“Over and over.”
“Our mother? You abandoned her too. You don’t give a shit about us.”
“I give several shits about you, you little asshole,” West said, knowing that was probably not the way you were supposed to talk to kids. But he wasn’t a damned kindergarten teacher. “I was looking for you. And you’ve been here the whole time?”
“And responsible for a few break-ins,” Pansy said.
West stared hard at his kid brother. “You stole that woman’s wallet. And you broke into the bakery.” Pansy slipped something out of her pocket, and it took a moment for him to realize it was the missing wallet. She opened it, and he saw a license inside that said Barbara Niedermayer. He shook his head. “Kid, I thought you knew better than this.”
“You’re going to lecture me?” Emmett scoffed. “You’re the one that spent four years in jail.”
“For something I didn’t do,” West said.
“Maybe I didn’t do it either,” Emmett said, lifting his chin. “Same as you.”
“I really didn’t do it,” West said.
“I have to... He’s under eighteen,” Pansy said. “I don’t know if Carl Jacobson from the bakery or Barbara are going to want to press charges. I’m going to recommend that they don’t, and that he engage in community service instead.”
“He’s young,” West said. “He shouldn’t be...he shouldn’t be punished for the crappy life we’ve had.”
“But he did those things,” Pansy said, her voice shot through with steel. “And I feel bad about it, but...”
“Pansy,” West said. “Please. Work with me.”
“I will. The question is if Carl and Barbara will. I have to uphold the law, West.”
“Oh, because of your fucking police chief position?”
“Yes,” Pansy shot back. “Because of that, and because of what’s right. I don’t get to just choose when to care about what’s legal and what isn’t. It’s my job to care about it all the time. It just is.”
Throughout their argument, Emmett was quiet.
“I’m not going to be able to make this go away, kid,” West said. “It’s not up to me.”
Emmett looked at him. “Am I going to go to jail?”
“For this?” Pansy asked. “Probably not. If so, not for long. But there will be some consequences.”
“Are you going to send me back home?” Emmett asked, this question directed straight at West.
West sighed, and looked around the place. His other half brothers happened to run a school for troubled kids. An alternative school. And, on the one hand, the idea of his half brother being around kids who were no less trouble than he was, was a little bit concerning. But then... Emmett was trouble, so it was fair enough.
“I’m not going to send you home,” West said. “Unless you want to go home.”
Emmett looked skeptical. “Really?”
“Emmett,” West said. “I was looking for you to find out if you wanted to live with me. From the minute I got out of jail. But Mom didn’t know where you were.”
“She didn’t care where I was,” Emmett said. “She never called me or anything.”
“You have your phone?”
“Yeah, but it’s not hooked up to anything anymore. I was on her plan. She quit paying for it a couple of months ago.”
So she could have let the police track her son’s phone, and she hadn’t done it. Probably even could have done it through the cell phone company, and hadn’t done it.
She had just cut him off. Quit paying for his phone, because it was convenient for her.
West knew that it shouldn’t be a surprise to him since he had been raised by the same woman. Since he knew what kind of parent she was.
Still. It damn well shocked him. Because when he looked at Emmett he saw a kid. He might be fifteen, but in West’s eyes he was a child.
And the thing that crashed in against him, crushed down on him like a ton of rocks rolling off the side of a mountain, was the fact that his mom didn’t seem to look at him and think the same.
That she hadn’t looked at West and seen the same.
Or if she had, that she hadn’t cared.
She had been young when she’d had West. A kid herself, at eighteen, and he’d always cut her a certain amount of slack because of that. But she wasn’t young anymore. There was no excuse. He’d been a kid left behind. One that had fallen between the cracks. He couldn’t go back and fix that. Couldn’t make their mom a better mother. But...he remembered what Pansy had said.
That he was trying to be the family for