Out of the blue a week later, she called. She was in Atlanta. No, she wasn’t coming home. No, she didn’t need money. She had a job. No, she wouldn’t tell us doing what. No, she wouldn’t give us an address. She didn’t want anyone to try to make her go back to Millerton.

  A police detective was in our house when she phoned. She assured him no crime had happened. We were bad parents, she agreed in answer to his questions, but not criminal.

  Having seen too many TV shows, she became convinced the police were trying to trace the call and hung up.

  The police lost interest. She had told them she was safe and had left of her own accord. She was under eighteen and a runaway, but no crime had occurred. If the authorities happened to locate her, they would send her home, but did we realize how big Atlanta was? Did we know how hard it would be to find one girl? If she got arrested, that would change things, but otherwise it would be difficult. They never apologized for all the accusations they had leveled at us.

  We reached out to shelters and groups in Atlanta that worked with runaway teens. Yes, they would keep an eye out, but the number of kids they saw was overwhelming. Their experience also made them curious and suspicious about why she had left home in the first place. Many of their kids were running from nasty family situations. Was something happening we weren’t telling them? Had we hurt her in some way?

  Despite being on the defensive again, we did our best to assure them otherwise. Maybe some believed us, because they warned that most teenage girls who run away to Atlanta turn to prostitution within forty-eight hours.

  Panicked, we drove to the city and searched for her. We asked people at homeless shelters and soup kitchens if they’d seen her. We talked to kids hanging out in parks—other runaways who eyed us warily and hit us up for money. We gave them what we could spare.

  We even asked hookers as they looked for work. We showed her photo to dozens—maybe hundreds—of people. No one recognized her.

  The second phone call came a month later. Mobile, Alabama. She had met a guy. He was nice. That worried us, but she told us she had a job waiting tables, so that made us feel better.

  Three months until the next call. New Orleans. New guy. New job.

  Then six months passed until Dallas.

  Then nothing.

  Was she alive? Was she dead? Was she hurt somewhere and needed us? Maybe she had settled down and was happy, and the last thing she wanted was our interference.

  Shelby wanted to look for her, but where could we start? Based on the few calls, she had moved first south and then west. Was that a pattern? Maybe she was headed to California. Maybe she wasn’t. How could we pick up her trail if we didn’t even know which direction to look?

  We considered hiring a private detective. Books and movies made it look so easy. We talked to one in Asheville, but he didn’t give us much hope. The cost just to sniff around was well out of our reach.

  The police were unsympathetic. There was little they could do. The best hope they offered was the off chance she’d be arrested, and they’d match her using records of missing persons. Once she turned eighteen, though, even that chance would disappear. The calls she’d made proved she had left voluntarily and wasn’t in harm’s way. How could we say she was missing when she had let us know where she was?

  Months of silence led to years. We’d think about her, wonder where she was, pray she was happy, but we didn’t have an answer.

  Until the call from Knoxville.

  After getting the news, I’d gathered Shelby in my arms, and we wept. All those years of worrying and praying, and I was still surprised how hard the grief hit us. We weren’t just mourning her death, though, but all those years of her life we hadn’t been able to share. All the old doubts resurfaced. I replayed every argument, every time I hadn’t been there for her, and every mistake I had made.

  When the tears finally slowed, we stayed in each other’s embrace and confronted the immediate problem. What were we going to do about her son, the boy we hadn’t even known existed?

  The detective hadn’t pulled any punches and made clear his disdain. The boy was fifteen, so Wyatt had been conceived long after Jessica had left Millerton and long after our last contact with her. No one we talked to had a clue who the father might be. He was a tough kid with a checkered history with the police. Social workers in various cities had been involved. Courts had debated cancelling Jessica’s parental rights, but there were no good alternatives to offer Wyatt. He had spent time in foster homes and juvenile detention centers, but Jessica had always been able to get him back.

  When her body was found, Wyatt was sitting with her head cradled in his lap. Heartbreaking. He was high and had drugs in his pockets. Heartbreaking in a totally different way.

  When the police asked him about other relatives, he could only shrug. He didn’t have any more of a clue who his father was than we did. She’d mentioned us to him, but he’d never met us, and based on what she had said, he didn’t like us. He knew only that we lived in some dead-end town that she’d sworn she was never going back to. He had no interest in meeting us. My heart couldn’t break any more.

  We cried through the night, holding on to each other and arguing, hammered with grief, confusion, and questions. How could Jessica have had a son without letting us know? What were we supposed to do with a complete stranger? On the other hand, how could we ignore his plight?

  I pointed out that if we encountered a stranger with a police record and a drug addiction, we’d cross the street to avoid him. Shelby still wanted to embrace him. The things she didn’t know about him didn’t matter, she argued—he was her grandson. He was her family, even if I didn’t think of him that way.

  By midmorning, we were on our way to Tennessee in my Chevy Nova, the two of us still unsure what we were to do or even what we would be allowed to do. Did we have custody rights? And did we want them?

  We met with the police, who made clear they thought of Wyatt as nothing but a budding criminal. We talked at length with a social worker who was confused and concerned about why we were so disconnected. Jessica had told her that her parents were dead. The fact that she was barely a year older than Wyatt when she had run away didn’t help. Discussing what had happened two decades earlier opened up all those old wounds and put us in her crosshairs. Nothing we said seemed to make her more comfortable, but how could we explain something we didn’t understand ourselves?

  Somehow, though, the social worker relented later that afternoon. We had apparently passed her test, and we were rewarded with our first glimpse of Wyatt. His shaggy hair was dirty, tangled, and matted. His eyes were sunken and dull. His clothes were ratty and filthy. He was thin with stringy muscularity. He eyed us with as much doubt as we felt. One look at him, though, and Shelby insisted we try to care for him. She had seen the family resemblance in his face.

  The details of the next few days were many but mostly unimportant. Wyatt was a minor, unable to live on his own. No one was claiming paternity or demanding parental rights. Jessica left no instructions of what to do. That left only a painful choice—Wyatt was in our charge or at the mercy of the state.

  The decision was largely up to him since he could easily scuttle any agreement. With his open warrants and long list of arrests for minor crimes, the police wanted him locked up. He shocked us by telling the social worker he preferred juvenile detention, something he knew and understood, to us.

  She explained that even after he got out of detention, he would be a ward of the state in a boys’ home until he turned eighteen. At his age and with his record, few foster homes would take a chance on him. Only faced with that reality did he reluctantly switch his choice to us.

  A judge signed off on temporary custody. Reports from a social worker assigned in Miller County and a guardian ad litem—a volunteer whose sole job is to represent the best interests of a minor—would determine the permanency of the situation. The open warrants would be purged if he stayed out of trouble until he turned eighteen.

  The police released a canvas backpack—no bigger than a book bag a student uses in school. Scribbled on the back with a magic marker were the words Wyatt Earp. In response to my raised eyebrow, he shrugged and mumbled, “Nickname.”

  The bag contained everything he owned—two pair of underwear, a pair of socks, a pair of blue jeans, three T-shirts, a hoodie, and a single crinkled photograph of his mother and him taken a decade earlier. That, plus what he was wearing, was the entirety of his worldly possessions. Every piece of his clothing was filthy and riddled with holes.

  He rooted through the bag and shot a look at the officer. “Where’s my money?” he demanded, though with a far more colorful vocabulary.

  The cop looked down at the printed inventory sheet. “No money was listed.”

  “I had cash in here.”

  The cop jabbed a finger at the sheet of paper. “That chicken scratch right there? Your signature says you agreed this list represented everything we confiscated. No money.”

  “It was there.”

  “Watch it, kid. No one here took anything from you. The junkies you lived with probably got it.”

  Wyatt’s face reddened, and his nostrils flared.

  I asked him, “How much?”

  He turned to me, his eyes cold and hateful. “I don’t know. Thirty, forty dollars.”

  I tilted my head toward the door. “Let’s go. Not worth it.”

  His eyes flicked back and forth between me and the police officer. He snorted, grabbed his bag, and stomped toward the door. I followed him out the building and toward our car, where Shelby was waiting. When we were halfway there, he spun and got in my face. Even at fifteen, he was taller than me. “What if I took off right now? Ran? What would you do?”

  I studied him and answered honestly. “Get in my car and go home.”

  The shocked look on his face told me he hadn’t expected my reply, so I continued to push. “I’m not going to lie to you. You’re faster than me, so I can’t catch you. You know places to hide, so I can’t find you. If and when the cops pick you up again, they might call me. I’d come get you then.”

  He rocked back on his heels and looked around the parking lot. I half expected him to jackrabbit. “And what if I get in the car? Then what?”

  “We take you home. You’ll get a hot meal, a shower, your own room, and a comfortable bed. Tomorrow, we’ll get you some clean clothes and a picture frame.”

  He averted his eyes. Weighing his options, I guessed. “And after tomorrow?”

  “Day at a time. Get you back in school. Maybe a part-time job. Help you figure out what you want.”

  “You’ll have a bunch of rules?”

  I shrugged. “A few. Clean up your language. Go to school. Stay out of trouble. No drugs.”

  He turned back to me. His face had softened. He looked less like a criminal and more like a lost little boy. “I don’t know if I can do that.”

  “Which one?”

  “Drugs. School. Language. Trouble.”

  “Nonnegotiable.”

  His tongue ran across his cracked lips. “I’ll try.”

  “Then I’ll help you.”

  We stood silently in that parking lot, sizing each other up. The choice was his, so I waited. He looked down at the tattered bag sitting between his feet. His words came out soft and resigned. “I don’t want to end up like her.”

  I found a distant point on the horizon to study. I barely knew him, but I didn’t want him to end up like Jessica either. My vision blurred as tears filled my eyes. “Then don’t.”

  The two of us stood there, still unsure what to do. I should’ve hugged him, but I’d never been good at things like that. If I had, I’m not sure how he would have reacted. Would he have hugged back? Or would he have turned tail and run?

  Instead, I asked, “Ready to go?”

  He picked up the backpack and slung it over one shoulder. “Nothing left for me here.”

  We drove back across the mountains to Millerton and gave him his choice of bedrooms upstairs. He picked the one with the best view, the same one Jessica had grown up in, the one farthest from Shelby and me.

  That had been five years ago. I would love to say everything had been idyllic from there, but it wasn’t. He wasn’t accustomed to a curfew, but we didn’t yield. He hated going to school, but we insisted. He didn’t like chores, but we tied his task list to privileges around the house. His language was filthy, but we stuck to our rules.

  The thing that almost broke us was chemical. I’d never understood addiction. Wyatt had seen drugs kill his mother. He knew the toll they took on his friends and others around him. He felt the lure in his own body. He said a thousand times he wanted off them.

  But he kept going back.

  Within weeks of him moving into our home, we knew we were in over our heads. We got him into a rehab program—no easy feat to find space for a fifteen-year-old. There were far too many teenaged addicts and far too few slots available. He completed the program and came out clean. He was using again a week later.

  Shelby found the drugs stuffed under his new underwear in a drawer. She had been putting away his clean laundry, but he thought we were searching his room. He ran away that night but hadn’t realized how long it would take him to hike out to the interstate. He reached the truck stop around dawn, just about the same time I realized he had left. I pulled into the lot as he was trying to hitchhike with a trucker.

  I pulled up beside him and pushed open the passenger door. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to Knoxville.”

  “I’ll take you. Safer than a stranger.”

  He looked stunned. With a last glance at the truck driver, though, he threw his bag onto the back seat of my car and climbed in.

  I shifted the car into gear and headed down the on-ramp. I aimed west and settled in for the ride. I was retired by then, so the only thing I was missing was the Liars’ Table. I almost never skipped, but my friends would wait a day.

  He didn’t speak until we were almost in Tennessee. “You really taking me back?”

  I shrugged. “If that’s what you want.”

  Another twenty miles rolled by.

  “She shouldn’t have searched my room.”

  I explained about the laundry. “Besides, you shouldn’t have drugs.”

  Fifteen miles.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry to me, to your grandmother, or to yourself?”

  Ten miles. We were approaching the exit to Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge along with the hordes of tourists flocking to their vacations.

  “Everyone, I guess.”

  “What do you want?”

  The bridge over the Holston River, the border into Knoxville, loomed.

  “I don’t want to do drugs.”

  “I’ll help you if you want it.”

  He nodded, his voice barely a whisper. “Please.”

  “Then let’s go home.”

  A tear rolled down his face. I turned around at the next exit.

  4

  “Wyatt!”

  I heard the crash of something falling in his room. Probably his alarm clock. He was always rough on them, even destroyed a few as if it was their fault he had to get up. In his early years before living with us, he had been as likely to go to bed at dawn as the other way around.

  Mumbled cursing floated through the open window. His throat cleared, and he called out, “What’re you yelling for? I’m not late.”

  Now twenty, Wyatt reminded me so much of his mother sometimes. Jessica had often accused Shelby and me of yelling when we hadn’t been. At least, we hadn’t thought so. I took a deep breath to calm my voice. “Can you come out here, please?”

  In the quiet of the morning, I could hear every noise from inside the house. His bedsprings squeaked, and then his bedroom door opened. His bare feet slapped the wood steps as he descended to the main floor and crossed the den. The shriek of the screen-door springs announced his presence. His hair was a tousled nest of chaos. He blinked against the daylight. “Yeah, Grandpa?”

  I cringed at that moniker. I didn’t like being called that, but I was more distracted by the way he was dressed. Or, more accurately, wasn’t dressed. That boy hadn’t even bothered to put on pants. He was clad only in his boxers. “Aren’t you worried someone is going to see you in your skivvies?”

  Wyatt exaggeratedly looked around at our surroundings. No neighbor houses were within view. “Who’s going to see?”

  I needed more coffee before I debated him, not that I ever won no matter how caffeinated I was, so I tried a more reasonable approach. “Just get dressed before you come outside from now on, okay?”

  He shrugged and opened the screen door to go back inside, but I stopped him. “Have you seen my car?”

  He let the door clang shut, rubbed his eyes, and stared at the empty spot beside his own vehicle. He ran a hand through his disheveled hair and stumbled down the steps into the yard. “Where is it?”

  I did my best to hide the exasperation in my voice. “If I knew the answer to that, would I be asking you?”

  He padded out to the driveway, wincing as his bare feet crossed the gravel, and pointed at the oil stain. “It was right here when I went to bed.”

  “You sure?”

  “I think so. Where else would it have been?” He did the same thing I had done—looked around the yard as if it might be under a bush or hiding in the cornfield. The only thing in the yard was Belle, hunched over and depositing her morning fertilizer. Wyatt shrugged and scratched his butt. “It ain’t here.”

  I clenched my jaw in irritation and fixed my stare on him as he shook his head, his longish hair flipping across his face. He said, “Maybe a swarm of mosquitoes flew away with it. They were fierce last night.”

  Memories of his mother’s teenaged sarcasm flashed into my mind again. I bit my tongue, something I should have done more of back then. “You have no idea what happened to it?”

  His smirk faded into a chilly stare. “Why would I know anything?”

 

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