also turned up drunk and Cam was the one who had cooked and done laundry and gotten himself, Josh and Barbara off to school.

No one had cared about that. Their grandfather had died, their grandmother was in a nursing home and the three Trent children were placed together in foster care with a middle-aged couple who lived in the heart of the city.

Deprived of the choice of how to live his life, Cam became bent on destroying it. Fortunately, he’d been caught with a few of his friends holding up a restaurant while the owner was closing. A few months in juvenile hall had turned him around. Foster care seemed like heaven after that.

“My mom’s always in another country ’cause of the acting thing,” Brian said. “What’d yours do?”

“Ah…” He had to think to recollect what had identified her place in his life besides the drugs and the jail time. “She worked in a furniture factory.”

“She drink, too?”

Cam was so surprised by the question that he stopped what he was doing to focus on the boy.

Brian shrugged. “It’s a statistic that a lot of people who drink do it with a husband or wife or boyfriend.”

Cam was sure that was true but he wondered how the boy knew. “Who told you that?”

“My mom’s in rehab a lot.” It seemed to be something he had accepted. “It happened one time in the summer, and the housekeeper took me to visit her. We had to sit in at this meeting about families of substance abusers.”

Cam had never known the politically correct term because there’d been no one to take him to meetings.

“Come on,” he said. “We’re going out to the truck. Remember to keep your hands off the switches.”

“We going to the shop or something?” Brian asked excitedly, taking the lead with the flashlight.

“No. I’ve got pipe in the truck.”

They reached the third stair from the bottom and Brian leaped down, the carpet squishing as he landed. “So, is it cool to be a plumber?”

Cam could feel his soaked shoes and socks and jeans and smiled into the darkness. “Oh, it’s way cool.”

CHAPTER THREE

MARIAH’S SISTER WAS BESIDE herself with worry when she arrived at the emergency room. “Oh, my God!” she exclaimed, swiping a white curtain aside to come to Mariah’s side. “Are you all right?”

Mariah sat up, fine except for pain in the bump at the back of her head. She explained briefly about Brian’s search for gold and the resulting deluge.

Parker shook her head sympathetically. “That kid’s going to blow up the world one day.”

Mariah sighed. “He’s the sweetest boy, but I’m going to have to build a cage around him for the safety of the other children.”

“And you. Do you have a concussion?”

“Just a mild one. The doctor’s worried, though, because I passed out.”

“You passed out? Did you stop breathing?”

“I’m not sure. I dreamed…” She put a hand to her throat as she recalled a drowning sensation, as if she was falling into a well, unable to draw in air. “Someone gave me…mouth-to-mouth,” she explained, remembering with abrupt clarity her grave disappointment when the face bent over her wasn’t Ben’s but that of some stranger’s.

Some stranger she’d just kissed with the desperate need she’d never revealed to anyone.

Someone whose eyes said that he’d felt that need in her.

Bitter disappointment over the loss of her babies, the loss of her marriage, the loss of her mask of stoic courage, had all required that she punch his lights out.

“Oh, God!” She put a hand to her face and groaned.

“Nurse!” Parker shouted.

“Sh!” Mariah lowered her hand and placed it over Parker’s mouth. “I’m fine! I just…just remembered something.”

“What? You looked as though you were going to slide right off onto the floor.”

“I…I was just thinking about the cleanup at the dorm.” Mariah frowned apologetically. “I’m sorry, Parker, but the doctor won’t let me go home tonight if there isn’t someone to watch me. Can you take me home with you, just for tonight?”

“Of course! It’ll be fun. I just made carrot cookies.”

Mariah tried to look pleased at that. As much as she loved her sister, she had very different opinions about what defined a comfortable environment. Parker was a naturalist, earth-mother sort of woman; Mariah’s approach to life was much more traditional.

Parker had a heart of gold, but her sofa was a red vinyl banquette from a Japanese restaurant, and two hammocks suspended from the ceiling constituted her bedroom.

All of a sudden Parker smiled. “Who gave you mouth-to-mouth?”