getting ideas that it was his birthright to just go out and crack
himself up on the freeway. He always liked speed. Just like his
dad.
So I sold it to one of the doctors where I worked-over at Foothill
General. I’d worked there before Reggie was born. AfterJimmy died I
had to go back there again.”
I said, “Pediatrics?”
She shook her head. “General ward-they didn’t do peds there.
I would have preferred peds, but I needed a place that was close to
home, so I could be close to Reggie-he was ten but he still wasn’t good
by himself. I wanted to be home when he was. So I worked nights.
Used to put him in at nine, wait till he was asleep, grab a nap for an
hour, then go off at ten forty-five so I could be on shift by
eleven.”
She waited for judgment.
The Inquisitor didn’t oblige.
“He was all alone,” she said. “Every night. But I figured with him
sleeping it would be okay. What they call latchkey now, but they
didn’t have a name for it back then. There was no choice-I had no one
to help me. No family, no such thing as day care back then. You could
only get all-night babysitters from an agency and they charged as much
as I was making.”
She dabbed at her face. Looked at the poster again, and forced back
tears.
“I never stopped worrying about that boy. But after he grew up he
accused me of not caring about him, saying I left him because I didn’t
care. He even got on me for selling his dad’s bike-making it into a
mean thing instead of because I cared.”
I said, “Raising a kid alone,” and shook my head in what I hoped was
sympathy.
“I used to race home at seven in the morning, hoping he’d still be
asleep and I could wake him up and pretend I’d been there with him all
night. In the beginning it worked, but pretty soon he caught on and
he’d start to hide from me. Like a game-locking himself in the
bathroom. . .” She mashed the handkerchief and a terrible look came
onto her face.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to-” “You don’t have kids. You
don’t understand what its like. When he was older a teenager-he’d stay
out all night, never calling in, sometimes for a couple days at a
time.
When I grounded him, he’d sneak out anyway. Any punishment I tried, he
just laughed. When I tried to talk to him about it, he threw it back
in my face. My working and leaving him. Tit for tat: you went out-now
I go out.
He never..
She shook her head.
“Never got a lick of help,” she said. “Not one single lick from any of
them. Your crowd, the experts. Counselors, special-ed experts, you
name it. Everyone was an expert except me. Cause I was the problem,
right? They were all good at blaming. Real experts at that. Not that
any of them could help him he couldn’t learn a thing in school. It got
worse and worse each year and all I got was the runaround. Finally, I
took him to. . . one of you. Private clown. All the way over in
Encino. Not that I could afford it.”
She spat out a name I didn’t recognize.
I said, “Never heard of him.”
“Big office,” she said. “View of the mountains and all these little
dolls in the bookshelf instead of books. Sixty dollars an hour, which
was a lot back then. Still is. .”. specially for a total waste of
time. Two years of fakery is what I got.
“Where’d you find him?”
“He came recommended-highly recommended-from one of the doctors at
Foothill. And I thought he was pretty smart myself, at first. He
spent a couple of weeks with Reggie, not telling me anything, then
called me in for a conference and told me how Reggie had serious
problems because of the way he’d grown up. Said it was gonna take a
long time to fix it but he would fix it. If Whole list of /s. “I