The Waiting Game
Duck and cover.
Standing outside the door to the Captain's office, Provenza repeated his mantra to himself.
Duck and cover.
Provenza took a deep, bracing breath before knocking and entering.
"Rusty has asked me to drive him over to the rehab facility to see his mother."
Eyes focused on the form before her, Sharon didn't look up to respond. "I know."
"You know?"
One finger nail trailed down the form to find and hold her place before Sharon looked up. "I suggested Rusty ask you. I thought his mother might be more comfortable with you there instead of me."
As Provenza continued to stand there saying nothing, she added. "It's a school night so try to have him home by ten."
His tone conveying his disbelief, Provenza responded. "Right ..."
When he said nothing more, her gaze migrated back to the form before her. Provenza took that as a dismissal and stepped back out.
Having managed to escape unscathed, Provenza attempted a sigh of relief, but the feeling of impending doom he had been living under the past week remained as present as ever.
He had a fair number of well reasoned justifications for what he had done but Provenza had been married enough times to know that even when he was in the right he was wrong. It was best not to argue. Just take his lumps and be done with it. The longer he waited, the longer he let her anger fester, the worse it would be for him.
As Rusty eagerly approached him, Provenza gestured for him to go ahead. "I'll meet you by the elevators."
Stepping back into the Captain's office, Provenza sighed and closed the door.
Having had enough of the suspense, he asked. "Could we just get this over with?"
Again using a finger as a place marker, she just looked up at him passively.
Exasperated, Provenza pleaded with her. "Could we just do this and get it over with? The part where you rail at me for keeping Rusty's secret from you. For not telling you that he was seeing his other mother."
Lifting her hand to brush back her glasses, she lost her place on the page.
"I'm not angry, Lieutenant. I'm glad that Rusty reached out to you. That he felt comfortable confiding in you. It's important that he have a support system that extends beyond just me."
Provenza frowned as she continued. This conversation wasn't at all going the way he thought it would.
"I understand why you didn't come to me. If you betrayed his trust this time, he wouldn't come to you the next time he had a problem that he couldn't deal with by himself that he wasn't comfortable coming to me about."
Provenza stood there staring at her in disbelief.
"I appreciate that you tried to get him to come to me directly."
Her calmness, her quietness was unsettling.
Provenza still wasn't convinced. "You are telling me that you are really okay with it?"
"Do I wish he had felt comfortable coming to me himself – of course. But there are always going to be topics that children feel more comfortable going to one parent about over the other."
While Provenza cringed at her depiction of him as one half – or was it one third? - of Rusty's parental equation, it was more out of habit than anything else. If she noticed she offered no reaction.
"I lied to you. I betrayed your trust and -"
She corrected him. "-You never lied to me. You just temporarily withheld information."
Again Provenza found himself speechless.
"Lieutenant, we both know the statistics on relapses for people who voluntarily check themselves into rehab. We know how this is going to end. I don't want it to seem like I put any obstacles in the way of Rusty's mother's recovery or his relationship with her. I want him to feel as though she has been given every opportunity to succeed. When she relapses, I want Rusty to know that it wasn't because of anything he or we did. That it was entirely her doing."
Having listened to her calmly and rationally defend his withholding of information and even outright deceiving her, Provenza told her exactly what he was thinking. "There is something fundamentally wrong with you."
Passing back through the mostly deserted squad room, Provenza saw Flynn packing up for the night.
Against his better judgment, Provenza stopped.
"Need something?" Flynn asked.
"I'm taking Rusty over to see his mother at the rehab again."
Concerned, Flynn offered. "You need some back up?"
"No..." Provenza waved him off. "... but I don't think the Captain has had dinner yet. I just thought I would mention it in case you wanted to have another one of your ill-advised non dating dinners."
Flynn looked surprised at the encouragement – however begrudged. "Thanks."
Finis