The lady’s mouth dropped open, and she blinked at him, then at me. “You have
got
to be kidding.” It was hard to tell whether she was talking to him or to me. “I understand that the alcohol is a big deal, but it wasn’t Dustin’s, and as for climbing the Scissortail, people have been doing that for years.
I
even climbed the Scissortail when I was young. No one ever made a federal case of it.” She straightened her back, her chin jerking up, like I was some kind of lunatic. Nothing new there. You usually don’t get thanks for trying to protect folks from their own stupidity.
“You been out there recently? To the Scissortail?”
“Well, no, but . . .”
“There’s a big set of buoys that says to
Keep off the rocks
.”
“Well, I understand that, but . . .”
“It’s a protected nesting site, for one thing.”
“I understand, but Dustin didn’t know that . . .”
“He can read, can’t he?”
“Well, yes, of course he can.” She checked her watch again, and I felt heat boiling under my collar. If she was in such an all-fired hurry, why didn’t she just admit that her kid did something wrong and move on? Judging by this house, she could bail him out easy enough.
“Then he knew he wasn’t supposed to be up there.” I turned to the boy. He’d gone red and backed away a couple steps, trying to move himself out of the conversation. “Dustin, did you know you weren’t supposed to be up there?”
He fidgeted from one foot to the other.“Well, yeah . . . yes, sir . . . but the other kids said it was okay. They said they do it, like, all the time.”
“Well, maybe you oughta look into the company you keep, then, son.”
He straightened back and got narrow in the eye, like all at once he’d gone mad to the bone. “I’m not your
son
, all right?”
His mom sucked in a breath. “Dustin!”
He swiveled her way with a snotty sneer. “Well, what am I supposed to do, huh? Huh? Just sit here all day by myself? This place is like a prison. There’s nothing to do. I should’ve stayed back in Houston and lived with Dad and Delayne.”
Mom caught a breath again, her hand flying toward her face like the words were a hard right cross. “Dustin!”
He looked satisfied, having landed a blow. “I don’t need the stupid class, either. I’ll take the ticket. Max already Facebooked me. He’s taking the ticket. It’s no big deal.”
“You’re on Facebook with those kids?”
“Yeah, so what.” All of a sudden, Dustin was all attitude. The crying act was gone, and you could tell what was really going on inside. This kid was set to blow.
She pointed a finger in his face. “You know,
so what.
You know what the rules are. You’re not supposed to be adding anybody to your account without asking me.”
“Oh, big deal.” He bowed up his skinny chest, daring her to do anything about it. “I’m not just gonna sit here all day and do nothing. And I’m not wasting my time in some stupid class, either.”
Now Mom had fire in her eye, and the thing with the live gators in the stock trailer seemed easy by comparison. All this teenage stuff was way too domestic for me.
“You are, if I say you are.” She turned a shoulder my way. “You listen to me, Dustin James – ”
“I’m not going! None of the other kids are going. Nobody’s going!” The boy didn’t wait for an answer. He just turned around and ran for the house, leaving his mama there in the yard, her hands in tight fists at her sides. When she turned around, her eyes were welling up again. I knew I needed to close this thing and head out of there before I got dragged into something that was out of my line of work. Wildlife was one thing, but crying women and family issues were another kind of mess altogether.
“Listen,” I said, and handed her my business card and a brochure. “Figure out what you want to do and let me know by the end of the day. The class starts a week from Monday. Deadline to sign up is noon today, but I’ll give him until five o’clock.”
Her hand shook as she tucked the card in her pocket and the brochure under her arm without looking at it. “I don’t have any way to get him to a class. I’m tied up with work all day.” A glance fluttered my way, looking for sympathy, I guessed.
“Ma’am, all I can tell you is, between you and him, you’ll have to figure that out. He needs to understand that the lake isn’t a play toy. Used the wrong way, it’s dangerous.”
She bristled again. “He knows that. He’s just . . . It’s just . . .” She pressed a hand to her forehead, squeezed her eyes shut. “He’s had a tough . . . year. He’s not normally like this.”
“I’m sure he isn’t.”
A crow flew into the tree nearby and let out a loud
caw
. She jumped and glanced at it, then checked her watch again.
“Let me know by the end of the day what you want to do.” I figured it was time for me to leave. “It’s your choice.” I watched a flock of cattle egrets swirl above the lake. One more thing I was already behind on in my job – I was supposed to help with a list of invasive species for some database.The egrets were an invasive species, technically. I could add Burt and Nester’s emu to the list, if I could ever find it. Pretty soon we’d end up counting those, too. “The Corps of Engineers doesn’t keep the lake levels where they used to. A boy died there a couple months ago. Diving accident. Seventeen years old. Jumped off the rocks and never came up.” I turned to head out. “Keep your boy off the Scissortail. For his own good.”
Have patience with all things,
but first of all with yourself.
– St. Frances de Sales
(via Reverend Hay)
Andrea Henderson
By the time I talked to Dustin and finally headed off to work, I was boiling in my own stew. Dustin didn’t want to accept responsibility for having made a bad situation worse by not filling me in about the water safety class. All we’d done was talk in circles again. It didn’t help that I was late leaving for work, and frustrated, and once again feeling like a complete failure as a parent.
Why was it so hard to find the dividing line between acknowledging Dustin’s pain and allowing him to act out in ways that were inappropriate and disrespectful, even potentially dangerous? I wanted to be his confidant, his comforter, his soft place to fall, but at the same time, he needed a parent, a regulator, an enforcer of the rules. I couldn’t seem to balance both roles, yet I couldn’t afford to fail at either one. No matter what it took, I had to bring my little boy through this transition in life, and judging by the fact that his father hadn’t even returned my calls about the late child-support check and the visitation that was supposed to take place in August, help wouldn’t be coming anytime soon.
If I failed, Dustin would fail. The thought was terrifying. The fact that his father was busy building a new life with a new wife and two young stepdaughters was enough to send me over the brink. Mentally replaying the incident with the game warden didn’t help, either. How dare he. He didn’t know a thing about what Dustin was going through.
Keep your boy off the Scissortail . . . for his own good.
He can read, can’t he?
Maybe you oughta look into the company you keep, then, son.
The more I recycled the conversation as I commuted to work, the more irritated I got. Maybe the game ranger . . . warden . . . whatever, was just doing his job, but he had some nerve acting like he knew Dustin, acting like Dustin was a teenage delinquent, looking for a beer bash on the lake. Dustin had never been to a beer bash in his life. He didn’t even know those kinds of kids, much less hang out with them. He’d just . . . made an impulsive decision yesterday and landed himself in a situation he didn’t know how to handle.
Hadn’t he?
What had possessed him to climb the Scissortail? He was afraid of heights. He wouldn’t even do the high dive at the pool in Houston. I should’ve told the game warden that. There was no way Dustin would have jumped off those rocks. He was probably scared to death the minute he started climbing.
Right now, I could come up with a million intelligent things I should have said to Mr. Mart McClendon, water cop, but when someone is attacking your child, it’s impossible to keep cool. One of these days, I was going to mature into a fully developed adult woman who didn’t react to conflict by getting in a mind frizz. After a master’s degree in counseling, you’d think I would be making progress, but this morning when the game warden had shown up on our dock, I was as unprepared as ever. I was unprepared for Dustin to pick that moment to melt down, too.
I’m not your son, all right?
This place is like a prison. I should’ve stayed back in Houston . . . with
Dad and Delayne.
What a mess. What an incredible mess. Did I have any business counseling families on how to raise their kids, when I couldn’t even guide my own son smoothly through the transition from intact family to shared-custody household?
Was there a smooth transition for that?
Intact family.
How many times had I heard that term thrown around in counseling classes – blithely written it in research papers and in my master’s thesis? Purely an analytical term, meaning nothing. I’d never imagined that term entering the bubble of our lives, crashing into it and leaving a jagged hole, like a bullet penetrating sheet metal, creating sharp shreds that pointed inward. Leaving Dustin and me
detached
. Separated. Not
intact
.
Other than Dustin’s pain and his yearning for the way things used to be, it was the terminology, the labels I hated most, if I really let myself admit the truth, if I really got down to the core. It wasn’t life within our old house or being with Karl I missed. I missed being married in front of the rest of the world. Being
intact
.
I pushed the thoughts away as I drove. One benefit to the flextime arrangement that allowed me to come in at eight thirty, rather than eight, was that I missed some of the morning tangle of commuters heading for jobs in the Dallas Metroplex.
My boss, Dr. Dale Tazinski, fondly known to personnel in our small office as Taz, was in the front hall by the coffee machine when I came in. “Nice of you to join us, Henderson. Hear you had some adventures yesterday.” Fortunately, he was smiling when he said it. Remarkable, considering that I’d already called in this morning to tell Bonnie there had been a problem with Dustin, and I would be a little late. After yesterday’s debacle, if I were the boss, I probably wouldn’t have been as cheerful as Taz. In my two weeks of shadowing him while doing my in-office training, I’d learned that he was amazingly tolerant.
“You missed the morning meeting. It was a quick one, though.” Taz’s belly lopped over the table as he upturned a second coffee cup and saluted my arrival with the pot. “Coffee?”
“Please,” I said, making my way into the entry while juggling my briefcase, my purse, Dad’s car keys, and a cart full of counseling materials and CPS referrals I hadn’t read last night. The door hung open behind me, and since my hands were full, I hooked the toe of my shoe over the edge and pulled it shut. Taz’s secretary had promised me you got good at that maneuver after a while – a necessity, as Taz’s plan to move out of the strip mall that housed his practice was temporarily on hold. The fact that decent real estate cost money had kept him in the decaying building, sharing space with a hair salon, a doughnut shop, and a secondhand furniture store.
Right now he was eyeing a box of chocolate twists the Cambodian lady next door had undoubtedly brought over. My boss was her favorite customer, and every time he got in the mood to actually follow his heart doctor’s advice and lose weight, Mai plied him with freebies. In my weeks of following him around while learning the business, I’d quickly discerned that flattery and food were the ways to his heart. Once you got there, it was a pretty big place, fortunately.
The last thing I wanted to do was take advantage of that kindness. I wanted to prove myself by doing good work. Post-divorce adjustment or not, I needed to be competent and fully put together. Taz had hired me because the load of contract cases referred to his practice by CPS had grown beyond the scope that even a workaholic psychologist and his small staff could handle. He was so desperate that he’d given me the job, even though my only experience was the counseling time I’d racked up at a church-sponsored family crisis center in downtown Houston.
“Tough morning?” Taz asked, tucking away the coffeepot while eyeing the doughnuts. He licked his lips, salivating like one of Pavlov’s dogs.
“Not so bad.” I was afraid to tell the truth and expose instability at home.
No problems here. Nothing I can’t control.
He raised a skeptical brow, studying me with one dull hazel eye wider than the other. One should always be careful when lying to a trained psychologist.
Sighing, I snagged my cup of coffee from the table. “Just a little issue with Dustin. He and some friends had a minor run-in with the lake patrol yesterday. The kids were climbing on the rocks where they shouldn’t have been.”
Taz’s gaze gravitated toward the doughnuts again, following the magnetic pull of carbohydrates and saturated fat. “That doesn’t sound so bad.”
“Well, I didn’t think so, either.” I relaxed and took a sip of my coffee, then leaned against the table. Taz’s counseling powers were working. I was already feeling better about the morning. Maybe the scene wasn’t as traumatic as it had seemed in the moment. Most things aren’t. “The game warden was a real jerk about it, though. He came by to tell me what a delinquent my son was.”