Fireside (38 page)

“Keep up the attitude and it won’t.”

“It’s just that I’ve never seen it.”

Noah spread his arms. “You’re looking at it.”

He had a point. A year ago, Noah Shepherd had been as unattached as Bo, rattling around in a big house all by himself. Now he was married with a family, and happier than Bo had ever known him to be. This was something Bo could never picture for himself, though. Noah was one of those guys who was good through and through. In contrast, Bo was a total screwup.

“We slept together,” he admitted.

“How was it?”

“The first time, very…restful. We slept, nothing else.”

“Get out of town.”

“It’s true. After that…not restful at all.” Bo couldn’t suppress a grin.

“Hey, Bo, get your skates on,” AJ shouted from the lake. “I’ll race you.”

“I need a beer,” Bo said, switching gears.

Noah laughed. “Sure, that’d be good.”

Resigned to his fate, Bo picked up his rental skates. Sophie and Kim joined them on a bench beside the lake. Kim’s cheeks were bright with color, her eyes dancing with laughter. She looked classy and athletic. And sexy as hell.

“I’m done,” Sophie told Noah. “Your turn. Two against one is too much for an old lady.”

“Hey, no fair playing the old-lady card,” Noah said.

“Daddy, come on, let’s go, Daddy,” his kids shouted.

“I don’t have to play it,” she said. “I am it.” She shooed him away to skate with his kids, then headed off to get some hot chocolate. She was a good bit older than Noah, and Bo suspected she was more sensitive about it than she let on. She shouldn’t be. The two of them made a great couple.

Kim turned to Bo. “Your turn. Skates.”

He shot her a look, but bent to take off his boots.

She patted his arm. “This means a lot to AJ.”

“That’s the idea.” He finished tying his laces and watched AJ for a few seconds. “It sucks, what’s happening to him, but I kind of like having him around. I mean, I’m not saying I’m father of the year or anything like that, but we get along, you know? Even through the hard stuff with his mother.”

“You sound surprised.”

“I didn’t expect…I mean, I don’t know the first thing about being a father.”

“Somebody, somewhere, taught you how to love a child.”

“That’s AJ. He takes me out of myself, you know? Out of my own head. I got to tell you, I’m learning a lot from the kid.”

She laughed. “Good to know. Now, go learn how to skate.”

“I know how to skate.” He stood and headed for the ice, wobbling a little. He hoped like hell he wouldn’t fall on his ass.

Twenty-Four

S
ince learning his mom had been deported and was in some women’s detention center in Mexico, AJ saw the world differently. Everything was gray to him—gray winter skies, dirty gray snow on the streets, a gray he never saw in the hot Texas sun. Sure, there were moments when Bo tried to distract him and succeeded sometimes, but every moment was weighted with the knowledge that his mother was in trouble and he had no way of getting her out.

Each day, he approached the bus stop like a condemned man to the gallows. Even though running away had been a stupid thing to do, and even though he was forcing himself to get used to Avalon, he still felt the same way—he wanted to be anywhere but here. Yet, realizing anything he did could affect his mother’s status, he was scared into being on his best behavior. He was going to have to figure out some other way to be with his mom again, but he hadn’t quite worked out what that was yet. In the meantime, he moved from day to day, crossing out each square on a small pocket calendar he kept in his backpack.

The middle school was an old-fashioned brick-and-concrete monolith rising out of a snow-covered expanse marked by bare trees and bike racks buried so deep, only the top rail was visible. To AJ, it resembled another planet, like the ice planet Hoth in
Star Wars.
Inside, the building was a maze of hallways jammed with loudly slamming lockers, and kids who seemed so different from AJ, they might as well have been space aliens. Hissing radiators filled the classrooms with steam, exuding a damp, uncomfortable heat.

AJ sat, subdued, through interminable classes and lectures by teachers who droned on and on in their Yankee accents. Every chance he got, he escaped to the computer lab to log on to the Internet. He kept hoping he would find a way, someone out there in cyberspace, to help him and his mom.

Back home, he used to wish for his own computer, but of course, there was no money for one. And even if there was, there would be no money for Internet service. He’d made do with school and library computers, but he’d never really needed one the way he did now. That was the difference—he needed to figure out how to save his mom. He thought about trying to stay in touch with some of his friends by e-mail and IM, but they weren’t much for writing or talking on the phone, even. Back in Texas, he and his
cholos
tended to hang out. That didn’t usually involve much talking or typing on the computer.

Bo let AJ use his MacBook anytime he wanted, but AJ had tried that, and ended up being stalked by the Avalon police. Here at school, he was probably just as easily tracked, but he felt somehow less exposed.

This afternoon he ducked into the computer lab, only to find every terminal busy with kids wearing headsets and acting all studious, even though most of them were probably playing games or trying to get past the school’s firewalls into chat rooms. Some girl was hogging his favorite computer, the one in the carrel on the end, surrounded like a three-sided fortress. The girl was pudgy and had frizzy hair. She was in the eighth grade, and her name was Chelsea Nash. He recognized her because she helped out around Dr. Shepherd’s veterinary hospital. AJ had seen her hosing down the dog runs, working around the barn, wheeling barrows of horse manure to a big steaming pile that rose out of the snow like Mount Vesuvius built of turds.

She was friends with Max Bellamy, Mrs. Bellamy-Shepherd’s son. Here was something AJ had noticed about being in a town this small. Everybody was connected to everybody else, eventually.

Not AJ. He didn’t belong here. Didn’t want to belong. What was the point? If he started feeling too much at home here, he might lose sight of the fact that his mother was far away and in danger of never seeing him again. That was the scariest part of all. He was already losing little bits and pieces of her and had to work to bring her back into focus. He shut his eyes, trying to picture her hand, tucking a curl of hair behind her ear and the flash of her eyes as she smiled at him. He listened deep in his mind for her voice, calling his name. The need to be with his mom was like the need to breathe, and his chest felt tight all the time, his stomach in knots.

He decided to kill time by getting his homework out of the way. He had Spanish, which was a no-brainer for him, and English vocabulary, which, unfortunately, wasn’t. The teacher had this word-of-the-day thing going, and she believed the way to learn a word was to study its roots and put it to use. Today’s word was
churlish.
The root word was
churl.
According to the textbook,
churlish
meant rude and boorish, having a bad disposition; surly. Its root came from an old word for peasant. The rude and boorish type. AJ wasn’t quite sure what boorish meant, so he looked that up, too. “Ill-mannered, coarse and contemptible in behavior or appearance…”

He drummed his pencil on the edge of the table, trying to decide how to use the word in a sentence.
The churlish boy was sick of waiting around for his turn on the computer,
he thought. He got up and paced restlessly.
Being ignored by the other kids made him feel churlish.

Lately, AJ was learning a lot of big words, like detention. Deportation. Expulsion.

“You waiting for this computer?” asked Chelsea Nash, taking off her headset. “You’re circling like a buzzard. I can’t stand that. Pisses me off.”

She had a way with words, that was for sure. He indicated the sign that noted a thirty-minute time limit on the terminal.

“Whatever,” she said, gathering up her backpack. “I missed the bus today, so I had to call my grandfather to pick me up. I think he forgot.”

AJ shrugged. “Call him again.”

“My grandparents won’t let me have a cell phone,” she said. “They won’t even have Internet in the house. Pisses me off.”

AJ handed over his mobile phone. “You can borrow mine.” Ever since the New York incident, Bo made him carry a cell phone wherever he went.

“Thanks.” She made the call, and sure enough, her grandfather had forgotten. She exhaled an exasperated breath as she handed back the phone. “Now it’ll take him like an hour to get here, because he drives really slow. Especially when the roads are bad. We had another six inches of snow on Lakeshore Road last night.”

She sure did talk a lot, AJ observed as he took his seat. She acted as though she’d known him forever.

“I’m Chelsea, by the way,” the girl said.

“I know. I mean, I’ve seen you at the animal hospital,” said AJ.

“Oh. You know Dr. Shepherd?”

“Mrs. Bellamy-Shepherd is doing some legal work for my dad.” AJ hoped she didn’t get too nosy.

“Who’s your dad?”

Great. She was going to be nosy.

“His name’s Bo Crutcher.” More and more, it was starting to feel normal, calling Bo his dad. Anyway, that was the simplest explanation, so he stuck with it.

“Oh! I love Bo Crutcher!” Her face lit up and she looked almost pretty, in a chubby way. “I mean, he’s a really good guy. He’s always helping out with fund-raisers and stuff, on account of he’s semifamous.”

Only in a town like this would a guy like Bo be considered semifamous. Of course, if he really did make it with the Yankees, he’d be legitimately famous. “What do you mean, helping?”

“Like last year at the Wildlife Shelter Auction, he donated private baseball coaching to the highest bidder, and people went crazy, bidding on it. And when his band won the battle of the bands the other day, it was a benefit for juvenile diabetes. That kind of thing. Everybody thinks your dad is a totally good guy,” Chelsea concluded. “So did you move here to live with him for good?”

“No,” AJ said swiftly. “Just until…just for a while.”

“Yeah, trust me, I know what ‘a while’ means. My parents left me with my grandparents for ‘a while’ and it’s been years.”

Nothing like a word of encouragement from a stranger. A talkative stranger. She told him her grandparents were really strict and old-fashioned. But she didn’t say much about her parents, like why they had left her and where they were.

She changed the subject back to him, her features sharpening with curiosity. “You’re new, aren’t you? What’s your name?”

“It’s AJ. AJ Martinez.”

“What’s the AJ stand for?”

She had to ask. He didn’t even know this girl. Why should he tell her anything? Because it didn’t matter. He didn’t care what she thought. “I go by AJ for a reason,” he muttered.

“Is it something really dorky or out-there? Like Ajax, or Apollo Jehosephat, or Able Janitor…”

He tried not to laugh.

She slid a notepad across the table toward him. “Here, write your name on this piece of paper. I’ll take one look at it, then destroy the evidence.”

Geez, this girl was relentless. He wrote his two given names on a piece of paper and slipped it to her. Of course she couldn’t keep her mouth shut, despite her promise.

“Angel?” she said, her voice a sharp exclamation that made heads turn. Noticing, she switched to a whisper. “Your name is Angel?”

“It’s pronounced
Angel,
” he muttered, not that the Spanish
g
made it any better. “
Angel Jacinto.
And we had a deal.”

“Right,” she said. “Ahn-
hell.
Sorry, AJ.” She ripped the scrap of paper into tiny bits of confetti. “I actually like how it sounds in Spanish. Are you fluent in Spanish?”

He nodded. AJ had grown up never sensing any boundaries between English and Spanish. Thoughts and words flowed freely across the divide, and until he started school, he hadn’t realized he was speaking two different languages. In school, he’d been taught that English was the way to get ahead, but Spanish always echoed through his mind, somehow more expressive, more meaningful. It was the language of his dreams.

“That’s lucky,” Chelsea said. “Are you taking Spanish?”

Another nod. His teacher, Sr. Diaz, was from Puerto Rico. His Spanish sounded different from the language AJ was used to, but it was the one class he knew he’d ace without studying.

It was funny how Chelsea deemed him lucky. He didn’t feel so lucky. He felt like a fish out of water, even in Spanish class. And she didn’t seem to realize a lot of people in this country, even in Texas, considered his knowledge of Spanish a reason to hate him.

Chelsea turned out to be as good a listener as she was a talker. Without really planning what he was going to say, or knowing why he needed to talk, AJ told her what had happened to his mother. It was really the first time he’d told anybody, blow-by-blow, about that day.

He’d gotten up as usual. He could hear Mama in the kitchen, singing “Livin’ la Vida Loca” along with Ricky Martin on the radio, a tune that suited her unselfconscious, happy voice. His mom was young and pretty, and she dressed for work like a kid, in jeans and sneakers. At her job at the rice-packaging factory, she had a locker where she changed into a coverall and hairnet. Since Bruno had left, she worked overtime whenever she could, but the mornings before school always belonged to AJ.

They’d had breakfast together that day as usual. She quizzed him on his spelling words because there was always a test on Friday. His mom had never finished school. She claimed helping him with homework helped her improve her English. This made homework seem important. He got all his words right except
disinterred.
She made him spell it three times and use it in a sentence:
The cats disinterred a fish carcass and had a smelly feast.

It was a completely normal morning, and AJ probably would’ve forgotten all the details, except it turned out to be their last day together. He’d gone to school like normal, moved and jostled through classes, lunch, recess, study hall the way he always did. The nightmare had started last period. Mrs. Alvarez came and got him out of science class. The teacher’s aide explained that there’d been a raid on the packaging factory where his mother worked. She’d been handed over to ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—and detained.