Notes: And it's done! This one takes place sometime next fall, after Rusty's started college. Thank you for all of your comments. :)

Words of Wisdom

Part III: Rusty

Sharon considered the inside of her refrigerator. There was a cooked chicken breast wrapped in foil on one shelf. Sitting beside it was a half-empty jar of almond butter. There were also two bottles of wine and some assorted condiments, including three nearly-empty bottles of ketchup that she assumed were Rusty's fault. Why they were still occupying an entire shelf in her refrigerator when Rusty no longer lived with her was a question she evaded by turning her attention to the freezer.

She fared a little better there. Two pizza crusts, half a dozen kinds of frozen vegetables, some pork chops she wasn't in the mood to thaw tonight, a pint of strawberry ice cream, and some prepackaged quiches and burritos that she kept for the days when she was too exhausted to cook but not in the mood for takeout.

There was always oatmeal.

She needed to go grocery shopping.

That had been her plan for the day, but she'd solved a two related homicides the day before and then decided she'd rather sleep in until nine and meet Andrea Hobbs for brunch. She supposed she could have gone later in the day, but grocery shopping on a Saturday afternoon always took twice as long as it should. Tomorrow morning would do just fine.

She'd just decided to steam some of the vegetables to eat with the chicken when she heard a key unlock the front door. Sharon smiled to herself and shut the freezer door.

"Rusty?"

"It's me." He appeared in the kitchen a moment later, backpack slung from one shoulder and his laptop hugged to his chest. "Hey."

"Hey." She touched his shoulder when he came to stand beside her. "What are you doing here? I thought you had a study group."

"Not tonight. I need to download something," he said. "And the internet is better here. I tried it from school and it said it'd take forty-seven hours."

She slid her arm all the way around him and hugged him against her side. "What were you downloading that was going to take forty-seven hours?"

"Like, nothing illegal, Sharon." But for all the exasperation in his voice, he unwound one arm from around his computer and wrapped it around her instead.

She hoped not. She hadn't gone through all the trouble of adopting him just so that he could get himself arrested for internet piracy.

Rusty sighed. "I'm the only person I know who hasn't seen Ant-Man yet," he said. "So I bought it. Now I need to download it."

"Go on." Her arm was still around him. She tugged on his shoulder and turned him in the direction of the living room, and then gave him a gentle push towards it. "Are you hungry? I was just about to make dinner."

"Uh..." She heard him setting his things down near the coffee table. "What are you making?"

"Get your download going and help me decide." There wasn't enough chicken for both of them.

"You want to watch with me?"

"I would," she said, and shook her head. Rusty's enjoyment of anything could generally not be trusted to be an endorsement of its quality.

When Rusty joined her in the kitchen, he opened the refrigerator and promptly informed her that she needed to go grocery shopping.

"Thank you," she said. "I hadn't noticed."

"Do you want to go? We could go."

"Right now? No." Sharon gave him a sideways look. He sounded a little too eager to spend a Saturday night grocery shopping with his mother. "Are you getting enough to eat at school?"

"Yeah?" He shrugged. "The food kinda sucks, but it's all right."

Right. Whatever that meant. At any rate, she was glad she'd bought him the mini fridge and the microwave for his dorm.

"All right," she said, and reached for the drawer where she stored the delivery menus. "What are you in the mood for? Pizza?"

"Really?"

She tried not to laugh at the look he gave her. "I've had a very long week, and I know you've been working hard too."

His smile faded.

She took the other menus and turned just enough that she could still see his face as she returned them to the drawer.

"I—" Rusty looked away. "Can we get extra cheese?"

"That's fine." Sharon touched his shoulder gently on her way out of the kitchen.

She went to call in their order. One large pizza, extra cheese, everything on it. When she turned around again, Rusty had set two plates at the table and was standing in the kitchen pouring each of them a glass of water.

"Normal people don't drink tea with pizza."

She tried not to smile too much as she took the glass he offered her.

"So did you solve your murders?"

"We did," she said as she took her usual seat. "Did you take your psychology test?"

"Yeah." He paused. "I—I think I did all right. I ran out of time on the last question, but I think I wrote down enough and the rest of it was okay, I guess. We find out next week. So who did it?"

"The brother and his girlfriend were in it together." Two young men had started off pulling small robberies in their neighborhood, escalated to murder when one of the homes had not been as unoccupied as they'd assumed, and then finally ended with one brother wanting to come forward and being killed by the other to keep him from doing so.

"Did they get a deal?"

"A manslaughter plea for the girlfriend in exchange for her testimony." Sharon shook her head. "It's so easy to make one bad, one stupid decision and have it escalate to something that ruins your life and someone else's."

"Sharon." Rusty gave her an exasperated look. "I would tell you if someone wanted me to murder their brother."

She hummed, feeling her mood lift a little.

"But it doesn't have to be just murder, though, right?" he said. "Bad decisions?"

Sharon stared at him.

Rusty cringed.

"No," she said, and gave him a long look. "There are other bad decisions in the world besides murder."

"Like... maybe something smaller?" he said. "Way smaller. Something that doesn't seem like that big of a deal?"

Sharon sat back, crossing her arms and keeping her face as neutral as she could manage. "Yes."

Rusty looked away. "It's kind of a long story."

"It'll be a long wait for pizza."

Rusty slowly spun his plate around in a circle. "That study group," he said. "It started off as a group, and then after awhile it was just me and this other guy. Alex. And... and—" He stared down at his plate, his expression intensely uncomfortable. "And maybe we didn't always study."

"Ah," she said quietly.

"We—" Rusty hesitated. "We didn't do anything. Not like that. We mostly just talked. But I... "

"Okay," she said, as gently as she could. "That's okay. So what happened?"

"He wanted me to—just, don't freak out okay?"

Uneasiness slowly filled the pit of her stomach. Narrowing her eyes, Sharon nodded.

"He wanted me to do something, I said no, and then he turned out to be kind of an asshole." Rusty glanced at her. "Not like that, Sharon. He didn't do anything to me."

Slowly, she unclenched her fingers. "What happened?"

"That test," he said. "I guess the only studying he did was with me, or something. And like I said, we didn't really study."

It had been awhile, but Sharon remembered the danger of studying with someone one was attracted to.

"So he asked if he could, you know, look at some of my answers. Not the whole thing, but like, just to know where to start."

Sharon frowned. "He wanted you to help him cheat?"

It made her angrier than she would've expected, hearing that. Rusty had worked so, so hard to get to college and even then, it had been a group effort to convince him that he was deserving of the opportunity. That someone would try to convince him to jeopardize that...

Sharon rubbed her temples.

"Right?" Rusty rolled his eyes. "I said no, obviously. Well, actually—" He smiled suddenly, looking pleased with himself. "I said yes—"

"Rusty—"

"And then right before the tests got handed out, I moved two seats over. He totally failed."

Sharon smiled before she could help it. "Did you tell your professor?"

"I'm not a snitch, Sharon." He rushed on before she had chance to respond. "He's dropping the class now, anyway. It's not a big deal."

"Isn't it?"

Rusty looked down and away. "I don't want it to be a big deal."

"But?"

"But I'm mad about it," he said. "And no one else thinks that I should've let him cheat, really, but they don't think it's really a big deal either."

"And you?" she prompted.

"I..." Rusty looked away again. "I really liked him, Sharon. And I—I just... I was thinking, that—that maybe we would..."

"If he's not who you thought he was, it's better to know now," she said quietly.

Rusty glanced at her.

She knew her voice changed, sometimes, when she was reminded of Jack. When she wasn't careful, when she didn't pay enough attention to catch it before she spoke, sometimes something wry and bitter slipped out before she knew it.

That was more than she'd meant to tell him.

He didn't say anything, but after three years, she knew him well enough to see that he'd picked up on it.

Sharon cleared her throat.

"Better no relationship than a bad one," she told him, in her normal voice. "Trust me."

"I know."

And he did.

She wished that he could know without knowing.

"I feel like..." Rusty looked away. "Like I should've seen it coming somehow."

"It's unpleasant, I know," she said.

He was quiet for a long time. "Why do I feel so bad?"

"Because he disappointed you." This time, she let the tone come through deliberately. Rusty gave her an uncertain look. Sharon twined her fingers together, sliding the tip of one thumb against the nail of the other.

Few people understood why she hadn't just divorced Jack from the get go. That was fine. They didn't need to understand; it was a private matter and Sharon preferred those kept private. She'd had her reasons, they'd made sense to her, and even now that she was moving on with someone else, she didn't regret not divorcing him sooner.

That didn't make the more than thirty years of constant disappointment hurt any less.

"Maybe I disappointed me," Rusty said. Sharon opened her mouth, then closed it and let him finish. He was staring hard at his plate, and didn't notice. "I know when people want something from me, Sharon. I—I should've..."

"You met this boy at the beginning of the semester?" she asked, and he nodded.

"Okay," he said, before she could. "I guess he probably wasn't planning to cheat on the very first day."

"It's unlikely."

"He texted me earlier," Rusty said. "He says he's sorry. He wants to talk."

"And what do you want?"

Rusty shrugged. "I haven't decided yet. It's—it's probably like what you were saying, earlier. How you don't realize one dumb thing can turn into something that ruins your life."

She nodded.

"I don't know what to tell him."

"I can't tell you whether or not to forgive him," Sharon said. "That's up to you."

"I—I know." He still looked disappointed, like he'd been hoping her to bestow upon him some magical solution.

"I've never met him," she said. "I don't know if he made one bad decision this week, or if this is something he does regularly. Either way..." She gave him a long stare. "You have worked so hard to get to college, and I would hate to see you surrounded by people who would ask you to risk that."

His shoulders were tense and he was beginning to fidget in his seat, two sure signs that he'd reached the end of the conversation.

Sharon glanced at her wrist, then at the door. No sign of the pizza.

"How about we get started?" she said, gesturing towards where he'd set his laptop on the coffee table. "We can take a break from Ape-Man when the pizza gets here."

"It's not—" Rusty caught himself, narrowing his eyes at her suspiciously. "You're not funny, Sharon."

She pressed her lips together to hide her amusement and stood, the back of her hand sliding against his cheek as she moved past him. He'd be all right.

"But—" Rusty caught the edge of her sleeve. She turned back to find him watching her with a reluctant smile. "Thanks."

She smiled at him in answer. "You're welcome."