“I don’t know who he is.”
“Just a friend. I worked with him at the gas station for a while. Anyway, I really gotta go.”
“To class. You’ll never make it in time.”
“I meant to bed.”
“And skip class? Jer—”
He spread his big hands wide as he towered above her on the narrow stairs. “Look, Mom. I’ve got it handled. Trust me.”
“How? When you’ve been out smoking and drinking on a school night, then lying to me about it. Hmmm. How can I trust you?”
“Then don’t.” He changed his tack and shrugged his shoulders. “Don’t trust me. I don’t care.”
“And that’s the problem. You don’t care about anything. We’re talking about your future here. Yours! Not mine!”
“Again. We’re talking about it again. I’m sick of it.”
“And I’m sick of you just rolling through life, letting it carry you along without any direction.”
“Is this the part of the speech where you tell me what you were doing at my age? How you were playing college ball and engaged to Dad and having a goal of becoming a super-detective?” he asked.
Bristling a little, she said, “You know, I was just getting to that part, but I see it’s sunken in. Good!”
“Can I go now?”
“You’re asking? You the ‘adult’?”
“I’m just trying to show some respect.”
“Well, show some for yourself, would you? This is your life we’re talking about.”
“Then let me handle it my way.”
Give me strength, she silently thought and realized the argument was going nowhere and fast. “Listen, I have to get to work. I’ve got a job,” she’d said, “a pretty important one, but this conversation is not finished.”
“I know,” he’d grumbled as he passed her and made his way down the rest of the stairs, “it never is.”
And for the first time in what seemed like forever, she’d actually agreed with him. “You got that right.” She’d hurried up the stairs and wondered what had happened to the little boy who had walked down the lane carrying his lunch box, his backpack firmly on his shoulders, a smile usually on his face. God, she missed that kid and she only hoped when Jeremy ever came out of the chrysalis of his teen years, he would emerge as the smart, strong, clever man that kid had promised to be.
That’ll only happen if you stick to your guns and be the mother he needs even while he’s pushing you away. It was moments like this that she really missed Joe. And therein lay part of the problem: They both did. Jeremy was screaming for his father and the one she’d given him in Lucky Pescoli hadn’t begun to fill Joe’s fatherly shoes.
But Santana could. If you gave him the chance.
Inwardly she’d cringed at that thought because she’d always silently sworn that she could be both mother and father to her kids. Turns out, their attitudes had shrieked that she’d been dead wrong. Arrogant and wrong.
The rest of the morning hadn’t gone much better.
Now, at the station, after having unloaded on an unsuspecting Joelle, she buried herself in her work. She’d deal with her kids tonight and somehow make things right with the receptionist. Joelle was Joelle: irritating, but, for the most part, benign. And besides, silver and gold Santa sayings or not, she could whip up one helluva Christmas crumb cake!
Chapter 14
“It was a closed adoption,” O’Keefe’s cousin Aggie was saying from the other end of the wireless connection. “And when I say ‘closed,’ I mean shut tight, locked and embedded with an indecipherable code. That was the way the mother wanted it and Dave and I agreed. Gabe was ours. Alone. We didn’t want his biological mother coming back into our lives, making demands or causing trouble or wanting him back.”
“Do you know if he was trying to find his birth parents? Had he checked any of the Web sites, attempted to contact them?”
“What? Gabe? No! None of my kids are interested in contacting their biological parents. I mean, I suppose they might change their minds, but not now. And Gabe, he never even mentioned the adoption even though he knew about it, of course. We’ve told the kids the truth from the beginning ... Why?”