Free Larkspur Cove by Lisa Wingate

wanted to be his confidant, his comforter, his soft place to fall, but at the same time, he needed a parent, a regulator, an enforcer of the rules. I couldn’t seem to balance both roles, yet I couldn’t afford to fail at either one. No matter what it took, I had to bring my little boy through this transition in life, and judging by the fact that his father hadn’t even returned my calls about the late child-support check and the visitation that was supposed to take place in August, help wouldn’t be coming anytime soon.
    If I failed, Dustin would fail. The thought was terrifying. The fact that his father was busy building a new life with a new wife and two young stepdaughters was enough to send me over the brink. Mentally replaying the incident with the game warden didn’t help, either. How dare he. He didn’t know a thing about what Dustin was going through.
    Keep your boy off the Scissortail . . . for his own good.
    He can read, can’t he?
    Maybe you oughta look into the company you keep, then, son.
    The more I recycled the conversation as I commuted to work, the more irritated I got. Maybe the game ranger . . . warden . . . whatever, was just doing his job, but he had some nerve acting like he knew Dustin, acting like Dustin was a teenage delinquent, looking for a beer bash on the lake. Dustin had never been to a beer bash in his life. He didn’t even know those kinds of kids, much less hang out with them. He’d just . . . made an impulsive decision yesterday and landed himself in a situation he didn’t know how to handle.
    Hadn’t he?
    What had possessed him to climb the Scissortail? He was afraid of heights. He wouldn’t even do the high dive at the pool in Houston. I should’ve told the game warden that. There was no way Dustin would have jumped off those rocks. He was probably scared to death the minute he started climbing.
    Right now, I could come up with a million intelligent things I should have said to Mr. Mart McClendon, water cop, but when someone is attacking your child, it’s impossible to keep cool. One of these days, I was going to mature into a fully developed adult woman who didn’t react to conflict by getting in a mind frizz. After a master’s degree in counseling, you’d think I would be making progress, but this morning when the game warden had shown up on our dock, I was as unprepared as ever. I was unprepared for Dustin to pick that moment to melt down, too.
    I’m not your son, all right?
    This place is like a prison. I should’ve stayed back in Houston . . . with Dad and Delayne.
    What a mess. What an incredible mess. Did I have any business counseling families on how to raise their kids, when I couldn’t even guide my own son smoothly through the transition from intact family to shared-custody household?
    Was there a smooth transition for that?
    Intact family. How many times had I heard that term thrown around in counseling classes – blithely written it in research papers and in my master’s thesis? Purely an analytical term, meaning nothing. I’d never imagined that term entering the bubble of our lives, crashing into it and leaving a jagged hole, like a bullet penetrating sheet metal, creating sharp shreds that pointed inward. Leaving Dustin and me detached . Separated. Not intact .
    Other than Dustin’s pain and his yearning for the way things used to be, it was the terminology, the labels I hated most, if I really let myself admit the truth, if I really got down to the core. It wasn’t life within our old house or being with Karl I missed. I missed being married in front of the rest of the world. Being intact .
    I pushed the thoughts away as I drove. One benefit to the flextime arrangement that allowed me to come in at eight thirty, rather than eight, was that I missed some of the morning tangle of commuters heading for jobs in the Dallas Metroplex.
    My boss, Dr. Dale Tazinski, fondly known to personnel in our small office as Taz, was in the front hall by the coffee