Page 102

“Leave it be!” my father insisted.

I don’t know why I was so surprised, so shocked at my father’s attitude. After all, he was the one who had me picked up for stealing our car.

I was led out of the house and quickly down to the patrol car, where I was placed in the rear behind the cage, a place growing more and more familiar to me. The door slammed on me again, and moments later we were moving away from the house. I sank back in the seat, first cursing Shirley and then cursing myself for being so stupid as to trust someone like her.

When we arrived at the police station, the desk sergeant looked at me as though I was a career criminal.

“What happened, you missed your holding cell and just had to get back to it?” he asked through the right corner of his mouth. Then he grinned at the other policemen.

Once again I was put through the booking process and led back to the Spartan cell where there was now a woolen blanket on the bench. A man who looked like a homeless man was sleeping on the floor of a cell across the way. After I was locked in, I realized there was no point in asking for my one phone call this time. Who would I call who could help me? My father wouldn’t let me speak with my mother.

I crawled over the bench, put my head on the folded blanket, and closed my eyes. Maybe, if I’m lucky, I thought, I’ll fall into a permanent sleep like Rip Van Winkle or Sleeping Beauty and I won’t wake up until Del decided I had been right and had come to kiss me and take me away just like the fairy-tale prince. And of course, we would live happily ever after.

I spent all night and half the following day there before Carson came to get me. Daddy had sent him like some gofer to do some unpleasant chore.

“What’s going to happen to me, Carson?” I asked. I was stiff from being so uncomfortable, and very tired.

“Lucky for you, Daddy calmed down enough to realize nothing would be gained for the family to have you convicted of a crime and sent to prison,” he told me as we left the station. “He went over to see Mr. Mazel and got him to drop the charges.”

“He did?”

“Yeah,” Carson said, pausing at the car. “Do you know how he did?”

I shook my head.

“By buying the necklace. That’s right, Teal, it cost him ten thousand dollars to fix the mess you created this time, ten thousand dollars! And Mother doesn’t want to wear it. She says it will only remind her of the terrible thing you did.”

“You going to add this to the profit-and-loss sheet you a

nd Daddy are keeping on me?”

“Go on, be a smart aleck and see how much more it will get you now,” he said, getting into the car.

For a moment I actually considered just turning and running off, even without a cent to my name. I’d be better off living in the streets, I thought.

“Get in, Teal. We have a lot to do yet,” Carson ordered.

I got in and folded my arms around myself defiantly.

“He didn’t pay the ten thousand for me,” I said. “He did it for himself and for you, to keep things quiet.”

“Same thing,” Carson said, driving away from the police station. “We’re a family.”

“We’re supposed to be a family. We’re not a family, Carson, not by a long shot.”

“Oh, boy. What are we going to hear now, the poor neglected me song?”

“No. You won’t hear another word,” I said, and pressed my lips shut.

He rattled on and on about the sacrifices our parents had made for both of us, especially me, describing the great efforts they had made and were making to find a way to get me to behave, be mature and responsible, and have a decent future. As I sat there and his words went in one ear and out the other, I thought how much like each other my mother, father, and brother sounded whenever any of them spoke to me. Never before did I feel it was me on one side and them on the other as much as I did this particular morning.

“Dad said you should remain in your room until he gets home today,” Carson told me when we reached the house.

“What happened with Mommy?” I asked him.

“She went to the doctor and he put her on a new tranquilizer, but she had a meeting with Waverly Taylor and a wedding planner this morning and hasn’t taken any of her medication yet.”

“What a trooper,” I muttered.