This one's been sitting on my hard drive for a while, but I finally decided to post— I wanted to really dig into what was going through Darry's head right after the accident (even if it's not always very flattering). I think it makes more sense if you've read Prodigal first, just as background on what's going on with Darry and his dad re: college.
"So what you're telling me, Darrel—" Beverly Edwards, according to the nametag on her desk, pushed her pointy glasses further up the bridge of her nose— "is that you are the only person capable of taking guardianship at this time. That you have no other family apart from your uncle Eugene?"
I couldn't stop rubbing my hand over my shaven scalp. I'd kept my hair short for years, to rebel against Dad and fit in at school in equal measure— now that we had to cut it, in mourning, there wasn't much further to go. I looked like I'd just gotten out of the reformatory, and the hack job I'd done to Jasmine's hair was even worse, hanging longer on one side than on the other. I didn't want to think of that as a metaphor for how I'd handle raising a girl. I didn't want to think about Dad, either, or else I was really going to lose it.
"He's… mentally deficient, ma'am," I said slowly, using the euphemism Mom had drilled into us, instead of splashing Uncle Gene's business around by telling the truth, with 'schizophrenic'. They called him 'high-functioning', at his last hospital, a success story compared to some of the patients; he didn't have to be there full-time or in a group home, he could live alone, and he remembered to take his pills and could dress and feed himself without an aide. He painted and made crafts and smoked grass, he seemed happy enough when we called on the phone and he was in a lucid phase. But he couldn't hold down a job, either, he lived off disability checks from the government and money he'd inherited from his daddy; he still saw and heard things that weren't there, half the time, had elaborate conspiracies cooked up in his head; he never got violent, to my knowledge, but if he got bad enough he'd curl up in a corner, or forget how to talk, or stare at the wall for days on end. The reason why he'd gotten the bright idea to move out to the middle of the desert was because he thought German paratroopers wouldn't find him there, twenty years after the war ended. I couldn't imagine him being able to raise three kids. They'd run all over him like he was a freshly-mowed lawn. "I don't think he'd be a good fit. At all."
He didn't really understand that Mom and Dad were dead, when Soda called him. He wasn't going to be any help. I'd have to see if he needed someone to accompany him to the funeral.
"Grandparents usually take precedence, over anybody else—"
"We only have one, ma'am," I cut off, and cursed myself for the rudeness— not that I gave two shits about her feelings, right now, more that I didn't want to give her a bad impression. Nana Liluye died of diabetes years ago, Grandpa Hall had had a heart attack, and I didn't know what happened to Dad's father, or if he'd even known or cared himself. "Our grandma Hall, and she disowned our mama a long time ago. She's not going to want to take them either."
She pushed a tin of butterscotch candies across the table at me. I put one in my mouth and almost gagged at the sudden influx of sweetness. "Are you sure that she wouldn't be at all willing to consider—"
"She was married to the Grand Dragon of the Texas Klan, ma'am. I really don't think she's going to be."
I was exaggerating like hell. I didn't know what rank Grandpa had ever reached in the Klan, or the difference between a Wizard and a Dragon in it. But I figured it would only bolster my point, which was that I'd drive the kids down to New Mexico myself before I left them to her loving care.
I didn't tell Miz Edwards that she'd offered to take just Pony in.
She heaved a sigh at me and flipped through the manila folder again. "I need you to understand that this is going to be a difficult sell to a judge," she said. "I also need you to understand that you don't have to do this."
Bile rose up in my throat, and it wasn't from all the sugar. "Excuse me?"
"You're only twenty years old— I'm not sure if you fully grasp the responsibility you'd be takin' on here." Worse than the insult to my intelligence was the blatant pity in her eyes. "Most young guys your age are just starting to think about marriage, havin' kids of their own… and you'd be thrown in the deep end with three teenagers. A teenage girl, too, with no mother or big sister to guide her… my goodness, that poor thing must be feelin' so overwhelmed right now." Did she and I know the same Jasmine? "Nobody would blame you, least of all me, if you thought that the state would do a better job finding them a safe place to live. I promise nowadays," and she said this with a small, nervous laugh, "we don't send children to orphanages like something straight out of Oliver Twist. They would be well cared for."
I could do it, I realized, and I thought about it in the same way that when you have a toothache, all you can do is keep prodding it with your tongue, even though you know you shouldn't. The state wouldn't compel me to take custody— in fact, that was starting to seem like the absolute last thing they wanted. I could just sign on the dotted line and have them assigned to foster families, or more likely, at this point, group homes until they aged out of them. Put myself through school with the money I'd saved up; it was too late to enroll this semester, but I could start taking classes in the summer session. And for one delusional second, I even tried to convince myself that it would be for the best, for everyone involved. Once I graduated, I'd be able to get a good-paying job, one that could support them all a lot better as adults than what I earned roofing houses the way Dad had. They'd grow up, or at least finish growing up, in a nicer neighborhood than East side Tulsa. And would they really be better off raised by me, their clueless, barely legal brother? One whose resentment would have to be kept on a constant leash?
I could finally be free.
For so many years, I'd seen my family as an anchor, keeping me weighed down to a place I wanted nothing more than to escape— and in the span of three days, I'd had the perfect out dropped right into my lap. Then I imagined Dad smacking me upside the shaved cueball head, and that train of thought reached its destination. Asking me what kind of man I'm gonna be. Was this how he'd felt the first time he held me in his arms, that desperate, selfless love, the realization that his needs were always going to be subsumed by his child's from now on? I knew without being able to hear an answer that it was yes.
I also knew the real reason why this woman wanted to take the kids, and it had nothing to do with my future plans. Knew it right when she remarked on what pretty beadwork we had hanging up on the walls, and just where had we gotten it from? I stared back at her, my face and my mind set. "I'm pretty sure I'm takin' them, ma'am. So you said I just have to file the forms at the courthouse, and I don't need to get a lawyer?"
When I headed back out into the parking lot, it was already raining, and I didn't have an umbrella— not that I really noticed, the raindrops could've been hailstones, for all I cared. Mrs. Mathews was waiting for me in the passenger seat of my truck, a foil-covered casserole in her lap. We were going to the funeral home after this, to talk about flower arrangements before the big day. Another reason to call Uncle Gene again— I never had any idea funerals were so expensive, and I'd already turned down half the advanced embalming options. I didn't see the point, when they'd just decay inevitably anyway. "How did it go?" she pressed the second I closed the door behind me, stray droplets soaking the cloth interior. "I'm tellin' you, Darry, worst comes to worst, they can always stay with me." Then she wrinkled her nose. "Well, Jasmine, at least, anyway. I already got one boy who eats up all my food and won't clean up after himself, not sure if I could handle two more."
Two-Bit came by his habit of wisecracking in inappropriate situations honest, but I forced myself to give her a wan half-smile. She'd been fussing over us for days now, bringing over so many casseroles and meat loafs that the icebox didn't close, so at least I didn't have to worry about cooking on top of the million other things I had to worry about. "It's all gonna work out okay, from what I gather," I said in what I thought struck a reassuring tone, and instead my voice whistled up an octave. She didn't need the gory details, and wouldn't understand them even if she tried. "Do you know where Mom keeps the—"
Paperclip. Paperclips, to hold the endless fucking stacks of forms I had to fill out every waking hour, but she didn't keep anything anywhere anymore. She had kept them in some drawer, past tense. And that, of all the timing in the world, was when my face screwed up in abject misery and my throat tightened to the width of a drinking straw.
"Oh, honey. Baby." Mrs. Mathews moved right into action, pulling me into her shoulder and wrapping her arms around me, though I was a solid foot taller than her. "You c'mere now... and in the bottom left drawer of your daddy's desk, I'm pretty sure. I was never great shakes at organization, the way she was, I swear y'all could've been in Better Homes and Gardens."
"I can't get into the habit of cryin'," I said thickly into the cloth of her coat, my nose clogged up from maybe ten seconds of it. "Not when the kids are, all the time, I have to keep it together for them." I tried to pull away from her and fumbled around my pockets for a handkerchief, embarrassed, but she held me firm by the forearms, with a strength I didn't think a woman her size had.
"You're a good boy, Darry," she insisted. Tapped the bottom of my chin so I'd look at her, into the fine lines around her gray eyes. With age came wisdom, something I felt sorely lacking in at the moment. "No, a good man. I swear Two-Bit would be halfway to Cancun right now, in your position."
This time she did manage to get a watery chuckle out of me. Lord, I'd almost feel sorry for ol' Two-Bit, if he wasn't such a pain in his mama's neck. "I don't know how I'm gonna do it," I said, confessing my worst fear, "I don't know nothin' about bein' no parent." Hell, I'd been within a hair's-breadth of signing them over to the state, I was sure that wasn't qualifying me for any awards. Though again, in this neighborhood, it wasn't like that bar was set too high to begin with. "Seems I was just a kid myself."
"You think I knew, when I was seventeen and expectin' Keith, or after I had Grace and my man never came back from his last truck-drivin' job? Or your mama or your daddy, you reckon they had it all figured out?" She cupped my face with one hand. "Here's a secret, Junior—" I would've rather died than allowed anyone else to refer to me that way— "you can hit my advanced age and still not have one solitary clue what you're doin'." She shrugged, as she let go of me, and gave me a hard, reassuring pat to the shoulder. "You just have to love them, the rest'll fall into place, trust me. They're half-raised already, you won't even be on duty for too long."
But that was the problem, and though I felt no small amount of guilt, criticizing my parents when their bodies weren't even cold yet, I just couldn't stop myself. I'd been raised all the way by Mom and Dad— Dad, who was proud of our lives and our neighborhood to the point where it obviously masked shame, Mom, who'd never let her dreams for her kids get in the way of yielding to him as the man of the house. I didn't want to keep that lackadaisical East side attitude going forward. Even if I'd signed my own ambitions away, I wanted Ponyboy to go to college on a full track scholarship, for Soda to at least graduate, for Jasmine to marry some nice oil man or construction worker and not be embarrassed to bring him home to the family, and I wasn't sorry about it, neither. I slumped down in the seat, traced a pattern in the condensation on the window with my finger. Should I have been?
She had one thing solid, though. Love wasn't a feeling, it was a duty, something you did wrong or right. And I'd pick up from where they left off and do them one better. I owed it to them, to all of us.