Free Times and Seasons by Beverly LaHaye Page A

hands on his hips, watching her with that helpless look on his face. She knew she was hurting him, but she couldn’t help it. She just had to get away, close herself in her room, and weep and cry and pray.
    Rick got in the front seat and Annie in the back, and she started the car and pulled out into the traffic.
    “Mom, are they really going to keep him for a year?” Rick asked.
    “Yes,” she said through her teeth, “and there’s not a thing in the world I can do about it.”
    Silence passed for the next five minutes, and finally, Annie spoke from the backseat.
    “Mom, what you said to Dad…”
    She almost couldn’t see through the blur of her tears. “I shouldn’t have said it in front of you.”
    “Why not?” Rick asked. “Everybody else heard it.”
    Again, silence ticked between them, and she had to force herself to drive more slowly than she felt like driving. She tried to replay the tape of what she’d said to Jerry in the courthouse. How condemning had it been? How upsetting for the children?
    “I’m sorry I said those things. I’ve tried all these years not to talk bad about your father in front of you, and I know I haven’t always been successful at that. Sometimes I’ve just seen red and I just rant and rave and say whatever comes to my mind. Today was one of those days.”
    “It’s okay, Mom,” Annie said. “Maybe those things needed to be said.”
    Cathy looked in the rearview mirror and saw that Annie had tears on her face. She was wiping them away.
    “And maybe they didn’t,” Rick said.
    She glanced over at him and saw the bitterness in his gray eyes. He hadn’t let the tears fall, and she could see that the grief was eating him from the inside out.
    “You know, Mom, Mark made that choice on his own,” Rick said. “It’s like you always say. We can make choices in our teen years that affect the rest of our lives. This one’s going to affect Mark.”
    Her face twisted as she turned the corner to get them home. She shouldn’t even be driving. It wasn’t safe.
    “I know you’re right,” she said. “Your dad didn’t do this. I never should have accused him.” But as the silence followed, those accusations rose in her mind again. Maybe if Jerry had been around to tell Mark to stay away from drugs, he would have listened. Cathy had told him a million times, but sometimes a mom’s word wasn’t as powerful as a dad’s. Maybe he wouldn’t have been so willing to follow his friends, to seek their approval, if his dad had been there for him.
    As she turned onto Cedar Circle and pulled into her driveway, she knew that bitterness was eating her up. And no words were going to cure the sin in her heart. It had been deeply planted and cultivated, and Jerry fertilized it every time she saw him.
    Before the kids had even gotten out of the car, she got out herself, ran into the house, and hurried for her bedroom where she could lock herself in.

C HAPTER
Fourteen
    Mark braced himself against the profanity spewing from the kid behind him in line. Surely the words would erupt into action, he thought, and someone would get hurt. He stood stiff with trembling, clammy hands at his sides.
    The pale, greasy kid behind him looked like he’d lost a recent fight. His orange jumpsuit, identical to the one they’d issued Mark, was dotted with blood from his busted lip and broken front tooth.
    This was all a mistake, he thought, desperately fighting tears that would mark him as a loser. He wasn’t like the ones in this line, with their foul mouths and fighting wounds. They’d kill him as soon as they knew he was weak. He would be an open target—the home-school kid from suburbia. His conviction was a death sentence.
    A yellow school bus with bars on the windows came to the curb. A guard with the build of a bouncer began ushering them on. It had been a long rime since he’d ridden a school bus, a yearand a half at least since his mother had taken him out of the public school and trusted him