windowsill. A tiny sizzle and a wisp of smoke proclaimed its demise. “Dad’s supposed to pick us up Saturday morning for breakfast.”
Her brother’s response was vulgar and totally appropriate.
“He’ll be pissed if you don’t show up again.”
“Am I supposed to care?”
“No.” Kelsey sighed. “But I have no intention of enduring another meal with him and the Bimbo by myself. And if neither of us goes, he’ll stand downstairs and yell at Kate for an hour. She doesn’t deserve that.”
Trace stared at the poster plastered on the ceiling above his bed, the landscape on some planet out of a heroin addict’s nightmare. “I hate her.” Kelsey knew he meant the Bimbo, the secretary their dad would bring to breakfast. Not Kate. Kate was all the mother he’d ever had.
She gave him the only reason that might work. “If we cooperate, maybe he’ll think about coming home.”
He cocked an eye in her direction. “Bullshit.”
“Maybe not.”
“I’ll think about it.”
That would have to do. “’Night.” She crossed to the door, listening for sounds of someone out in the hallway.
“Kelse?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s wrong with us? What else does he want?”
Kelsey rested her head against the panel and closed her eyes. “God only knows.” With a deep breath, she opened the door, stepped out and closed it behind her. “And She’s not telling.”
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, Mary Rose nosed Kate’s Volvo into a long line of equally sensible, passenger-safe vehicles and waited her turn to pick up Kelsey and Trace from school. She had to smile, thinking of herself as a car-pool driver. If she and Pete had stayed married—if their baby had been born—this might have been a daily routine in her life. That little boy would have been ten this year. There might have been brothers and sisters…
She shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut against the futile, irrational urge to cry. What in the world was she thinking? Why had that long-ago tragedy suddenly reared its head?
Because of Pete, of course. Seeing him again had undone ten years’ worth of forgetting and resurrected a pain she really couldn’t afford to relive. Except for Trace and Kelsey, children played no part in her present and future plans. There were real advantages to a life without kids, and she enjoyed as many as came her way.
The car behind her beeped its horn, and she realized the line had moved up. Easing closer to the van ahead of her, she scanned the groups of kids hanging around outside the school building, hoping to spot Trace and Kelsey among them. Even after she reached the head of the queue, though, the LaRue kids were nowhere to be seen. When minutes passed and her passengers didn’t show, the security guard told her to move on. Mary Rose tried to protest, but the woman in the bright orange vest simply shook her head and waved with both arms in a gesture that said, clearly, “Get out of the way.”
Two additional trips through the line later, Trace and Kelsey still hadn’t appeared. Muttering a few choice words, Mary Rose drove to the student parking lot—nearly empty now—and left the Volvo there. She had no idea where in the building Trace and Kelsey might be. But when she found them…
The nearest entrance was one of the doors on the back of the gymnasium. Rounding the corner, Mary Rose stopped short at the sight of what looked to be battle lines drawn up in the narrow asphalt alley between the high gym walls and the chain-link fence marking the edge of school property. Seven or eight Hispanic boys on one side taunted the three white kids who stood backed up against that fence. The gibes were in English, but there were extra comments in Spanish, with mocking laughter and lewd gestures. After a moment, she realized that one of the outnumbered boys wore the brilliant yellow, long-sleeved T-shirt she’d seen just this morning in the car on the way to school. Trace.
She started to call out, just as the fight exploded. One of Trace’s friends charged the other group and was sent sprawling on his back on the asphalt. When Trace bent to give him a hand up, he got a kick in the backside that sent him down on his face. And then there was a jumble of bodies, the sick sound of fists pounding against flesh, curses in English and Spanish.
Mary Rose headed back the way she had come, intending to summon help, but found the principal already running toward her, with Kelsey and another girl behind him. The sound of a siren in the distance heralded the approach of more assistance. For a dreadful second, she wondered if Pete would respond to the call, then decided with relief that the highway patrol would let the local police handle this kind of incident.
“Break it up! You hear me? Get back!” A big, heavy man, Mr. Floyd waded into the fight without any apparent concern for his own safety, jerking kids apart by the shirt collars. In another minute the police car arrived; between them, the three men separated the combatants and ended the fight.
“What’s this all about?” Mr. Floyd stared down at Trace and each of the other boys. “Who started it?”
But no matter how many times he asked the question, none of the kids would give an answer. Even after they were marched like a string of prisoners to the principal’s office and written up for violence on school grounds, no one offered an explanation.
“It wasn’t Trace’s fault,” Kelsey told Kate and Mary Rose later, after they got home. “Eric Hasty made a comment in class about a wrong answer Johnny Vasques gave. They’ve been sniping at each other all year long. And when Trace and Bo and Eric went outside at the end of gym class, Johnny and his friends were waiting for them. Trace was trapped. He didn’t have a choice.”
“You could have walked away,” Kate told her son as he sat at the kitchen table with an ice pack on the side of his face. “You didn’t have to fight.”
“And left Bo and Eric there by themselves? I don’t think so.” Dropping the ice pack in the sink, he stalked out of the kitchen, then pounded up the stairs to the refuge of his room.
“Men and their honor code.” Mary Rose shook her head. “Not a tradition I understand very well.”
“It’s like something out of the Middle Ages.” Kelsey folded her arms on the table. “Eric’s sister is a year younger than him, and when he caught her talking to Johnny at lunch last fall, he threw a fit. His family doesn’t think Mexicans and Americans should mix. So there’s been this running feud going all year, and today I guess it just erupted.”
Kate took her coffee cup to the sink. “I guess I’ll have to put Trace on restriction. Honor code or not, I can’t have him fighting in school.”
“Oh, come on, Kate. It’s not his fault.” Kelsey got to her feet. “He was just backing up a friend. It’s not like he started the fight.”
“The two of you should have been out front, waiting for Mary Rose to pick you up.”
“I told you, this thing started before school got out. I went to find Trace and they were already fighting. Please, Kate. Don’t punish him like that. I know he’ll stay out of trouble from now on. I promise.”
“How can you make a promise like that for your brother?”
“I’ll
