Child by Chance

“Fine. School was fine. Okay?”

His son’s first day of in-school suspension and all he had to say was fine?

“What did you do?”

“Sat.”

“Did you go to the cafeteria to eat your lunch?” Sherman, as he’d been instructed, had packed sandwiches. He’d added celery sticks and a couple of Kent’s favorite cookies, too.

“No.”

He frowned. “What about your juice?”

“Someone got it for me.”

He nodded. Okay. So maybe this was good. Kent was seeing that if he misbehaved, he’d be taken out of society. Such as it was.

Brooke wouldn’t be happy with their son missing lunch with his friends. Hell, he wasn’t happy about it. Kent had been alienated enough from the regular kids, as he called them now, when his mother was killed.

Before the accident, Kent had been such a great kid. That person was still there inside him. Sherman knew it. And the counselor Kent was seeing seemed to think so, too. Somehow they just had to get through the anger stage of the grief process.

“Did Mrs. Barbour have anything special for you to do?” He put a plate of salad in front of his son.

“Nope.”

“Did your teachers come in and give you assignments?” Retrieving foil-wrapped bread from the oven, he dropped it on the table along with some peanut butter and a knife.

“Nope.”

He sat. Opened his napkin on his lap. Picked up his fork. “You just sat there all day and did nothing?”

Not at all what he’d envisioned when he’d asked for his son to spend the week in the principal’s office.

“No.” Kent was attacking his salad as if it was a banana split.

“You did schoolwork, then?”

“Duh, Dad, it’s school.”

The disrespect hurt as much as it irritated. He let it slide. Took a bite of salad. Missing the days when Brooke used to make it with fresh lettuce, cutting up cucumber and onion and celery and broccoli while he grilled fresh chicken for the top.

“So how’d you know what to do?” he asked, chewing.

Kent pushed salad onto his fork with his thumb. “Mrs. Barbour gave me a list.”

Sherman picked up a piece of bread he didn’t want, touching his son’s wrist and motioning with the bread, then used it to push food onto his fork. “You just said she didn’t have anything for you to do,” he said.

“I said she didn’t have anything special for me to do. It’s all just regular stuff that we always do.” The boy picked up a piece of lettuce with his fingers and popped it into his mouth.

Biting back the retort that sprang to his tongue, Sherman took a bite of salad and hoped he didn’t get indigestion.

“Did you get it all done?” he asked a moment or two later. Were they at least going to get to skip homework that night and go straight for the basketball game he wanted to watch? Kent loved basketball—or, really, any sport—and so far, they still bonded over their teams.

“No.”

He stopped chewing. “No?”

“No.”

Picking up a piece of bread, Kent used it to shove a huge bite of salad onto his fork the way Sherman always urged him to.

And now Sherman was worried. Why would the boy purposely do something to please him? Why start following the rules at that exact moment?

“Why not?” he asked. If Kent thought he was going to stop doing his schoolwork altogether, things were going to get a hell of a lot harder on him. While the boy had been acting out a lot, so far he’d maintained excellent grades. And so Sherman had been more willing to go along with the counselor’s recommendation and give Kent some slack on some of the rest of it.

Because Dr. Jordon had recommended a less severe course of action, and because Sherman understood Kent’s anger and had a hard time finding it within himself to be hard on the boy. He’d rather die for him than hurt him.

Kent shrugged. “I got extra to do,” he said. And dunked his bread into his chocolate milk, dripping chocolate on the table as he slurped the mess between his lips.

CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_8d3250b1-e6b3-5327-9e96-2d40e6c39070)

“WHAT ARE WE going to do with this?” Kent frowned as he studied his partially completed collection of photos and moved a motorcycle up to a corner of the board—farther away from the center of his life, she noted silently.

“Why do we have to do something with it?” Talia prevaricated—something she was really good at. Better than giving direct answers, for sure.

“I dunno.” He shrugged. “Just seems like we should.”

Shoulds and have-tos seemed to carry weight with the boy. If for no other reason than so he could break the rules. And yet...

“I mean, why do all the work if it’s for nothing?”

“Just for fun.”

“You don’t go to school to have fun,” he said, as though she’d never been a student.

Every day for three days he’d been sitting at his desk when she arrived, dressed in pants—sometimes jeans but always a clean and new-looking pair—and a shirt and sweater or sweater vest. She’d never seen him in tennis shoes.

“There’s nothing wrong with enjoying learning,” she said, watching as he swapped the positions of a backyard grill and a video game character. He had an eye for shape and color. And she itched to intervene, to make suggestions, to take part.

But she couldn’t.

This was his story. His expression. The collage was possibly going to be her only insight into the person who was her son.

She was there to facilitate only. Just like giving birth to him. She hadn’t been a participant in his life. Not since Tanner had had her baby’s father arrested and Talia had made the decision to give him up for adoption. Her role was facilitator.

Still, as he bent over his collage, she longed to touch his hair. To smooth the little piece that wanted to curl just above his ear. Was that why his father kept Kent’s hair so short? Because it had a tendency to curl?

Talia’s hair was straight. And blond. Nothing like Kent’s. Kent’s hair came from Rex. The high-school teacher who’d gone to jail for having sex with his student.