The Way Things Are (12 page)

Mary Anne looked up at the overcast sky and sighed. “I’ll see what I can do. I’m not making any promises, mind you. The soonest I can take his case personally would be four or five weeks, at best. And he’ll be off intensive supervision in six weeks.”

“But when he reoffends, I’ll still be his JPC. I’ve got to hand him off to someone else.”

“
When
he reoffends?”

“You saw the case file from New York. He’ll reoffend—he even admits it. You know the addiction treatment listed in the file? His counselor diagnosed him as being addicted to graffiti, if you can believe that. And PTSD and a whole bunch of other shit. I’ve still got to get a copy of the actual assessment, but he’s remarkably normal for how messed up the paperwork claims he is.”

“And you still want to get involved with his father?”

Ken shrugged. “I know it’s not a good idea, but I haven’t felt this excited about someone before, not ever.”

“One of my kids is turning eighteen in five weeks. Keep his case file together and keep your hands to yourself until then, okay?”

Ken couldn’t help grinning like an idiot. “Thank you,” he whispered.

She patted him on the shoulder and brushed her hair out of her eyes. “Sure. Can I leave this to you and go enjoy what’s left of my day off?”

“I’ve got them.”

With only an hour left, Ken didn’t have much to do. He checked Mary Anne’s sign-in sheet against his own list, made a note of who hadn’t shown up, and then made his rounds, greeting each of his kids in turn. He avoided Jay because he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to look at the kid without feeling guilty about the things he’d done with Patrick the night before. In the large park across the street, Jay Connelly was being dragged around by a black-and-white Newfoundland that weighed more than the boy. He looked oblivious to the time, the dog, and everything else in the world.

He’d spent a good chunk of his evening, before going out, reading through Jay’s file from New York. Patrick Connelly had been adamant about not discussing whatever had triggered his son’s obsessive behavior, so Ken had tried to glean what he could from the case notes left by his former probation officer. There were dozens of references to an inciting crisis, but even the probation officer seemed reluctant to actually describe what had happened. Ken had planned on using this morning to start an easygoing conversation about Jay’s artistic inspiration, but now Ken was reluctant to say more than a few words to him.

As one o’clock approached and parents began to pick up their kids in the parking lot, the buffer of his other clients gradually dwindled until Ken didn’t have anything else to focus on. By one fifteen, Jay was the last kid who hadn’t been picked up yet.

“Jay!” Ken called out. He jogged across the quiet street, stopped a bit short when he discovered he was already out of breath, and waved Jay over. “Jay, come on, bring her back. We’re done.”

The dog bounded ahead, nearly pulling Jay off his feet, and jumped up against Ken’s chest playfully. He scratched the giant animal behind her ears, then stepped back and eased her back to the ground. “This has got to be the biggest puppy I’ve ever seen.”

“She can’t be a puppy,” Jay muttered.

Ken caught his surprised reaction in his throat. If Jay was willing to talk about the dog, he’d take it. “No, she is still a puppy. Her tag says she’s only ten months old. Can you imagine how big she’ll be in a year? Here, I’ll take her leash.”

Jay unwrapped the leash from his hand. It left a faint pink imprint behind. Ken took the dog off his hands and guided them both back across the street. The puppy jumped happily and turned back for attention every few seconds while Jay shuffled along slowly, keeping his head down. “Come on. We can wait for your dad at the picnic table over there.”

“Can I get my backpack?” Jay asked, his voice trembling. “I left it inside.”

“Yeah, of course. Go on, I’m going to pet this monster a little more.”

Ken took the Newfoundland over to the picnic table and sat down with his back to the table so he could keep an eye on the shelter door and the parking lot. The dog set her muzzle in his lap and looked up at him with content brown eyes. He set his hand on her head and watched Jay shuffle toward him, clinging to his backpack as though his life depended on it.

“Are you okay?”

Jay nodded immediately. He sat down at the end of the table, produced a sketchbook and a chewed-up pencil from his bag, and began to draw without saying a word.

Ken watched him for a long time, noting the way his posture shifted as the pencil scratched its way across the paper, the way his eyes brightened and came back to life. Ken leaned over to glance at the page and was surprised to see the basic shape of the dog resting its head in his lap. “You like her, huh?”

Jay nodded quietly, his focus never leaving the page.

Ken had learned from his first attempts at conversation that any mention of New York tended to just make Jay retreat more, so he chose his next words carefully. “Did you have a dog before you moved here?”

“A Pomeranian before my mom kicked us out. She was little, and I guess she was cute, but she always peed on my stuff. She bit everybody too. I hate little dogs.”

The family dog wasn’t a fond memory either, if the look on Jay’s face was any clue.

“Dogs are just like people. Some of them are nice, some of them aren’t,” Ken said quietly. “I think most little dogs are okay. But I guess people might let little dogs get away with aggressive behavior just because they’re tiny.”

Jay shrugged and shifted his grip on the pencil, going from broad lines to soft, feathery shading. “I just don’t like them. I like her, though.” Jay nodded down at the Newfoundland without looking away from the paper. “I can’t believe someone gave her up.”

“A lot of people who have to give up their pets don’t want to do it. They have to move, or lose their jobs and can’t afford a pet anymore. With this one, I can picture some family getting her as a puppy and then finding out they got a much bigger dog than they bargained for. She wasn’t here last Saturday, so there’s still time for her to find a new home.”

“I wish I could take her.” Jay grinned. “But there’s no room in our place as it is. Definitely no room for a dog that’ll be bigger than the couch.”

In less than two minutes, Jay filled the paper with a decent sketch of the dog.

Ken scratched the dog a bit more. “Look, Jay, between you and your dad, I get that you don’t want to talk about stuff that happened in New York. But I think you ought to tell me why you paint. Why did you paint the scene you did downtown? The seagulls?”

The pencil scratching across the paper began to move faster, filling in the pattern around the dog’s face with long, dark lines. “It’s what you can see of the city from the docks, from the control tower on the pier. Not up in the crane. My dad can’t take me up there because of union regulations or something.”

“Why did you paint it?”

Jay shrugged. “I didn’t have a good sketch of anything else. And it just got stuck in my head.”

Ken didn’t mean to laugh, but he couldn’t help it. Despite his hang-ups about discussing his mother and his past, Jay was surprisingly candid. Yesterday in the car, Ken had forced himself to analyze every comment from the boy, trying to figure out if he was being manipulated or not, but so far the boy came across as smart, honest, and totally lost in his own head. There were none of the elaborate excuses other kids tended to come up with, nor the outright denials that came when kids were too slow to realize there was no point in denying something they’d been caught doing.

“It just got stuck in your head?”

Another shrug.

“So should I be expecting a mural of this big fuzz ball to show up somewhere in a downtown alley?”

“No. She’s pretty, but there’s not much there to draw, nothing that needs color.”

Ken leaned over and looked at the drawing. “Are you joking? Look what you’ve done in just a few minutes.”

“Yeah, but that’s all there is.” The pencil stilled on the page. “I don’t draw things the way they look, I try to draw the way things are—the way they
really
are.”

“So there really are demons in New York?”

Jay’s face became so pale his freckles stood out like dots of marker on his skin. “Yes.”

Ken felt like smacking himself in the forehead. “I’m not sure that explains the seagulls,” he said, trying to shift Jay’s focus back to his recent graffiti.

Jay stopped drawing and flipped through his sketchbook. Ken saw roughly two-dozen versions of the mural Jay had been arrested for painting. Jay stopped on one that looked identical to all the others and held it up.

Ken couldn’t help the gasp that escaped from his mouth at the sight. Instead of just seagulls flying over the sound, this sketch included details of the city skyline, and even some of the larger buildings in Bremerton on the far shore. The sketch was so detailed Ken had no doubt it could be mistaken for a black-and-white photograph, except photographs were never quite so perfect. Somewhere in the mixture of buildings, water, parks, and birds there was a tantalizing hint of emotion. It seeped into him, saturating him with wonder, excitement, and a childish hope he hadn’t felt in nearly ten years.

“Hope?” he asked, looking from the drawing to its young creator.

Jay’s face lit up in a gratified smile as he nodded.

“You need to be in an art class,” Ken muttered.

Jay shook his head and turned back to his current project. “No art class. I’ve read books about art. Books about drawing, painting, techniques, styles, history. Some of the style stuff I didn’t get, but the technique bits are easy enough. I don’t see what an art class can teach me that I can’t learn in the library.”

Jay carefully smudged the soft fuzz around the dog’s ear, and Ken realized he was right. Everything the boy might learn in the after-school arts-and-crafts program at the YMCA, Jay had already mastered long ago.

“So when do you start that boxing class we talked about?” Ken asked, giving in on the art class.

Jay glanced up from the sketchbook and huffed. “That’s the fun-filled afternoon I have ahead of me,” he grumbled.

“You’re not looking forward to it? It sounds like fun.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke? I don’t see how having some sweaty old guy screaming at you while someone else beats you up can be fun.”

“I doubt they throw you in a ring and just let some guy twice your size whale on you,” said Ken, craning his neck to get a better view of the sketch. “Not on the first day, anyway.”

“Have you ever done it?”

“No,” Ken admitted. “But how would they keep people coming back if they let every new kid get beaten up on the first day?”

The pencil in Jay’s hand slowed down and his eyes narrowed at Ken. “I doubt they care about keeping everybody coming back. And I’m not every new kid. I’m a Connelly,” he said, rolling his eyes.

“What’s that mean? That you’re a Connelly?”

“Duh. It means they’re going to expect me to be like my dad.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“Yes. They’re going to want me to be good at it. I’m not good at much of anything.”

“Well, what about the art class? You’re already good at that.”

“I’m not doing that.”

“Why not?”

Jay nearly turned his entire body away.

“I’ll tell you what,” Ken back peddled quickly. “I’ll check out the boxing class today, and if it’s structured and positive and there is enough supervision, I’ll let you off the hook for the art class. You’ve got to go at least three times a week, though.”

Jay looked up at him. “Seriously? I just do the boxing thing and I don’t have to do the other class? Because they’re both going to suck.”

“They might. But if I were you, I’d try to remember that either program is going to be whatever you make of it. And I will make good on my promise to force you into therapy if you quit. Besides, if you keep painting that graffiti over gang tags downtown, you’re going to need to know how to defend yourself eventually.”

“Doubt it. I’m fast.”

“Fast enough to get away from a gang that might have a car?”

“Yes. Cars can’t go over fences.”

“Cars can’t go over fences,” Ken agreed, nodding. “So how did that patrol car catch you? Oh, that’s right!” He snapped his fingers. “There were two patrol cars. You’re a smart kid, Jay. You know the police aren’t going to hurt you, not unless you try to pick a fight with them. But what happens if it’s not the police who catch you next time?”

Jay huffed and the pencil in his hand began to move again.

“So accept that you’re bound to piss off someone you won’t be able to outrun, sooner or later, and try to prepare for it. Art’s not going to help you do that. Boxing might.”

A truck honked twice from the parking lot. Jay glanced toward the truck and started packing his backpack, shoveling the sketchbook and pencils in. “That’s my dad.”

Ken took a deep breath, reminded himself that he had to do his job regardless of how mortifying it was, and followed Jay to the truck, where he had to consciously stop himself from gasping as Patrick Connelly, clad in a pair of loose jogging shorts and a tank top, stepped out of the driver’s seat.

“Everything okay?” Patrick asked, staring between him, Jay, and the massive dog still following at Ken’s heels.

Ken shuddered, trying to get ahold of himself. “Yeah. So far, yeah. Jay did great today. I was just talking to him about this boxing class. He doesn’t seem too excited about it, so I figured I’d offer him a bit of motivation.”

“Hmm?”

“If the class offers enough supervision and structure, I can let him off the hook for the other class at the YMCA.”

Patrick’s pale hazel eyes kept shifting from him to Jay.

Ken shifted his shoulders, trying not to let the nervous jitters he felt under the man’s attention throw him off. “The only problem is I’m not familiar with the boxing class. Would there be any problem with me observing the class this afternoon?”

Patrick raised both eyebrows and stared directly at Jay. “You still going to whine about it if it gets you out of the other program?”

“Probably.”