Courageous (22 page)

“What do I do next?”

“I used to do this for my father on Sundays. Here, let me try.

“There. Perfect,” Carmen said as she patted his chest and smoothed his lapels.

Isabel and Marcos ran into the room. Their eyes got big when they saw their father. Isabel said, “You look handsome!”

“Is it yours,
Papi
?” Marcos asked.

“Yes,” Carmen said. “This is Daddy’s suit that he will wear to our special meeting. We will all wear our very best.”

Javier turned to look at himself in the mirror. He smiled sheepishly, not wanting to be proud.

“I feel like a rich man.”

Carmen took his arm. She looked tenderly into his eyes. “Javy, you
are
a rich man. You have a strong faith, two children that love you, and a wife that adores you.”

Javier’s face contorted and his eyes misted as he looked down.“Stop it, Carmen. You’ll make me cry in front of the children.”

Adam and Nathan stood talking to David in an empty courtroom adjacent to the sheriff’s office. David leaned against a dark wood bench, gazed at the floor, and rubbed his sweaty palms along the sides of his dark-brown uniform pants.

“I want to do this, guys, but . . . I’m scared to death.”

Adam said, “David, you know that little girl is your responsibility, right?”

“Yeah. I think about her all the time. God seems to have put my conscience into another gear.”

Nathan leaned toward David. “You’re a new person now. He lives inside you. He’s convicting you to do the right thing.”

“But this will be like dropping a bomb. Amanda hasn’t heard from me for over five years. Olivia’s never even met me.”

“Then it’s time to man up, isn’t it?” Adam said.

David looked at both men and ran his fingers through his short sandy hair. He agreed. “When I’m alone, all the reasons not to do it take over. But it’s hard to rationalize my way out of it while you two stand here.”

“I hear you,” Adam said. “Since I told you guys I’m determined to cut back on television, I sit in the living room and think, ‘I don’t want to have to tell them I wasted another evening.’ So I turn it off. Maybe not the best motive, but it’s a good result.”

“It’s peer pressure, isn’t it?” Nathan supposed. “We never outgrow it. I told Jade the other night she’s not the only one whose decisions are affected by those she hangs out with. Who Kayla and I hang out with affects ours, too.”

“‘Stimulate one another to love and good deeds,’” David offered.

Adam smiled. “There you go quoting Scripture. You’re the man, David.”

“This will be one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.”

“The right things are often the hardest,” Nathan said. “But when you act courageously, there’s a huge payoff.”

Adam, in jeans and a T-shirt, stood outside the open door. Sam Rivers’s face looked like a skull with skin. All sheetrock, no insulation. On another face his eyes might have looked normal, but this was not another face. They bulged like eggs stuffed in Play-Doh.

“What do you want?”

“Mr. Rivers, when I talked with you before at the sheriff’s office, it was as a cop. Now it’s as a dad. My son, Dylan, and your boy Jeremy are friends.”

“Yeah? So what?”

“Well, I’d want someone to talk to me if my son took drugs. So I’m talking to you.”

“Okay. Then talk.” Rivers poked at his iPhone. Adam barely resisted the urge to slap it out of his hand.

“There are signs to look for when your son is on drugs.”

“I know the signs.”

“You knew your son was on drugs?”

Rivers looked like he’d had his tooth pulled without novocaine. “Half the school takes drugs. His friends in sixth grade got him smoking cigarettes. Then weed. On the school playground—can you believe it?”

“And then it led to the other drugs. Marijuana always does.”

“Not always.”

“Jeremy bought meth too.”

“Allegedly.” Rivers looked at him. “You’re off duty and you said you weren’t talking to me as a cop. So this is off the record, right?”

“Right.”

“So if you take anything I say and go after us, my lawyer will eat you for lunch. You got that, mister?”

As Adam stared into Rivers’s bulgy eyes, he tried not to let his face know what his brain thought.

“My wife has prescription OxyContin. For pain. Totally legal. Jeremy got started on the Oxy. Then, when he couldn’t get any more and he found out what it cost, he panicked. They told him he could get the equivalent amount of meth or cocaine for half the price.”

“You seem pretty calm about it.”

Mr. Rivers shrugged. “He’ll grow out of it.”

“What makes you think so?”

“I did. I mean, I don’t do real drugs anymore. Just booze and a little grass once in a while.” His eyes widened. “We’re off the record—you promised.”

Adam sighed. “Have you talked to Jeremy about it?”

“I told him don’t buy drugs, okay, but if you do, don’t be a moron and do it at Pearly’s. Might as well rob a donut shop and not expect cops to notice.”

“Did you tell him drugs will ruin his life?”

“I turned out okay, didn’t I?”

“So you’ve given up on him?”

“It’s not my job to interfere in my son’s life.”

“Isn’t that
exactly
what your job is?”

He rolled his eyes like Adam clearly didn’t understand what dads were for.

“Okay, he bought meth and powder cocaine. What about crack?”

“I don’t know.”

“Have you asked him? Have you looked in his room?”

“I respect his space, Mitchell. Right to privacy. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”

“Don’t take the moral high ground when you’re neglecting your son.”

“Instead of arresting my boy, how about going after thieves and lowlifes, Barney? Thanks to you, we’ll waste our time with the courts. I got a lawyer. We’ll get my son off. It’ll cost us, but hey, what are cops for? Never there when you need ’em, always there when you don’t. I can get pizza delivered faster than I can get a cop to show up.”

“Will you get drug counseling for Jeremy?”

“Like I said, he’ll grow out of it.”

“Lots of people never outgrow it. It can become a five-hundred-dollar-a-day habit.”

“He can’t afford that.”

“Which is why he’ll have to steal or sell to sustain it.”

“You saying my boy’s a thief?”

“He could become one. Especially if you don’t get involved!” Adam’s indignation at Sam Rivers embodied his thoughts toward all the out-of-touch fathers who had waved a white flag to the culture and given up their children as hostages.

“The lawyer will take care of everything.”

“Jeremy doesn’t need a lawyer. He needs a dad.”

“Instead of passing judgment on me and my family, why don’t you take a closer look at yours?”

“What do you mean? Dylan?”

“Yeah, Superdad. Have you talked to
your
son? Have you checked
his
room?”

Adam drove home. Dylan was at track practice and wouldn’t be home for an hour. Adam went into his room and looked in the obvious places where he knew nobody with brains would hide something. And Dylan had brains. He thought of the dresser, but Victoria put away laundry.

He assessed the bookcase with more video games than books. He looked at the closet shelf filled with old shoes, old video games, and some boxes. Under the mattress? No, Dylan knew his mom stripped the bed to wash the sheets.

Adam looked around the room. If he were Dylan, where would he hide something? He remembered where he’d hidden things from his parents. At the bottom of a box of comic books at the top of his closet. It was out of his mom’s reach. And she was indifferent to comic books; a perfect combination—she wouldn’t throw them out, and she wouldn’t look through them either.

So Adam reached for the thing Dylan knew he’d be least interested in—video games. He picked them up and opened them one by one. Finally he came to an old, worn Madden box, a video relic, and opened it. There it was. A baggie of marijuana with a few rolling papers and a roach clip.

He thought of Sam Rivers, the neglectful father, so out of touch with his son’s world. The man’s negligence as a father and ignorance of his son’s life had outraged Adam. In an instant, Adam realized he himself was the man he despised.

Chapter Twenty-four

When Victoria arrived home thirty minutes later, she found Adam on the living room sofa, head in hands.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s Dylan. He’s been smoking marijuana.”

“What?” She nearly collapsed.

Starting with Pearly’s, the arrest, Jeremy Rivers, and the confrontation with Jeremy’s father, Adam told the whole story. She wanted to see the drugs. When she did, she cried.

“He’ll be home anytime,” she said.

“Because I confronted Jeremy and his dad and searched Dylan’s room, I think maybe this should start as a father-son conversation. Does that make sense?”

She nodded.

Adam hadn’t seen Victoria so frail since Emily’s death. He realized this too felt like a death, a smaller one, but a grave threat to her only remaining child.

He talked with her in the bedroom until he heard Dylan come in the front door.

“I’ll pray,” Victoria whispered.

Adam walked to the kitchen while Dylan raided the refrigerator.

“Dylan?”

A pitcher of orange juice in his hand, Dylan turned and looked at the Madden box his father held, with a baggie protruding. The pitcher crashed to the floor. Orange juice splattered over their shoes and pant legs.

“You searched my bedroom?”

“Yes, I did.”

“That’s my private stuff.”

“I’m not the one in trouble. You are.”

“I don’t go through your stuff. Maybe I will now.”

“Don’t mouth off to me, Dylan. I want some answers.”

“What do you want to know?”

“How long have you been using?”

“A party at Drew Thornton’s. When I was in eighth grade. Everyone was smoking weed. I didn’t want to be alone.”

“Last year? At the Thorntons’? I don’t believe it! They go to our church!”

“Believe what you want. You always do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

When Dylan looked away, Adam raised his hand to calm himself and Dylan. “Look, how about we clean up the juice and change? Then we can talk.”

For the next five minutes, they mopped the kitchen floor with wet hand towels. Without a word, Dylan got up and went to his room. Adam changed his pants and sat on Dylan’s floor.

“How much pot have you smoked?”

“Maybe a few times a month. I’m no teahead. It’s not every day.”

“I know what it smells like, Dylan. How come I’ve never caught a whiff of it?”

“I don’t smoke it in my room. I’m not that stupid.”

“What else have you used? Meth?”

“No.”

“Cocaine?”

“No!”

“Prescription stuff? Like OxyContin?”

Dylan looked down. No denial.

“Oxy?”

“No. That’s all over the place at school. Some kids just take it from their parents’ medicine cabinet and pass it around. I don’t use it.”

“Dylan, you hesitated. I think there’s something else, isn’t there?”

“It’s legal. It’s nothing bad.”

“What is it?”