Dead at thirtyeight, the victim of 'high cholesterol.'
'Thank God we owned the house,' she said. 'Besides that, the only other thing Jimmy left us worth anything was an old HarleyDavidson motorcycle-one of those choppers. He was always tinkering with that thing, making a mess. Putting Reggie on the back and racing through the neighborhood. He used to call it his hog. Till Reggie was four he actually thought that's what a hog was.'
Smiling.
'It was the first thing I sold,' she said. 'I didn't want Reggie getting ideas that it was his birthright to just go out and crack himself up on the freeway. He always liked speed. Just like his dad.
So I sold it to one of the doctors where I worked-over at Foothill General. I'd worked there before Reggie was born. AfterJimmy died I had to go back there again.'
I said, 'Pediatrics?'
She shook her head. 'General ward-they didn't do peds there.
I would have preferred peds, but I needed a place that was close to home, so I could be close to Reggie-he was ten but he still wasn't good by himself. I wanted to be home when he was. So I worked nights.
Used to put him in at nine, wait till he was asleep, grab a nap for an hour, then go off at ten forty-five so I could be on shift by eleven.'
She waited for judgment.
The Inquisitor didn't oblige.
'He was all alone,' she said. 'Every night. But I figured with him sleeping it would be okay. What they call latchkey now, but they didn't have a name for it back then. There was no choice-I had no one to help me. No family, no such thing as day care back then. You could only get all-night babysitters from an agency and they charged as much as I was making.'
She dabbed at her face. Looked at the poster again, and forced back tears.
'I never stopped worrying about that boy. But after he grew up he accused me of not caring about him, saying I left him because I didn't care. He even got on me for selling his dad's bike-making it into a mean thing instead of because I cared.'
I said, 'Raising a kid alone,' and shook my head in what I hoped was sympathy.
'I used to race home at seven in the morning, hoping he'd still be asleep and I could wake him up and pretend I'd been there with him all night. In the beginning it worked, but pretty soon he caught on and he'd start to hide from me. Like a game-locking himself in the bathroom...' She mashed the handkerchief and a terrible look came onto her face.
'It's okay,' I said. 'You don't have to-' 'You don't have kids. You don't understand what its like. When he was older a teenager-he'd stay out all night, never calling in, sometimes for a couple days at a time.
When I grounded him, he'd sneak out anyway. Any punishment I tried, he just laughed. When I tried to talk to him about it, he threw it back in my face. My working and leaving him. Tit for tat: you went out-now I go out.
He never..
She shook her head.
'Never got a lick of help,' she said. 'Not one single lick from any of them. Your crowd, the experts. Counselors, special-ed experts, you name it. Everyone was an expert except me. Cause I was the problem, right? They were all good at blaming. Real experts at that. Not that any of them could help him he couldn't learn a thing in school. It got worse and worse each year and all I got was the runaround. Finally, I took him to... one of you. Private clown. All the way over in Encino. Not that I could afford it.'
She spat out a name I didn't recognize.
I said, 'Never heard of him.'
'Big office,' she said. 'View of the mountains and all these little dolls in the bookshelf instead of books. Sixty dollars an hour, which was a lot back then. Still is..'. specially for a total waste of time. Two years of fakery is what I got.
'Where'd you find him?'
