Jesus. “Why three days?”

“Because that’s the longest my mother ever stayed away.” She said she probably disliked her mother more than her dad, because she hated the weakness she saw every time her mother went crawling back. “I’d have been out of there a long time ago if it weren’t for my brother,” she said. “I gave up on Mom by the time I was twelve. Thomas is turning sixteen this year and he’s almost as big as Dad, so I don’t think there’ll be any trouble.”

Then, in answer to the unasked question of why she was telling me all this, she said, “So here’s the deal with me and guys, bubba. If we’re friends, we’re friends. If we have sex, we have sex. I don’t sleep with more than one person, and I won’t go with anyone who does. We double up on birth control. And nobody runs my life, which means I don’t go in for a bunch of whining when I have something important to do and you want to go to the prom. You interested?”

Actually, at that point I was still stuck back where she said, “If we have sex, we have sex.”

I was interested, and the rest is history. Georgia Brown says Carly saved me from having to learn that middle-school lesson over and over again into my fifties.

Funny how everything is relative. If my father were ever to behave the way Mr. Hudson behaves, he’d spend the rest of his life begging forgiveness-from the Turkish prison my mother would see to it he was sentenced to. And if anyone ever broke my mother’s jaw, they’d better be ready to take a bullet.

So if I’m Carly, a good day is one in which no one in my family gets brutalized; and if I’m Chris Coughlin, a good day is when nobody calls me dummy and the football players don’t jack me up, and somebody puts their hand on my shoulder and smiles at me when they see me staring at my dead brother’s picture in the trophy case. If I’m The Tao Jones, a good day is when I lock onto whatever I’m passionate about and pursue it with abandon, whether it’s swimming, or messing with Mike Barbour’s head, or a good journalism story, or Carly Hudson.

If you’re my father, a good day is one in which you avoid remembering the events of July 27, 1968.

Everything is relative.

CHAPTER 5

Our family legacy of helping kids runs deep. The more obvious source would be my mother, working as she does in the juvenile court division of the attorney general’s office on child-abuse cases. Plus, she was the one so quick to snap up my raggedy two-year-old butt when my bio-mom called it quits. But the kid thing goes back further, into a darker hole.

My dad was one of those smart guys who doesn’t do squat in school. He never forgets anything he’s interested in, and he can assemble almost any gadget without instructions. When we get some new electronic gizmo, like a VCR or a digital camera or a scanner to go with the computer, he doesn’t even take the instructions out of the little plastic envelope. He says the guys who write those things start by telling you not to stand in the bathtub when you plug it in; that you’ll read three-quarters of the booklet before running into your first piece of useful information. I’ll bet his I.Q. is someplace in the one-sixties, but when I asked him once what he remembered most about high school, he said, “The clock.”

So, due more to attention span than ability, he skipped college and went to work in a Harley shop out of high school, then enrolled in truck-driving school on his twenty-first birthday, thinking he’d get paid the big bucks to see the country. What he got paid to see, again and again and again from the cab of his ten-wheeler, was the country between Boise, Idaho, and a small town called New Meadows, a hundred-fifty miles north on winding two-lane. He got to be a small-time hero in that town, hauling meat and produce and bread and beer and information from the capital city; everyone knew his truck when it rolled into town, and everyone waved.

One day, after he’d been driving the route about a year, he stayed for lunch with a young widow who worked at the New Meadows Merc, which is like a general store, and whose husband had been killed in a hunting accident two years earlier. Big and scary looking as he can be on first sight, that’s how gentle and understanding my dad is when you get to know him. As Dad tells it, the widow was just beginning to come out of the shell she’d created around herself following her husband’s death. Her baby was eighteen months old, had never known his father. The widow’s mother took care of the baby while they had lunch at the exclusive Pine Knot Café, and they both felt some chemistry bubbling. She took him to her house, where they made fast, hot, electric love, uncharacteristic for either of them, to hear Dad tell it.

When Dad got the widow back to the store, he was behind schedule, so he jumped into his truck, confident traffic would be light that time of afternoon, that he had a pretty good chance of making up most of the time he’d lost. The lovemaking had transported him; it was the sweetest he’d felt in years.

But somehow while the baby’s grandmother wasn’t looking, the little boy had crawled under the truck and got caught between the rear dual tires. It was several minutes before anyone realized the baby was missing, and they quickly searched the store, hitting the obvious places before the widow was struck with the unthinkable and jumped into her car to chase after Dad, hoping beyond rationality that the baby had somehow gotten into the trailer. She discovered a small severed arm lying next to the white line about a mile and a half outside the city limits, maybe a hundred yards from where the truck spit out the rest of the little boy’s mangled body.

The state patrol let Dad get home before telling him, in hopes there would be a family member or a boss to help him with the emotional sledgehammer that was about to thunder into his chest, so it was almost six hours after the baby’s death that Dad discovered what he’d done.

I was twelve when he told me that story, in response to my kidding him about whether or not he’d ever had a real job. He’d always known he’d tell me someday, because it became the defining moment in his life. For years it was who he was. I don’t know that I was ready to hear it; I woke up with nightmares every night for two weeks, but I haven’t seen him the same since.

“I thought I’d have to kill myself,” he told me later, “just to end the pain. For more than two years it was constant; didn’t ease up when I worked out, when I slept, when I rode my bike a hundred miles an hour, or when I used drugs, and believe me, buddy, I used them all. Nothing touched it. I literally ached for the relief of being gone. The law wouldn’t charge me, the widow wouldn’t sue me for every penny I would ever make; I can’t tell you how bad I needed to be punished, but no one would do it.

“I took a job in a sawmill in a small logging town on my old route, worked a full forty-hour shift every week, then volunteered to sub for anyone calling in sick. I’d keep enough of my paycheck for rent and food and send the rest to the widow, but after a couple of months it started coming back. There was simply no way to get redemption.”

Dad always called the woman “the widow,” though I know he knows her name. He said he couldn’t bring himself to say it. “I sometimes consider those six hours,” he said, “when the deed was done, but I didn’t know it yet. Driving back toward Boise, letting my mind wander back over our slow lunch, the light in her eyes, her soft hair; I considered they might be the best six hours of my life. She was so…elegant. When she reached across the table in the Pine Knot and touched my hand, we both knew what would happen next. And yet, in those same six hours, when I was on top of the world, the world had already crumbled under me. I was riding back toward Boise on the cloud of a lie.”