by Susan Wiggs
If she accomplished nothing else here, Kim thought, at least she could remedy that. She would help her mother sort out her finances. Now Kim understood the reason why Penelope had not urged her to visit. Her mother hadn’t wanted to burden her with the knowledge of her true circumstances. Hadn’t wanted to poison a daughter’s memories of her father with something so inconvenient as the truth.
Things happened for a reason. Kim would do whatever it took to help her mother. If this meant moving to a tiny mountain town and rolling up her sleeves, so be it. This was hardly the life Kim had planned for herself, but her own goals and plans and hard work had led to a dead end. She’d been driven by a need to impress her father, burnishing his reputation by making a name for herself. In a way, that was exactly what she did for her clients—made them look good. Clearly there was a flaw in that strategy.
She wasn’t likely to find the answer to her dreams here, but maybe coming here would yield something more precious—the chance to reconnect with her mother. To give back to the one person who had given Kim unconditional love. And maybe, if Kim was very lucky, to figure out a direction that didn’t lead to disaster.
Chapter Four
There were some papers for Bo to sign before the airline could officially release its unaccompanied minor.
“See you around, AJ,” said the flight attendant, handing Bo duplicate copies of the paperwork. She was a pretty woman in her dark uniform and sweater, and in a different situation, Bo might flirt with her, offer to buy her a drink—which he now needed worse than ever.
She offered a smile that somehow hinted she might be open to such an offer. In general, women tended to like him. Now was hardly the time for flirting, though. “He did great,” she reported. “You must be very proud of your son.”
Bo nodded, but didn’t know what to say to that. What the hell was there to say? Twelve years the kid had been on this earth, his flesh and blood, walking around, and this was Bo’s first time to see him. He had no clue what AJ thought; the boy was regarding Bo like a stranger or, at most, a distant relative.
Which pretty much described Bo to a T—distant. Relative.
It was completely screwed up.
And none of it—nada, zippo—was the kid’s fault. So Bo offered his most disarming smile to the flight attendant and said, “Yes, ma’am. I sure am proud.”
A gate agent double-checked the paperwork in AJ’s neck tag. Then she handed Bo a receipt, like a claim check for a rental car. “All set,” the agent said. “Have a nice day. Thanks for flying with us.”
Bo nodded again and stuffed the receipt in his pocket. “Baggage claim’s this way,” he said, indicating the sign.
They started walking, keeping a wide gap between them, like the strangers they were. Naturally, Bo couldn’t help checking him out. AJ was small. Like, really small. Bo didn’t know how big a twelve-year-old was supposed to be, but he was pretty sure AJ was puny.
As they passed a trash can, the kid took the tag from around his neck and dropped it in the garbage.
“Hey, I sure wish we were meeting under different circumstances,” Bo said to him. He didn’t know what the hell else to say.
No response. Maybe the kid was in shock, or something. If so, it was understandable. This was probably the scariest day of the boy’s life.
Bo played Yolanda’s phone call over and over in his head. That she’d called him at all was unprecedented. Over the years, she had called him only a few other times—to tell him of AJ’s birth, to advise him she was marrying some guy named Bruno, and—just last year—to let him know she was getting a divorce.
For reasons of his own, Bo had been more than willing to abide by her wishes, to keep his checkbook open and his mouth shut. He didn’t know diddly squat about being someone’s father, but he sure as hell knew how to give money away.
And then yesterday...the urgent call that didn’t leave him a choice. “Thank God, you answered,” she’d said in a voice he barely remembered.
“Yolanda?”
“I’m in trouble, Bo. There was a raid at work. I’m at the Houston Processing Center of the INS.”
“The INS.” It took a second for him to realize what she was talking about. Then it came to him—Immigration and Naturalization Service—and he felt a sick curl of apprehension in his gut. “Hell, Yolanda, what does that have to do with you?”
“There’s no time to explain,” she said. “I’m not supposed to be making any calls, but I’m desperate, Bo. I’ve been detained.”
He wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but he knew it was nothing good. “What, like a foreigner? I thought you said you grew up in the U.S.”
“I did. They say I’m undocumented, and I have nothing to prove otherwise.”
He winced, hearing her voice shake. There was nothing quite so compelling to Bo as the sound of a woman whose heart was breaking. Truth be told, he couldn’t remember a hell of a lot about Yolanda Martinez—but he remembered what was important. That she had a tender heart and beautiful eyes. That they had been each other’s first love. That she’d been the first to teach him that love alone couldn’t save a person from hurt.
“What do you mean, ‘prove otherwise’?” he’d demanded. “Nobody ever asked me to prove I’m a U.S. citizen.” Even as he said the words, he knew he was being willfully ignorant. People didn’t ask light-haired, blue-eyed Anglos if they were citizens. Such inquiries were reserved for people with dark skin and Hispanic surnames...like Yolanda Martinez. “Okay,” he’d told her, “then just clear it up for them. Show them whatever paperwork they need and everything will be fine.”
“I don’t have anything to show them. Don’t you remember, Bo? They way we ended things... The way my parents were?” She reminded him that she was the only child of ultra-conservative parents. Having a baby at age seventeen had strained her relationship with them, and the years had only increased the distance. Her father had died a while back, and her mother had returned to Nuevo Laredo, her Mexican hometown, just across the Rio Grande from Texas.
Yolanda had no time to explain much more about the situation, but suddenly Bo was part of it. Although he felt sorry for her, he also felt himself suppressing a surge of anger at her, hiding it from AJ. The kid had enough troubles without being told his mother had screwed up. The last thing Bo wanted to do was lower the boy’s opinion of Yolanda.
Rounded up en masse with undocumented employees at the factory where she worked, Yolanda claimed she had no one other than Bo to turn to. “I’m being sent to a detention center,” she’d said in a voice strained by terror and dread. “AJ’s at school...” She related the rest in a furtive, terrified tone. The armed raid had begun without a breath of warning. Seventy undocumented workers had been rounded up for deportation. Many of these workers’ American-born children would be left alone, to be lost in the foster system or fobbed off on relatives, most of whom were undocumented, as well.
AJ had no one, Yolanda had explained between sobs. He was an only child, and she was a single mother. All her trusted friends and relatives had already been detained or deported. With no one else to look after him, AJ would be sent to foster care and lost.
Bo had felt a sick lurch of panic. He didn’t want the kid thrown to the wolves, but hell. He and Yolanda had been in high school when she’d gotten pregnant. Their lives were completely separate; the only tenuous tie had been the flow of Bo’s money into an escrow account set up a dozen years ago. Now, all these years later, that tenuous tie was made flesh and blood: AJ needed Bo.
He’d ponied up for a ticket; the only flight he could get last-minute was a red-eye routed through Chicago, making the journey an all-night ordeal. Mrs. Alvarez, a teacher’s aide at AJ’s school, had helped him. She’d dug up his birth certificate and put him on the plane.
It had been a hell of a night for the kid.
Bo took out his phone. “I need to call Mrs. Alv
arez. I promised to let her know as soon as your flight got in. We’ll see if there’s any word on your mom.”
Finally, a flash of interest sparked in the boy’s eyes. He offered a quick nod. They kept walking as Bo scrolled to her number and hit Send, dialing a woman he’d never met, but whose semihysterical phone call had thrown his life into chaos.
“Mrs. Alvarez?” he said when she picked up. “AJ’s with me. He just got in.”
“Thank you for calling. Is he all right?”
“Seems to be.” He glanced at the dark-eyed stranger. “Quiet, though.”
“AJ? That’s not like him.”
“Any word on Yolanda?” Bo felt the boy looking at him.
“None. I’ve spent hours trying to get answers, but it’s impossible. The bureaucracy is absolutely incredible. The INS and the detention center are closed for the weekend. Nobody knows what’s happening. We’re lucky she managed to call you before they in-processed her at the detention center.”
The sinister terminology made him shudder. “Yeah, lucky. Okay. Well, keep me posted.”
“Of course. Can I speak to AJ?”
“Sure.” Bo handed him the phone.
AJ’s face sharpened as he took it. “Where’s my mom?” he asked. His voice was different from what Bo had expected—and then he realized he hadn’t known what to expect. Not this, though. Not this boyish rasp of emotion as AJ lowered his head and asked, “Is she okay?”
Then he was quiet for a minute, his face solemn. It was the face of a stranger. Bo had trouble wrapping his mind around the idea that this was his kid. He tried to pick out some resemblance, some point of reference that would somehow make sense of all this. But there was nothing. The Yankees cap and Windbreaker, maybe. Bo had sent them in his annual Christmas box to AJ. The fact that the kid was wearing them had to mean something, Bo told himself.
Right, he thought. It didn’t mean shit. Years ago, when Bo had asked to see AJ, Yolanda had claimed that if Bo showed up in AJ’s life, it would only confuse the boy.
Now that he’d met AJ face-to-face, Bo knew that was a total crock. This kid, with his keen, guarded eyes, was not the type to be confused by anything.
AJ handed over the phone. Did all kids have such soft eyes, such thick lashes? Did it always hurt to watch a kid’s chin tremble as he fought against tears? He didn’t want to tell AJ that he’d talked to both the teacher and teacher’s aide at length already. He had been desperate for this not to be happening, and not just because it was inconvenient for him. It was because this sudden upheaval was so brutally cruel to the boy. Bo felt guilty about his earlier impulse to bolt. He would never do that to this kid. It had simply been his default fight-or-flight reaction to the unexpected.
For AJ’s sake, Bo kept mum about his conversation with the teacher. Mrs. Jackson had taken a bleak view of Yolanda’s prospects for getting out of her predicament. “It happens a lot down here,” she explained. “More than people realize. Long-time workers are detained and then summarily deported. And no one seems to worry that much about the kids. School-age children are allowed to go with their parents, but quite often, the parents don’t want that. I’m quite certain Ms. Martinez doesn’t want that for AJ.”
“So what happens to kids whose parents don’t bring them along?”
“They go to relatives if there are any, or into foster care if there aren’t. Some of them—too many of them—fall through the cracks.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“They...the system loses track of them. They’ve been found living in cars or on the street, sometimes in abandoned apartments.”
“And how often do the parents get to come back for their kids?” Bo had asked her.
There was a long hesitation, so long he thought he’d lost her. “Mrs. Jackson?”
“I’ve never seen it.”
Bo didn’t think AJ needed to hear any of that. He put the phone away, saying, “Try not to worry. We’ll figure out how to fix this thing with your mother.”
The kid didn’t say anything, but Bo was sure he could feel doubt radiating from AJ’s every pore.
“It’ll be all right.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know anything about me.”
“True, but right at this moment, I’m all you’ve got.” Bo watched the boy’s face change. “Sorry, that came out wrong. I intend to help you, AJ. That’s all I mean. I’m real sorry your mother never told you anything good about me.”
“She never told me anything about you,” the boy said.
Bo was stunned. “She didn’t explain where the monthly checks came from? The stuff I sent for your birthday and every Christmas?”
The kid shook his head. “I never knew about any checks. The gifts...we didn’t talk about those, either. She just handed them over.”
Bo tamped back a fresh burn of anger at Yolanda. There were lots of times when writing that check meant skipping meals or dodging the rent, but he never let her down. He figured it was the least he could do, since she was raising their child. It never occurred to him that Yolanda wouldn’t explain where the gifts came from. He gritted his teeth against saying what he really thought. “Maybe she didn’t tell you more because she wanted you to feel like you belonged to Bruno.”
“I belong to my mom. Not to Bruno or you.”
“When did you find out...about me?” Bo asked.
“When my dad—when Bruno left. I thought we’d handle it like other families, you know? You get to visit the parent who left. But Bruno, he didn’t want it that way. He said I couldn’t visit because I don’t belong to him.”
What a jackass, thought Bo.
And AJ had been left to deal with the reality that his father came in the form of a monthly obligation instead of a flesh-and-blood guy. Bo wondered if the boy would ever regard him as someone who cared, who would keep him safe and dedicate himself to helping Yolanda. And, yeah, there was probably some pride involved. He wasn’t the jerk Yolanda had painted, and now he had a chance to show his boy the truth.
“Tell you what. You’ve got a home with me for as long as you need it. And I’m going to help your mom. The smartest lawyer in the world just happens to be married to my best friend, Noah,” Bo explained. “Swear to God, I’m not exaggerating. Sophie’s an expert in international law.”
“My mom needs an immigration lawyer,” AJ said, the term sounding disconcertingly adult as it rolled off his tongue. “Is your friend an immigration lawyer?”
“Sophie’s the best possible person to help,” Bo replied. “I told her what happened, and she’s already working with lawyers she knows in Texas, trying to figure out what’s going on down there.”
Sophie had warned him the situation might get complicated. She said this “temporary” detention might last for a while.
Bo didn’t see how the government could keep a hardworking single mother away from her own kid. It didn’t just feel wrong, but inhuman.
They reached the baggage-claim area, and Bo found the carousel that corresponded to AJ’s flight. The conveyor belt was already disgorging pieces of luggage, the occasional box bound with bailing wire, a car seat, a set of snow skis.
“Let me know when you see your bag,” Bo said.
The boy watched the conveyer belt, then glanced at the duct-taped suitcase he toted behind him. “It’s right here,” he said.
Bo frowned. “You mean you don’t have any luggage?”
“Only this.” He indicated the carry-on bag and his backpack.
“Then what are we standing around here for?”
AJ just looked at him.
Damn. There was something that drew him to this kid. This solemn, very unkidlike kid. And it wasn’t just DNA.
“Is this the first time you’ve ever flown in an airplane?” Bo asked.
“First time I’ve ever flown in anything.
”
At last, a glimmer of humor. “Well, hell. This is where the checked luggage comes out. And since you don’t have any, we’re done here.” Bo grabbed the carry-on and led the way to the parking lot. As they stepped through the automatic doors, the outside air assaulted them with bone-cutting January cold. The cindery reek of jet fuel and diesel exhaust bloomed in thick puffs from the shuttle buses.
AJ seemed dazed. He hunched up his shoulders and stuffed his hands in his pockets. Bo stopped walking and lifted the suitcase. “Hey, you got an extra coat in here?”
The kid shook his head, plucking the nylon fabric of the Yankees Windbreaker. It flapped thinly against his skinny arms and shoulders. “This is all I got.”
Great.
“It was hot in Houston,” AJ added.
Now that, Bo could understand. Once in a blue moon, a cold spell might hit the Gulf Coast in a fistlike front known as a Blue Norther. Usually, it was plenty warm down there, and often muggy. Growing up, Bo hadn’t owned a coat, either, except for his varsity letterman’s jacket, purchased by someone from the high-school booster club; no way could he have afforded it himself. Now, that thing had been a work of art—smooth black boiled wool, sleeves of butter-soft cream-colored leather.
He peeled off his olive-drab parka, handed it to AJ. “Put this on.”
“I don’t need your coat.”
“Yeah, well, I don’t need you catching cold on top of everything else, so put it on.” A knifelike gust of wind sliced across the multilevel lot.
“People don’t catch cold from being cold,” AJ objected. “That’s an old wives’ tale.”
“Just put on the damned coat. It’s a long walk to the car.”
The boy hesitated, but then put on the parka. Bo couldn’t quite conceal his relief. He didn’t know what he would have done if the kid had defied him. Bo was a bartender. A ballplayer. Not a dad.
