The sign was white with the name of the school painted in building-block letters in bright primary colors. In the center was an old-fashioned little red schoolhouse surrounded by green grass and flowers, and around the edges blue and yellow numbers formed a border. There was a childlike look to the sign, perfectly appropriate to its purpose.
“My nieces and nephews did the original. I used their work as a pattern for this. How long do you think it’ll last?” she asked, matter-of-factly acknowledging that nothing had much chance of staying new, bright and shiny for long down here.
“Until someone gets smart enough to realize that they might not be able to damage it but they can get rid of it entirely by removing the bolts.” He thought of the kids responsible for most of the vandalism on Serenity these days—teenagers mostly, dropouts like him, with nothing to fill their hours but trouble and no one to care about the trouble—and added, “Maybe a while.”
She smiled.
He hadn’t meant the words to be amusing. There was a serious shortage of smart kids on Serenity. Smart kids either went on to someplace better or pickled their brains in booze, dulled them on drugs or got themselves killed. They didn’t roam the streets or gather in the park at night with the punks. They didn’t spray-paint graffiti, break windows, scatter garbage, trample newly planted flowers or vandalize signs.
“If they figure out how to take it off, I’ll weld the next one in place.” She brushed a carpet fiber from the thick plastic, then looked at him. “You don’t work weekends.”
Though it wasn’t a question, he shook his head in answer anyway.
“What do you do? Hang out with friends?”
The question made him stiffen. It was one thing to be friendless by choice, another altogether to be alone because it was everyone else’s choice. There was something shameful in no one wanting to know you, in having your every move scrutinized, in seeing suspicion, wariness and distrust in every face you looked into. It was even more shameful when you’d earned those responses. When you knew you were every bit as worthless as everyone believed. When you couldn’t even say for sure yourself that you deserved trust. Wasn’t that a hell of a situation? He didn’t know himself whether he was trustworthy.
“No,” he said, his voice as cold as hers had been friendly. “Not with friends.”
“Then...” She looked away; then back, and smiled awkwardly. “Want to go to lunch with me?”
He gave her a long, hard look. “Hasn’t O’Shea given you the standard stay-away-from-Reid-he’s-a-punk speech yet?”
Her smile turned gentle. “I don’t think he gives that speech anymore. I’m just asking you to lunch in a restaurant with other people. No one could find anything wrong in that.”
She was wrong. Jamey could. No doubt the Wades could. Even Karen, the only person in the world who had any faith in Reid at all, would object to his spending time with her young assistant. Hell, even he knew it was a bad idea.
So why the hell was he about to agree?
The restaurant was a hole-in-the-wall downtown, a place open only for lunch and only six days a week. Cassie had eaten there at least three times a week until she’d quit her downtown job. Lunches from now on were likely to be brought from home and eaten at school with the kids, and she could hardly wait.
Folding her hands together in her lap, she watched as Reid studied the menu: Jamey had stopped giving the warning speeches, she had told him, but it wasn’t true. One day she’d gotten too obvious in her scrutiny of Reid, and his father had informed her that Reid’s reputation was well deserved. She hadn’t asked for further information, and Jamey hadn’t offered it. She’d heard enough gossip from neighbors to understand what he was talking about. Reid had grown up with no father at all and not much of a mother. He had run wild and had been in trouble with the police since he was a kid. His best friend had been a major felon by the time he was twenty and had died at the age of twenty-five.
So Reid had run with the wrong crowd. That didn’t mean he was like them. He’d never killed anyone. He’d never hurt anyone, had never taken part in any crime against a person. Yes, he’d broken plenty of laws, but that was what kids with no parental guidance did in places like Serenity. Maybe he had been a punk, but there was plenty of blame to go around for it—to Reid himself, to Jamey and Meghan Donovan, to society in general.
And he was trying to change, even though it meant giving up his friends. Even though it meant still living with suspicion and contempt. Even though no one but Karen had any faith at all that he was making a serious effort. Didn’t that count for something?
“The menu is limited, but the food is good,” she said at last.
He closed the menu and laid it aside. “You come here often?”
Delia, the waitress, had greeted her by name and hadn’t bothered handing her a menu. She ordered the same thing every time she came through the door: a chef’s salad, minus the ham and turkey and with dressing on the side. “I used to. I used to work a block and a half that way.” She waved toward the wall hung with photos of the downtown district as it looked seventy-five years ago, then smiled. “Starting Monday, my income’s going to drop so drastically that I probably won’t see the inside of a restaurant again unless I take a part-time job washing dishes in one.”
“So why did you take Karen’s job?”
“I want to teach.”
“Teach in some exclusive private school.”
“I want to teach on Serenity.”
The look he gave her was flat and blank. “Why?”
“Because I can make a difference.”
“Anyone who can teach can make a difference, whether it’s in a public school, private or some dump like Serenity. Why waste your time in a school with no budget with a bunch of hopeless kids in the neighborhood from hell when you can get better results elsewhere with better conditions and better pay?”
“I like a challenge. Besides, I don’t believe the kids on Serenity are hopeless. They’ve just never had much of a chance. With such small classes, we’ll be able to give them the attention they need to catch up to and even surpass their grade level. When they’ve gone as far as they can and have to leave us to transfer to public school, at least they won’t be behind the other students. They will have learned everything those kids have learned and more.”
He shook his head, his disagreement faintly derisive. “You’re talking about kids with every disadvantage in the world against them. Teaching them to read and write isn’t going to magically improve their lives. It’s not going to change the fact that they’re poor. It’s not going to bring an end to the violence they live with. It’s not going to change who they are or where they come from.”
“We don’t want to change who they are or where they come from. There’s no shame in being from Serenity. My parents lived more than half their lives there. My brothers and sisters grew up there. I lived there myself.”
“For how long? A couple of years?”
She answered evenly, unapologetically. “I was four when we moved away.”
“Four.” He looked and sounded as if he didn’t know whether to be scornful or amused. She decided to give him a nudge toward the latter.
“I was a very mature four-year-old,” she announced in all seriousness.
One corner of his mouth almost lifted into the beginning of a smile, but it was such an unaccustomed expression for him that he couldn’t quite manage it. In all the times they’d been together, at the neighborhood parties and working at the school, she had never seen him smile. Not when everyone else was laughing and talking and he was standing just far enough back to be apart. Not when he was putting his considerable talent to work on his murals. Not when he was carrying on the simplest of conversations with his father or stepmother.
“What do you remember from those four years on Serenity?”
“Nothing. I grew up hearing about it, though.”
“Hearing about it isn’t the same as living it.”
“If you dislik
e it, why do you stay? Is it because Jamey’s there?”
His harsh, mocking look returned. “That would make everyone happy, wouldn’t it, if I packed up and left.”
“Karen would be sorry to see you go. Jamey would be sorry.” And she would be sorry. She would regret that she hadn’t had enough time to get to know him. She would regret what might have been. “Why do you stay?”
“Where would I go?”
“Someplace where they don’t know you. Where they don’t expect the worst of you. Someplace where you could start over again, where your reputation didn’t precede you. Someplace where you could be just Reid Donovan. Not Jamey O’Shea’s son. Not Ryan Morgan’s friend. Not Jimmy Falcone’s boy. Just Reid.”
He didn’t answer. Maybe he didn’t want to appear sentimental—or worse, foolish—by admitting that his father was the reason he stayed in a place where acceptance was so hard to come by. Or maybe he didn’t want to acknowledge that the idea of going someplace new, where he would have no ties, where he would be a stranger to everyone, was too daunting to contemplate. Maybe he found Serenity, for all its despair, hopelessness and lack of welcome, an easier place to be. At least it was familiar. At least there people knew him. Maybe they didn’t trust him, but they shared a history with him.
Instead, he watched silently as Delia served their food. His hamburger, greasy and seasoned heavily with black pepper, smelled good enough to make Cassie’s mouth water, tempting enough to remind her that she hadn’t had a burger in years. She wasn’t a strict vegetarian. She indulged an occasional craving for chicken, and it was practically impossible to be New Orleans born and bred and not nurture a fondness for seafood. She tried to avoid red meat, though at the moment she couldn’t help but think that one burger every year or so couldn’t hurt.
Almost as if he’d read her mind—or maybe the hunger in her stare—Reid asked, “Why don’t you eat meat?”
Swallowing, she turned her attention to her salad, drizzling dressing over it. “What makes you think I don’t?”
“You’ve never had a hamburger at one of Karen’s cookouts. You always bring salads and eat those.”
He was right. Salads of all varieties were her specialty, fixed whenever she needed a dish for family meals, office parties or neighborhood cookouts. Everyone liked them, and she ensured that there was always something she could eat on the menu. She was surprised, however, that he’d noticed. No one else had. “I quit eating meat when I was fifteen.”
“Why?”
“I wish I could say it was out of respect for the animals with whom we share the planet, that I was acknowledging their equality with us, that I no longer wished to take part in a -carnivorous ritual based on our arrogant and inaccurate presumption of superiority.” She shrugged. “Truth is, I was fifteen, and I did a lot of weird things then. I made a serious effort to be different from all the other kids my age. I dressed all in black. I listened to Celtic music, read the great Russian novels for pleasure and went only to foreign films. Life was one great drama. Eventually, to my family’s tremendous relief, I grew up and started behaving more normally. I just never got back into the habit of eating meat.”
A moment’s silence descended over the table as they focused on their food. After a time, though, Reid spoke. Reluctance colored his voice, as if he didn’t want to be making conversation. She wondered why he did. “I did a lot of stupid things when I was fifteen. I hitchhiked from here to Atlanta, then back again, without telling anyone I was going. I quit school, got arrested a half-dozen times, hooked up with the Morgans, did my first job for Falcone and punched out Jamey.”
Cassie’s expression remained unchanged, although inside she was wide-eyed and openmouthed. She couldn’t imagine any circumstance in the world where she would even talk back to her father, much less physically strike him. A child, no matter how old, no matter what the provocation, simply didn’t do that to a parent. But Jamey O‘Shea—now a devoted husband, good friend and protector of Serenity Street’s vulnerable—hadn’ t been one-tenth the father Patrick Wade was. No doubt he had been as much to blame for the incident as Reid. “Why did you go to Atlanta?”
“I was looking for Meghan.”
Meghan Donovan, Cassie knew from gossip, had been a Serenity Street girl. She and Jamey had married young and divorced a few months later, soon after Reid’s birth. She had taken their son out of state—explaining in part, at least, Jamey’s failure as a father—and then had brought him back to live with her mother. Other than a derisive comment from Karen that Meghan’s mothering had been worse than Jamey’s fathering, Cassie knew nothing else about Reid’s life before he’d come to Serenity. “This was after she’d brought you here to live?”
His mouth curved into a thin, bitter smile. “She brought me here to meet my grandmother and my father. When she didn’t come back in ten days the way she’d promised, I thought maybe she had forgotten, so I hitched a ride back home.”
She needed a moment to consider that: a mother who could forget to reclaim her child after a visit to another state. With thirteen kids, it would have been perfectly understandable if Rosemary Wade had occasionally left one behind somewhere, but it had never happened, not even for an instant. She had always known where each of them was at any given time. She had always looked out for them, had always loved them. Even now, with all of them grown, their mother still worried over them, still kept tabs on them. Cassie simply couldn’t imagine any mother as thoughtless and unconcerned as Reid was so casually describing. “Did you find her?”
He shook his head. “A neighbor told me all I needed to know. There was this man....” The bitter smile reappeared. “Meghan always did love men—any man who would support her for a while, buy her booze or feed her drug habit. I’m sure whatever he offered was too good to turn down just because her kid was expecting her to come back for him.”
Cassie pushed away her salad so she could rest her arms on the edge of the table. “I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter.” He said it carelessly, as if the fact that his own mother had abandoned him with strangers in favor of an affair with yet another temporary man meant nothing to him. Surely it was just an act. Surely it must have hurt tremendously to be callously rejected by the one person required by the laws of nature to love him.
“So you came back to Serenity and stayed.”
“I was fifteen. What else could I do?”
He’d come back, dropped out of school and started getting into trouble—classic signs of teenage rebellion. Too bad someone—his father, his grandmother or social services—hadn’t intervened and given him the guidance needed to turn his life around. Too bad the only people interested in him had been the wrong ones. Of course, people like Ryan Morgan and Jimmy Falcone preyed on kids like Reid—the abandoned, the rejected, the disillusioned, the hurting. They became family to kids whose own families didn’t want them. They gave them a place to belong and a group—a gang—to belong to.
One of Karen’s goals, both with Kathy’s House and the alternative school, was to give those kids a choice, to show them that they had options. They could get an education and improve the quality of their lives. They could have family and friends. They could belong somewhere without taking their lives into their hands, without turning their backs on society, without stooping to the level of the Ryan Morgans and the Jimmy Falcones.
It was too late to save the fifteen-year-old boy whose mother had abandoned him with strangers who wouldn’t or couldn’t fulfill their obligations to him. But it wasn’t too late to help the man he’d become. It wasn’t too late to be the friend he needed.
She wondered if there was even the slightest chance of ever being the woman he needed.
Forcing the question away, she smiled. “So you came back to Serenity. You ran wild for a white—” most of his life, she thought to herself “—then straightened up. You don’t associate with your old friends. You work. You support yourself in a law-abiding manner. Have you ever considered doing volunteer w
ork for Karen?”
The look he gave her was blank. He was probably thinking about all the hundreds of hours he’d spent painting, scraping, repairing, tearing down and building back up, all for no pay, for nothing more than Karen’s gratitude and his father’s grudging respect. What more, he probably wondered, could she expect him to do?
“I know you’ve done a lot of work at the house. I was thinking about with the kids. The young boys. Most of them don’t have fathers living in the area. If they have older brothers, they’re usually in trouble, in gangs or in jail. They could use a role model.”
For a moment, he simply stared at her. Abruptly he got to his feet, pulled some money from his pocket and picked up the bill, then settled his gaze on her again. “We used to call Karen the crazy lady when she first came to Serenity.” His voice was cold and derisive as he shook his head. “Darlin’ she ain’t got nothin’ on you.”
Chapter 2
A role model.
A day later, Cassie’s suggestion still held the power to amuse Reid. It still held the power to rankle. Nobody in his right mind could ever consider him a role model for anything, other than budding juvenile delinquents. Hell, he’d never even managed to be very good at that. He had lacked Ryan’s aggressive instincts, Vinnie’s viciousness, Trevor’s utter lack of conscience. He hadn’t gotten a kick out of taking someone else’s property, had always been uncomfortable with the idea of profiting from illegal activity. He had never enjoyed threatening, intimidating or the possibility of assaulting anyone.
He had only wanted to belong, and Serenity Street was the only place he’d ever managed that. The punks everyone was so scornful—and so afraid—of were the only people he’d ever fit in with.
And this idiot teacher thought he would make a good role model for young boys at risk. Hell, the kids with a parent or guardian who gave a damn had been warned away from him since they were babies. Half of them were afraid of him. None of them trusted him. As for the kids with no one who cared enough to protect them, they weren’t interested in learning from his mistakes. Any lessons they might care to learn from him would involve hot-wiring a car, the quickest way to pop a stereo out of a dash, the best place to fence stolen electronics or which local drug dealer paid the highest salary to his juvenile lookouts.
The Taming Of Reid Donovan Page 3
