Showers in Season (9 page)

Later, when Tory went inside, Barry was nowhere to be found. She checked on Spencer and Brittany, saw that they were sleeping soundly. Annie had long since gone home. The checkbook lay out on the counter where Barry had paid her.

She went back to their bedroom and found that Barry’s pillow was gone. Further exploration revealed that the basement door was open. He had apparently opted to sleep down there tonight. She fought the urge to kick the door shut, but she didn’t want to turn this crisis into a war.

The truth was, she didn’t want to sleep in the same bed with him tonight, anyway, knowing what he wanted for their child. Funny thing, she thought. Two weeks ago, when she’d first learned she was pregnant, it had drawn them so close together. They had counted seconds together, waiting for the results of the test. She had enjoyed being the pregnant wife. Now they couldn’t even stay in the same room together. Even being in the same house would be harder and harder as the months of her pregnancy passed by.

She touched her stomach as if silently telling her baby that one of her parents cared. Then she got ready for bed and dropped into it. Her eyes were tired from crying, and her body was weary from the tension that had worked on her today. She wondered how many more days like this she would have before the baby came. And then there would be a lifetime of crisis management.

She dropped into bed and tried to pray, but tears came instead. Quietly, she cried herself to sleep.

The next afternoon, Cathy bent over the mangled poodle that had been hit by a car not an hour earlier. She had sedated it to keep it still and out of pain while she tried to X-ray it, but now it was obvious that the animal had several broken bones and a punctured lung, and was hemorrhaging from somewhere in its abdominal cavity.

“So if I only had twenty more dollars, I could get the shoes that I absolutely have to have,” Annie was saying, following Cathy around the office as if she was doing nothing more important than dusting the wood.

“Annie, I’m a little busy right now.”

“But Mom, how am I supposed to talk to you if I don’t come here? You’re never home.”

Her children always used this tactic to get her attention. Cathy was used to it.

“I get home every day when you do,” Cathy said. “This is an emergency, and you know it. There’s a lady out in that waiting
room crying her eyes out because this dog, who is the only family member she apparently has, is on its deathbed.”

Annie absently reached out to stroke the animal’s groomed ear. “I’m sorry about that, Mom. You act like I’m cold-hearted or something. I’m not. I just need shoes.”

“Annie, you
have
shoes. You have shoes in every color under the rainbow in several different styles, and I’m just not real concerned that you have a new pair of hiking boots at the moment. You
have
hiking boots.”

“I have those old cheesy kind. But who wants to wear those? They look like something you’d wear in the army.”

“And these others don’t?”

“No. These others are classy. They’re in style. Everybody has them.”

“They’re
hiking
boots, Annie. That’s all they are. You never hike anywhere. Besides, you bought the other pair, and you can live with them.” She went to the door and opened it for Annie to leave. “You’ll have to excuse me now. I’ve got to tell this dog’s owner what the prognosis is.”

Annie just stood there, petting the dog’s ear and giving her a dreadful look. “Are you gonna put her to sleep?” she asked.

Cathy sighed. “I don’t know. It’ll be up to the owner.”

“I’ll be in your office,” Annie said, lowering her voice. “Be gentle. You know how you can be.”

Cathy spun around. “No, Annie. How can I be?”

“Well, abrupt, as my English teacher likes to say. You know. ‘Sorry your dog got hit, but he’s a goner, so let’s just put him out of his misery.’”

Cathy’s mouth fell open. “I would
never
say that.”

“Well, okay, so sue me. I’m just saying you’re a little unsympathetic sometimes. Try talking to you about shoes.”

Cathy left her, shaking her head, and went into the waiting room to sit down with the crying woman. “Miss Anderson, I’ve X-rayed your poodle.”

“Shish-kabob,” the woman said, dabbing at her nose with a red bandana.

“Excuse me?” Cathy asked.

“Shish-kabob. That’s what I call her.” The woman patted her chest as if to keep it beating.

“Oh.” Cathy cleared her throat. “I’ve just finished X-raying Shish-kabob, and—”

“You’ve got to save him!” A vein on the woman’s neck stood out, punctuating the seriousness of her words. “Look at me. I can’t live without him. You’ve
got
to save him!” She grabbed Cathy’s coat. “Please!”

Cathy tried to compose herself. The woman obviously needed compassion, even if she was bordering on violent. “I don’t know if I can, Mrs. Anderson. He’s got multiple fractures, he’s punctured a lung, and he’s bleeding internally. Even if I could patch him up, this is going to be a long, excruciating recovery for him. If left alone, he would probably die.”

“Then
don’t
leave him alone!” the woman shouted, and for a moment she reminded Cathy of a mob leader making an offer she couldn’t refuse. “I’ll pay you anything! You’ve got to save him!”

“Miss Anderson, it would take several surgeries. I’m not sure I could get everything the first time. We’d have to insert a feeding tube, put him on a ventilator…”

“I don’t care what it costs,” the woman said, clutching her heart again. “I don’t care what you have to do. Please, I’ll pay you anything.”

Cathy didn’t know what to do. She hated running up a patient’s bill beyond what was reasonable to sustain a pet, but the cost of keeping this dog alive was more than she could handle with the equipment she had. Still, she understood the attachment a lonely woman might have to her pet. “Well, I guess I’d better get in there, then, and see what I can do.”

As she hurried back from the waiting room, the phone began to ring. Since her receptionist had already gone home for the day, because they usually closed at three, Cathy snatched the phone up. “Flaherty Animal Clinic. May I help you?”

“Uh…Mom…” It was Mark’s voice, and something about his tone made her forget the dog slipping away at the back of the clinic, or the hysterical woman out front.

“Mark? What is it?”

“Uh…the principal…sort of…needs to talk to you.”

“The principal?” Before she had a chance to question Mark further, a man’s voice came on the line.

“Dr. Flaherty?”

“Yes?”

“This is Principal Ernest Little. I’m afraid we’ve had a problem this afternoon.”

“A problem?”

“Yes. I’m afraid we caught your son taking drugs in the bathroom.”

“
Drugs?
” she shouted out, and Annie came running up the hall, as if she couldn’t take the chance of missing this. “There must be some mistake!”

“No mistake,” the principal said. “I caught him red-handed. He and the two friends who were with him have been put on three-day suspension, and unfortunately, while we were talking in the office, he missed his bus.”

The blood rushed from her face, and she felt like that woman in her waiting room. Had she been in the principal’s office, she would have climbed across the desk and grabbed him by the throat, and demanded to know what he
meant
by drugs.

“What kind of drugs?” She prayed that it would be something benign. Tums, perhaps.

“Marijuana,” he told her.

“No way!” Cathy cried. “My son was
not
smoking marijuana!”

“I’m afraid he and his friends were caught red-handed.”

“What friends?” she asked. “Who were they?”

“Andy Whitehill and Tad Norris.”

She slapped her forehead and backed up. “I can’t believe this. I told him he was not allowed to hang around with those kids. They’re bad news. Mr. Little, you have to understand that Mark was probably just following the crowd. He’s not the leader type.”

“I’m not suggesting that he is, Dr. Flaherty. But that doesn’t change the fact that he was in the bathroom smoking that stuff. I could actually call the police and have him arrested for possession, but I thought it was better this first time just to call you instead.”

She closed her eyes. “Mr. Little, I appreciate your call. You can be certain that I’ll take care of this from my end. You will never catch my son smoking pot again.” She turned and saw Annie staring at her with her mouth wide open. “Right now, can I send my daughter to get him? I’m kind of in the middle of an emergency. A dog has been hit by a car and I need to do surgery immediately.”

She knew what he was thinking already. He was probably wondering if she considered a dog’s life more important than her son’s. She looked through the glass at the woman still crying in the waiting room. That vein on her neck was getting bigger.

“Certainly. That’ll be fine,” Mr. Little said in a disapproving voice.

“All right, thank you.”

She hung up and thought of throwing her receptionist’s paperweight through the glass, but decided that would be too entertaining to Annie. She was going to throttle Mark. And then she was going to scream and yell at him, and then she was going to spend a few hours making him memorize Scripture. She wondered if there was anything in the Bible about smoking marijuana. She’d have to ask Brenda…or Steve. She was still too new at all this.

Then she realized that she couldn’t tell Steve, the man she had been seeing for five months. She couldn’t let him know that her child was a reprobate who took drugs and got suspended from school.

Who was she kidding? He knew her children weren’t little angels. Already, they’d embarrassed her so many times that she didn’t know why he was still hanging around.

“Mom, what is it?” Annie asked.

She shoved her hair back and looked at her daughter in the doorway. “Annie, I need you to go get your brother.”

“My brother?” she asked. “I just heard the word
marijuana
hollered up the hall, and now you’re telling me that phone call was about Rick?”

“Not Rick. Mark.”

“
Mark?
So what happened?”

“He’s in the principal’s office. Just go right in there and tell the principal who you are—”

Annie’s eyes were round and slightly amused. “Mom, you have to tell me. This is my little brother we’re talking about.”

“Oh, right. Suddenly you’re very concerned about your little brother. It’s moving, Annie.”

“So did he get suspended or what?”

“For three days,” Cathy bit out.

“No way!”

“Annie, go get your brother. I have a poodle to keep alive.”

It was six before Cathy got home to deal with Mark. She had hesitated to leave the poodle, who had casts on three legs, wire stitches in her stomach, a feeding tube down her throat, and a ventilator tube in her lungs. The best she could tell the owner was that the dog would be sustained through the night, but she couldn’t even promise that. The woman didn’t threaten to attack, but went home wailing.

She pulled into the driveway and said a quiet prayer for strength before she went inside. At the back door, she stepped over the three backpacks that had been carelessly tossed down, and saw Annie, Mark, and Rick sitting together before the television in an unusual show of solidarity. Normally, they would be scattered across the house, studiously avoiding each other’s company, except to fight over the telephone or the computer.

Their intense interest in the
Brady Bunch
reruns was hard to swallow. She dropped her purse on the table. The fact that they didn’t turn around told her they were bracing themselves.

“Hi, Mom,” Annie said, glancing back at her. “How’s the poodle?”

“Alive.” Cathy crossed her arms. “What have you got to say for yourself, Mark?”

He looked much younger than thirteen as he turned to face her. “Mom, I didn’t do anything.”

She laughed sarcastically. “I might have expected that, Mark. Of course you did something, and you got caught red-handed.” She walked into the den and stood over him. “I want to know where you got the drugs.”

“Mom, you can get them anywhere.”

“Where did
you
get them?”

“Tad had it.”

“Mark, you know better than that. You know better than to smoke cigarettes in the boy’s rest room, let alone dope!”

“It wasn’t dope, Mom. It’s not like I was freebasing crack or something. It was just a little grass.”

The fact that her baby knew the term
freebasing
brought tears to her eyes. “Mark, what has gotten into you? I knew what would happen if you hung around with those kids. I knew they would drag you down the wrong path. Do you feel better now, Mark, being thrown out of school for three days? Making zeroes on everything that happens while you’re gone? Missing tests?”

“Well, it’s not like I was an A student.”

“Right,” she said. “So now your C’s and D’s will drop to F’s.”

“You don’t have to be so negative.”

“
Negative
! Mark, you must be kidding me!”

Annie tried not to laugh, but the humor overcame her. “That was not the thing to say, Mark.”

“Listen to her!” Cathy shouted. “She knows!”

Rick got up, unfolding to his full six feet. “Mom, don’t be so hard on him. He’s been punished enough.”

“Punished enough?” she shouted back. “Rick, I don’t need advice from you on parenting. If he’d been punished enough, then this wouldn’t have happened!”

“Where’s all that Christian love and forgiveness stuff you’ve been trying to teach us?” Mark asked.

“It doesn’t give my child license to hang around in the bathrooms with kids who take drugs. Mark, Mr. Little could have called the police. You could be in jail tonight.”

“Mom, they don’t send thirteen-year-olds to jail.”

“They send them to the detention center, Mr. Smart-mouth. Would you like me to take you there to show you?”

Mark rolled his eyes, which almost sent her over the edge of control. “You know, now that I think about it, that might be an excellent thing to do. Brenda’s always taking her kids on field trips. Maybe we need to go on one. Tomorrow, while you’re on vacation, I’m going to take you to the juvenile detention hall downtown, and I’m going to show you just how cool it is. And then maybe you’ll think before you decide to take drugs again.”

“I just wanted to see what it was like!” he shouted.

“Now you’ve seen, and you’re going to see a little more. It’s
like
getting suspended from school, it’s
like
being grounded from associating with your friends for the rest of the school year. It’s
like
going to the juvenile detention center, only not as a visitor. Not as a tourist with your mom.”

“Boy, you’ve done it now,” Annie told Mark.

Mark looked distraught. “Mom, I’d rather go to algebra.”

“Well, you’re not going to algebra, because you’re suspended. You’re coming with me.” She stormed into the kitchen, racking her brain for what to cook for dinner. When she reached the counter, she saw the note that Rick had jotted. Steve had called. She hoped to heaven that they hadn’t told him what Mark had done.

She turned back around and saw all three kids still sitting in front of the television. “Go clean up your rooms,” she said. “All of you. And don’t come out until all your homework is done.”

“I don’t have homework,” Mark said. “I’m suspended.”

“Do it anyway.”

“Do
what?
”

“Whatever homework you would have been doing if you hadn’t been suspended.”

“I don’t know what that would be because nobody ever gave it to me.”