A Son's Tale

“No, Daddy, she did not.”

George stood. “Do not waste my time again, daughter.” He turned away and then turned back and said, “A word of warning. If you want me to trust you with unsupervised visitations once the boy is settled in where he belongs, then you’d better not try to go against my wishes again. Do not resist me, Morgan. You will lose.”

Morgan cried all the way back to the day care, but she made it in time to greet the dance instructor with a smile and introduce her to the children in her care.

* * *

PLAYING A HUNCH, Cal didn’t stay outside for basketball practice. He shot hoops with Sammie until his father came out to join them, and then, as soon as Frank appeared, he remembered a phone call he had to make and excused himself to his home office.

When Morgan arrived to collect her son, Frank was on the driveway next to Sammie, helping the boy with ball handling and foot positioning. Cal headed out to greet his student, but by the time he made it outside she was already pulling away.

“I told her you were on a business call,” Frank said when Cal appeared.

In spite of spending the past hour and a half in the Tennessee heat dribbling a basketball, his father wasn’t even sweating.

And if the old man knew that Cal had made up the excuse of the call—what call would a college professor need to take that lasted an hour and a half?—he was playing a game of tit for tat. Or calling Cal’s bluff.

Either way, Cal didn’t like it. So he pretended not to notice. If he gave his father that satisfaction, there was no telling what conclusions the man would draw. And no telling what hell Cal would pay for them.

“I made spaghetti,” he said instead, and followed Frank into the house.

“That call you got at work,” Cal said lightly, while the two of them sat watching a rerun of a college basketball scrimmage on a satellite sports channel, eating the supper Cal had prepared. “Don’t worry about it. It’s all taken care of.”

Fork resting on his plate, Frank didn’t look up, didn’t move except to say, “You talked to Ramsey Miller?”

“Yep. He won’t be bothering you anymore.”

With a slight nod, Frank took another bite of dinner. And a couple of seconds later, his gaze rose to the game once more. His father didn’t ask how he’d found Miller. Or what was said.

Cal wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. But because he wanted his father to let it go, he did, too.

“The boy has a problem,” Frank said, halfway through his plate of food.

“Sammie? What problem?” Cal asked, juggling his plate with the remote as he muted their regular dinner companion.

“Seems he got invited to try out for the junior high basketball team.”

“Junior high? Sammie’s ten.”

“Going into the fifth grade.” Frank nodded. “Junior high is sixth through ninth here. He’d be playing one year early.”

“Who invited him?”

“The coach came by his school. Knows someone named Julie.”

“And does Julie know about the invitation?”

“Not as far as Sammie knows. He asked the coach not to say anything to anyone.”

Cal didn’t like the sound of this. Sammie’s face had been planted all over the news the week before. Every creep in the city would know who he was.

And who his grandfather was.

“How do we know this guy’s really a coach of anything?”

“Sammie knows who he is. He meets with boys in gym class starting in the fourth grade.”

“So why not tell anyone?”