The Honest Truth

 

           Angela sat on the passenger side, grey sweatshirt spotted with rain, hood covering her head. She stared straight ahead into the dark night at nothing, looking less like my sixteen-year old daughter than the ten-year old I’d coached at soccer.

            “It’s not my fault he was driving fast,” she tried.
            I let my silence answer her as we watched the tow truck’s flashing lights mark its movements like a strobe. The red numbers on the dashboard read-out said one a.m. The rain continued A warm wind whipped through the roadside trees, but I shivered even in the car with the windows rolled up..
Boyfriend Ryan’s semi-upright Ford Bronco was in a miserable drainage ditch and would be a tough pull. Harnessed up, the rear wheels and axle made a sucking sound as they pulled free of the muck. Angela started crying.
            She really sobbed, her head rocking forward against the dash.
            “A little longer and we can go home, Honey.” I reached over and massaged her neck. The trooper came alongside and I rolled the window down. Rain dripped off his hat brim and into the car when he handed me the paperwork. Not a citation – she hadn’t been driving – but a notice to appear.
            “I’d still take her to Valley, Sir.” He referred to the hospital.
            “Maybe tomorrow. We’ll watch her tonight.”
            We drove off. Behind us, Ryan’s folks sat in their car, the boy in the backseat like a busted drunk in a squad car and the three of them backlit against the still laboring tow truck.

  We sat around the kitchen table like something on the Family Channel. Angela in her pink terry robe sipped hot chocolate next to her mother. The ceiling light made a halo it in her blonde hair. Her eleven year-old brother Scott sat at the end of the table trying to remain unnoticed. My wife Nancy was white-faced – uncharacteristic of the parent who, between the two of us, usually remained unflustered.

            “She gonna get in trouble?” Scott couldn’t stand the silence.
            “No, but you are if you’re not upstairs in bed before I get there.” Nancy managed a smile as she said it, and the boy got up and left with an “Aw, gee.”
            Every parent knows the feeling. In the face of a child’s behavior that has resulted in injury or near to it, you struggle to remain stern and authoritarian while all you want to do is hold her tight and rock. And thank God.
            We didn’t like boyfriend Ryan in the first place. His pierced tongue for starters; his low-life parents who drank and talked too much; the guilty flash I’d always see in his eyes before he remembered to smile and be nice to me.
Nancy and I were most uneasy, we decided, about his obvious need to be at our house rather than his own, a neediness that our daughter either didn’t see or didn’t want to see. Clearly our family represented normalcy, a place of refuge for Ryan away from the torment at home. Rather than welcome him, however,we resented the intrusion. Odd, for the otherwise gracious products of the Sixties that we were.
Were not neighborhoods littered these days with abused, ignored, or virtually parentless children? Would we not have made room for that Ukrainian family the church was trying to place had it not conflicted with our annual get-away to the lake? To our cabin which did sleep eight, but which was our own special place of refuge?
I was clearer about his Ryan's neediness. He was after my daughter and all that that implied. He loved her, he said. I’m sure he did – and, by now, probably had!
Angela had taken him in like a stray puppy. The dogs she’d adopted, of mixed ages and uncertain parentage, could have predicted her response in this situation. But, if dogs sniff around too much, they’re sent outside. And they don’t take one’s daughter on dates in a car.
  Ryan was also older - nineteen in fact. The three years separating them was, to be sure, one year shy of the age difference between Nancy and me. No mystery, then, locating most of my discomfort with this arrangement in the dark frowns twenty years ago on Nancy’s father’s Old World face.
  Ryan’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Ketchum (“Butch” and “Dotty,” I swear) didn't help his, or their, cause. At first, with surprising good grace we thought, they’d called and apologized and expressed all kinds of concern and relief that there'd been no injury. The other shoe dropped during their actual visit to our house some days later. It seems their insurance company had contacted them (a surprise?) and referenced Ryan’s two prior moving violations (no surprise).
  Surely, we’d be interested in the Ketchum’s settling with us for any medical costs or other “inconvenience”; we didn’t need to go to our insurance company with any kind of claim, did we?
Ryan’s dad continued, “The way we see it. That dog racin’ into the street, the boy goin’ the speed limit, dark and rainy night and all.”
He pronounced “night”, “nat,” and “all” as a two-syllable word.
Angela, whose chronic truthfulness often got her in trouble, had said nothing about a dog. Ryan had been going over fifty, as computed by the veteran cop who’d needed only to work backward from the distance between the curve and where the Bronco ended up.
 I stared at The Family Ketchum with growing disbelief. Nancy’s pleasant smile turned down by degrees and by the hidden movement of small facial muscles into the rictus grin she reserved for door-to-door salesmen who took root on the front step or the receptionist at the doctor's office where she'd already waited an hour.
"So, my daughter’s to lie,” I managed.
The six of us sat silently. The mantel clock ticked, and from upstairs came the murmur of afternoon TV.
“Who’s to know?” asked Butch.
"Well, the six of us, for starters,” I said.
I put my hand on Angela’s knee when I heard her start to speak.
“We’ll talk it over, how’s that?” I said, and stood.
Ryan’s mother – a Dotty, for sure – picked up on the cue and stood as well.
“We’ll leave y’all to your Sunday, then. Come along, Ryan. Butch?”
“Butch!” I moaned as the door closed behind them, and we managed a giggle.

     Two weeks later, Angela and I took the interstate to the county seat for Ryan’s court appearance. I picked her up at school and she walked toward me in a sensible skirt, blouse, and sweater. Her mother had arrested her first wardrobe effort that morning with “You’re not wearing that, and you know it!”

Her morning sullenness at the rebuke had subsided into flat-out nervousness by the time she climbed in the car.
"What’ll they do to him, Daddy?”
“As much as he deserves,” I thought to myself, but shrugged.
We sat outside the county attorney’s office on wooden benches, vintage World War II. The courthouse had been built over a century ago, and periodic remodels of the interior had not expanded the space, only jammed in more people. The place smelled of a thousand legal files. A row of incandescent ceiling lamps, looking undusted since the same World War, led the way down a hall to a doorway marked in large letters: Superior Court – Division One. Division Two no longer existed, the victim of a budget cut at the state legislature years before.
Ten or so other people waited along with us including, it appeared, another father-daughter combination. He and I exchanged quick looks which were one part rite-of-parental-passage and one part frank remembrance of our own wayward youths. Neither Ryan nor his parents was anywhere to be seen.
The letter to our home had informed us that this was a preliminary hearing. The judge would determine whether sufficient evidence existed to hold the defendant over for an actual trial. Routinely, however, a plea of guilty or no contest could be entered at the time and a sentence pronounced. “Reckless endangerment” was a gross misdemeanor in our state, not a simple traffic infraction.
The door at the end of the hall swung open, and we were summoned inside an imposing room. The juxtaposition of twenty-foot ceilings, the imposing polished oak judicial bench rising a good ten feet from the floor, and my five-and a-half-foot daughter – tiny as a babe, from this perspective – was daunting even to me. I would sweep her up and run from this place; she has no business here, she’s just a child!
Angela moved closer, her small frame pressing against my side. I took her hand, and it was shaking.
“All rise,” boomed the bailiff.
A smallish woman in a black robe strode in from a door to our right, ascended the high bench, disappearing for a moment, then reappearing before she sat down.
 “You may be seated,” called the bailiff. All of us complied. Still no Ryan.
The first case was called – hit-and-run of an unattended vehicle sideswiped in a parking lot. The offender didn’t leave a note, but a witness got his license plate. Five hundred dollars, plus the damage to the car.
A second case, and then a third. Then, “People vs. Ryan Bartholomew Ketchum.”
“Bartholomew?” I looked sidelong at my daughter. Angela was not amused.
The case was called a second time with no response.
“Bench warrant will issue for failure to appear,” intoned the judge rapping her gavel.
 The door behind us banged open, and Ryan rushed in. He looked terrible. His face was flushed and his hair was mussed, and I thought I detected a bruise on his cheek, but maybe I was wrong. I also thought he might have been crying.
He saw us, and we both motioned him toward the judge and through the swinging wooden gate in the bar rail.
 "If you’re Mr. Ketchum, you’re late,” said Her Honor.
  “I . . . I . . . ." He couldn’t continue.
Okay, okay. You’re nineteen, of age. Do you have someone to represent you?”
He looked small standing there, a tail of his barely ironed white shirt sticking out of his dark trousers, his long arms to his sides. Then, his shoulders started to shake.
I was out of my seat and past the bar without a conscious thought.
 "I will, Your Honor,” I said. I put my arm around the boy and squeezed his shoulder. “I’m the father of Mr. Ketchum’s passenger, back there.”
I motioned toward Angela and got enough of a glance to see her dropped jaw.
The judge frowned, no doubt to wonder if I was a lawyer.
“Tell the judge what you’re going to do, Ryan.”
High above, the blades of a fan whirred quietly while we waited.
Finally, “I’m guilty, Your Honor.”
The judge flipped through the file.
“Your record’s lousy, Mr. Ketchum. The police report has something here about a dog darting in front of your car. It also says you said you were doing thirty-five, but the officer seated over there has a different opinion. How fast were you going?”
“I don’t know. Probably about fifty. And there wasn’t a dog.”
“And you could have killed yourself or that young lady back there. Good thing you weren’t drinking.”
It was over that fast. License suspended for a year, but he could petition for permission to drive to work after sixty days. Six hundred dollar fine plus seventy-five court costs. Thirty days in jail, twenty-nine suspended.
“Remanded to the custody of the sheriff’s department. Do you need to make any arrangements before you go to jail?”
“I guess not, Your Honor.”

 We drove home in silence, Angela and I. She snuffled against my coat sleeve and hugged my arm. I accepted her gratitude and loved the adoration.

“You’re the best, Daddy!”
But I failed at self-congratulation.
I recalled slouching down behind the wheel of my car that reeked of beer while my buddies and I watched a cop car speed by the intersection where we’d taken a hard right, flipped off the headlights, and stopped.
I remembered watching the detectives take away the guy I bought pot from in college while I hid out shivering in his backyard.
 I remembered dashing back into the neighbor’s house with Nancy just in time to empty the wastebasket of a forgotten condom and tissues.
I remembered standing next to my lawyer father and explaining to the judge about the carton of cigarettes I’d gotten caught with stuffed under my jacket. Dad hadn’t even known I was smoking.
My daughter looked at me. "I think he’s learned his lesson, Daddy.”
“So do I, Honey,” I lied.