“My gosh, Mother, I’ll be there in five minutes!” Rachel rolled her eyes on the other end of the phone. She held her phone in one hand and her coffee in the other as Wally, her interesting and wildly disapproved of boyfriend, sped down the interstate. She motioned for him to hurry, but he pointed at the speedometer and shrugged.
“I told you nine o’clock,” Nora sighed. “Joanna is here. David and Melissa were on time.”
Joanna and Emily had followed Nora outside. Randy put his arm around Emily as he bragged to the others about her recent election as Junior Class President. The sixteen-year-old was all smiles as she grinned lovingly at the only father she had ever known.
“You’re cutting in and out, Mother. I’m hanging up now,” Rachel said as, grumbling, she tossed her phone into her bag.
“Rachel will be here in five minutes,” Nora announced.
“Which, in actuality, means that she just left Wally’s apartment, and we’ll be waiting for her and her faux Louis Vuitton luggage all afternoon,” Joanna snickered.
“Wally’s apartment?” Nora gasped.
“Oh, did I say that? I meant the convent, Mother,” Joanna replied sarcastically.
Nora knew good and well that Rachel was living with her boyfriend, but she liked to pretend that she didn’t have a clue. She glanced around and took a quick visual assessment. “We’ve got David with Melissa,” she pointed. “Joanna’s here. Rachel’s on her way. Emily’s ready,” she mumbled to herself. She stopped and put her hand on her hip. “Randy, is it just me or is one of them missing?”
“Nope, I think we’re good to go when Rachel gets here,” Randy laughed.
“I’m fairly sure we’re still missing one,” Nora kidded with her husband.
“Knucklehead! You coming with us?” Randy screamed toward the house.
Nora smiled as Randy put his arm around her shoulders. She glanced over at her older children and shrugged. “Baby brother wasn’t exactly in a chipper mood this morning,” she said with a little wrinkle of her nose.
“Oh, really? You mean to tell me you’ve finally taken notice of his rather severe personality disorder?” David quipped.
“Grant, get a move on it, Son!” Randy bellowed.
“I’ve got to talk to you,” David whispered as he pulled Joanna toward the garage. “You won’t believe what happened to me last night.”
“What happened?” Joanna asked curiously as she sat down on her father’s riding lawnmower.
“Okay,” David began, checking to make sure that everyone else was out of earshot, “so I was on patrol last night, right?”
“Yeah,” Joanna nodded.
“My partner and I got a call about some punk hurling bricks at a house in a nearby neighborhood,” David explained. “We had a description from a neighbor of a young, white, male suspect with the vocabulary of a drunk marine. The neighbor said that the woman who lived next door to her had bricks stacked outside of her house because she was intending to build a flowerbed…”
“And some guy was using them to knock out her windows?” Joanna asked eagerly. “Was it random? Was he a jilted ex? Did you catch him?”
David held up his hands. “Well,” he nodded, “we go to the scene. The kid takes off as soon as he sees us. He’s quick…over fences…through bushes…you name it.”
“So did you catch him?” Joanna begged.
“It took us forty-five minutes to track him down, but we finally trapped him,” David said as though he was exhausted just telling the story. “I tackled him. I’m ready to strangle this guy, right? It’s dark, and I’m panting, trying to catch my breath from the chase. I grab his shoulder, and I flip him over, and…”
“Please don’t say what I think you’re about to say,” Joanna sighed, the color draining from her face.
“Yeah, that’s right,” David nodded. “I flip him over, and Grant stares up at me with this look of utter disgust. I’m so stunned that I can’t say a word, and Grant finally says, ‘You win, now get off of me.’”
Joanna brought her hand to her mouth, unable, in that moment, to articulate all of the questions she wanted to ask.
David leaned against the lawnmower. “I couldn’t believe it,” he sighed. “I chewed him out for running from an officer of the law, and he said to me in that smug way of his…get this…‘I wasn’t running from the cops, David, I was running from you…that’s different.’”
“Did you arrest him?” Joanna had trouble forcing the words out.
“You better believe I slapped those hand-cuffs on him,” David recalled, “and if it had been anyone else I would have had him on resisting arrest and assaulting a police officer. Anybody else, and he would have had a face full of pepper spray. Thankfully, I was able to alert my fellow officers to hold their fire, else someone probably would have shot the idiot.” David shook his head in disbelief.
“Whose house was it? What was he doing there?” Joanna insisted.
“That was my question to him, and he actually said to me, ‘I’m just having a bad day, okay?’ Well, I was crazy angry by then, so I just start shaking him and screaming, ‘What is your problem? Why are you doing this to all of us?’”
Joanna jumped up, the anticipation too much to handle. “David, tell me already! Whose house was it he was so determined to vandalize?”
“He totally lost it, Jo,” David said, his voice breaking. He took his sister’s seat on the lawnmower. “He was crying so hard that I thought he was going to hyperventilate. He was exhausted; he was upset; it was a complete meltdown right there in the middle of the road. I went from shaking him and screaming at him to holding him in my arms while he cried. I was still furious at him, but it broke my heart to see him like that, you know?”
“So, he actually put on a performance worthy of making you feel sorry for him?” Joanna shook her head. “Classic.”
“You had to be there, Joanna,” David replied seriously. “It was raw and real…and scary.”
“Who lived in that house?” Joanna asked softly.
“A woman named Cindy,” David shrugged.
“I don’t know a Cindy,” Joanna thought. “How does Grant know her?”
“I couldn’t get a shred of truth out of him,” David gulped.
