Autumn Blue (6 page)

“Wow. At least she’s positive. Why didn’t you tell her before? I go crying to my mom about things like the toilet backing
up.”

Sidney stared at the chunk of burrito on her fork and shrugged. “I don’t know. Mom has this family-portrait image of my world
in her head—everything’s fine; the kids are always squeaky-clean and smiling. I used to clean for days before her visits,
trying to make my house look as perfect and organized as hers. We weren’t rich growing up, but you wouldn’t know it by the
way she kept the house. She served tea in bone china cups and saucers, poured it out of a silver teapot on a silver tray.
She dressed my sister and me in matching dresses—the kind you have to iron! I’m lucky if I can get two matching socks on Sissy
before I push the girls out the door in the morning, let alone iron anything. And of course, she always had her hair done
and lipstick on when Dad came home at night. She managed to stay happily married too, by the way.”

“How many years?”

“Dad died just before their fortieth anniversary. The funeral was on the actual day. August 12.”

“Oh, how sad.”

Sidney tipped her head and smiled. “Yes, it was. But for once Dad was there with flowers—enough to make up for all the anniversaries
he forgot. He never was very good with dates.”

Micki leaned back and crossed her arms, looking at Sidney like her fifth-grade teacher used to when she couldn’t diagram a
simple sentence. “So you’re comparing yourself to your perfect mother, who—correct me if I’m wrong—had a husband to pay the
bills and help raise the kids, and she never worked an outside job a day of your childhood.”

“Not comparing, exactly,” Sidney said. “Just trying to live up to. Please pass the salsa.”

“Too bad she lives so far away. I think you could use some mothering right now.”

Sidney stared at a papier mâché parrot that seemed to be eavesdropping from its perch above Micki’s shoulder. Her mother lived
in a suburb of Cleveland with Sidney’s aunts, Clair and Aggie. The three now-single middle-aged women were crazy best friends.
Sometimes Sidney couldn’t carry on an intelligent phone conversation with her mother for all the laughter and commotion going
on in the background. She wouldn’t do anything to break up that happy trio, no matter how bad things got for her there in
Ham Bone.

“My sister needs her worse than I do.” Sidney shook her head, still disbelieving that her younger sister, the one who once
claimed she didn’t have a maternal bone in her body, had somehow ended up with five kids under the age of ten. She and her
husband were in a standoff, both refusing to have their bodies permanently altered to prevent any future surprises. “Mom watches
the little ones in the mornings while Alana works.”

She glanced at her watch. The school bus would drop Rebecca and Sissy off at their driveway at about 3:45. With Ty gone, the
girls would be home alone until she got home after 5:00. But maybe it was actually better that way for now. Lately, she had
worried more about them being
with
their brother than without him.

A green sheriff’s car sped past the restaurant window, lights flashing. Sidney was surprised when it jerked to a stop abruptly
in front of the insurance office next door.

“What’s going on?” Micki stood, dropping her napkin to the floor. Another patrol car appeared from the other direction and
braked, and an officer stormed from the car. Both women bolted for the door of the restaurant, leaving their half-eaten lunches
behind.

“We’ll be right back,” Sidney called over her shoulder to the waitress.

The officers ran, shouting, toward the gravel alley behind the Leon Schuman Insurance building where another deputy was wrestling
someone facedown to the ground. A guy in a big brown jacket. He wasn’t going down easy. Adrenaline shot through Sidney’s bloodstream.
“It’s Tyson!”

Micki reached out and held her arm. “No, Sidney. I don’t think so.” They stopped a safe distance away in the middle of the
small parking lot between the two buildings. Leon Schuman and several coworkers spilled out of their office to observe the
incident from the side porch. A dark-haired officer with a broad back and shoulders—unmistakably Deputy Estrada—jerked the
captive’s arms behind his back to be cuffed, causing his face to drag on the gravel. The body on the ground let out a plaintive
cry.

Tyson! It
was
her son lying there, pressed to the ground. She ran toward him on legs like ribbon, but just before she reached him another
deputy caught her, firmly holding her back. Estrada yanked the boy roughly to his feet. Tyson’s eyes were wild and fevered,
his hair a shaggy mess. “Ty!” He looked directly at her, blinked, and dropped his head. His cheek was bleeding. Estrada thrust
him past, pushing and dragging him across the parking lot. She had never seen that brown canvas jacket. The sleeves were too
long; thick rolls of fabric were bunched at Ty’s wrists. Just before they reached the awaiting patrol car, Ty defiantly jerked
his arm away. Estrada grabbed it again, roughly shoving him forward and then pushing her son’s head down into the backseat.

Micki was at her side, supporting Sidney’s elbow when the car door slammed.

“Please, let me talk to him.” The deputy hesitated before reaching inside the driver’s door and lowering the window partway.
There were a thousand questions to ask. Why did he run? Where had he been? How had he been eating and sleeping, surviving
the cold autumn nights? She lowered her head, resting it on the upper rim of the window opening. “Ty,” she said softly.

The cuffs made him lean forward awkwardly. He didn’t look up. “I just wanted to tell you I’m okay,” he muttered.

Her tears threatened to choke her, but she wouldn’t let them come. Not yet. “Tyson, we’re going to work this out. You cooperate
in every way. Do you hear me?”

“I won’t stay in jail. I can’t. I’d rather die.”

A chill ran through her body. This was something he had obviously given a lot of thought. “Nobody said you’re going to jail,
Ty. A lot depends on you.” She really didn’t know how true that was. After all, he had committed a felony by pulling that
pellet gun. “Now you be good. I’ll do whatever I can to help, but you have to quit making stupid mistakes. You got yourself
here; now you’d better decide if you’re going to do the right things to get yourself out.” He finally looked up at her. He
had the dark eyes and long lashes of his father. The eyes of her perdition. “I love you, Tyson.”

He tried to speak, but all that came from his quivering lips was a stifled “Ma . . .” She saw his face screw up like it did
when he was small, like the times his little heart was broken by a father who found a better life and simply lost interest
in the family he had started. Ty whipped his head away from her. A blade of dry grass stuck in the back of his dirty, tousled
hair.

Sidney’s tears came then. Micki held her, kept her knees from hitting the ground as the bulletproof window slid up and the
patrol car rolled away.

S
IDNEY WAITED
for almost three hours in the austere Winger County Juvenile Detention building before being allowed to see her son. How
long did it take to
book
someone anyway? The place was eerie, with no daylight in the wide, echoing corridor except for the slice that ventured through
a tiny oblong window at the far end. She sat against the wall in the middle of a row of vacant green plastic chairs that must
have been there since before she was born. When a uniformed deputy finally escorted her to a visiting room, she passed him
Sybil Tanner’s card. “Can you please call our attorney and let her know we can see him now?” Sybil’s office was just across
the street in the courthouse, a much friendlier building with lots of windows, surrounded by neat gardens and stately trees.

Sidney waited alone in a room with a chicken-wire window in its door. Sybil arrived, her pregnant belly swollen dramatically
since Sidney last saw her, barely having time to drop her neatly organized briefcase to the table and remove Ty’s file before
the door opened again.

“Try to keep it to a half hour,” the deputy said, guiding Ty into the room with a firm hand on his upper arm. After the door
latched behind the deputy, his uniformed shoulder remained visible through the small window.

Sidney’s breath caught. Tyson’s wrists were cuffed, chained to a belt locked around his waist. He wore a blue, short-sleeved
jumpsuit and an expression of shame or hopelessness, maybe both. She inhaled deeply.
I will not cry. I will not cry.
Her chair scraped the floor as she rose to hug him. His body was slightly rigid, but he let her rub his back as she held
her cheek to his. She savored the moment, the sensation of finally holding her son’s slim but developing body next to hers.
There was a new firmness in his back, small but sinewy biceps now palpable on his arms. He smelled clean; he must have showered
before donning the garb that marked him as a detainee.

“Sorry, Mom,” she heard him whisper through her hair.

“Hello, Tyson,” Sybil said. “Why don’t you join us here at the table? We don’t have much time.”

He dropped into a chair across the table from her.

“Okay.” She sighed deeply. “We have a real challenge in front of us. Why did you run? Didn’t you believe me when I warned
you about breaking court orders?”

His eyes narrowed. “I got in a fight at school.”

Her intense blue eyes looked directly into his. “Tell me about it.”

He shrugged. “This jock kept riding me about what happened at Graber’s. He and his friends were on me since the first day
of school. And lying about what really happened. They said I meant to kill that guy.” He scoffed bitterly. “With a pellet
gun?”

“Who threw the first punch?”

He stared down at her pale, freckled arm as she scribbled notes. “I guess I did, but actually he hit me first. He’s a big
dude. Has longer arms.”

“I’ll bet you were glad when the teachers broke it up.”

“Yeah. Until the counselor called the sheriff. That’s why I ran.” His voice cracked. “I knew they’d throw me in jail because
of what you said. That I couldn’t get in any more trouble before my hearing.” His eyes searched her face. “What’s going to
happen now?”

She hesitated, tapping her pen on the table with clamped lips. “I think you would have been better off facing the situation
head-on.” She flipped through his file. “You were charged with a felony, in which case you may be tried as an adult. The judge
was surprisingly lenient when he released you to your mother’s custody after the robbery.” She looked at him squarely with
a slight shake of her head. “I’m not going to lie to you, Tyson. Judge Renkin is not one to mess with. He’s tough. Especially
when he feels he hasn’t been taken seriously. I’m going to do the best I can.” She glanced over at Sidney. “If you’ve got
family, gather them up and get them in that courtroom. Showing that Ty has support may have some influence on the outcome.”
She turned back to Ty. “Prepare yourself. I’m sorry to say that you’re going to do some time. If you’re tried as an adult,
the worst-case scenario is five years.”

Ty’s face went pale. He wheeled his head toward the wall with an audible whine. “No!” His chained hands struck the table’s
edge and the terrible sounds resonated in the stark room. Sidney watched his shoulders rise and fall convulsively and heard
the resolve in his breaking voice as he uttered, “I’d rather die.”

SIDNEY PARKED HER CAR
in front of the Dunbar Traders Market and took a good, hard look at herself in the visor mirror. Her eyes were slightly red
from crying, but no longer swollen. She swept a coat of mascara on her lashes. What did she think she was doing? Jack Mellon
was probably married or at least engaged by now. He had wanted to settle down, to have a family. He was that kind of guy.
A man who held a steady job, loved kids and sports—and, at one time, her.

But as long as she was already in Dunbar and Micki had the girls, it occurred to her that this might be the perfect time to
connect with him again. She knew she was fooling herself, yet the image of Jack sitting beside her in court next Tuesday kept
popping into her mind. Her mother was in Ohio. Micki and Dennis were the closest thing to family that she had locally, but
they would be in Arizona for Dennis’s business convention on the day of the hearing. She ran a comb through her hair. It was
longer now than when she and Jack had dated, falling on her shoulders, dark blond with lighter streaks that were no longer
the result of spending hours in the sun like the highlights in Rebecca’s sleek tresses. Sidney’s rays of sunshine came from
a box and were painted on. She applied tinted lip gloss and glared at herself one last time. “Okay, if you’re going to do
this thing, do it,” she murmured aloud.

Inside the store, she grabbed a cart and began throwing a few items into it on her way to the meat department. Nothing frozen;
it was a half-hour drive back to Ham Bone. How she would explain the out-of-town shopping trip to Jack, she still didn’t know.
She was not one to lie. The seafood case came into view. Behind it, a young man wearing an apron and plastic gloves stooped
to arrange salmon fillets on a bed of crushed ice. Sidney took a sharp right, not even daring a glance to the left where the
red meats were displayed. After all, she never touched beef or pork. Jack knew that better than anyone. It had been a standing
joke with them while they dated. A red meat–loving butcher and a fanatic vegetarian. Jack had insisted that opposites attract,
while Sidney was repelled by the hormone- and chemical-infused slabs of flesh that he consumed. He had corrupted Tyson on
their outings, sneakily buying him hot dogs and pepperoni pizzas, barbecuing hamburgers on a portable hibachi that Jack kept
in the back of his canopied truck. Long after their breakup, her son had begged her to stop at the Burger Barn every time
she drove past.

In the safety of the organic produce section, Sidney collected her thoughts while weighing bunches of romaine lettuce in her
hands. At $1.99 each, she was determined to get the heaviest one.