her voice.
Abruptly the young woman sat up, pushing the hair out of her face with the heel of her hand. Her cheeks were flushed. Eyes blood-shot.
‘Sure about that, sweetie? You’ve been through a lot,’ Bell said.
A strand of Carla’s hair had strayed onto her forehead. Bell tried to smooth it back out of her eyes.
Carla flinched violently at her mother’s touch.
‘I know that, Mom,’ she snapped, pushing away Bell’s hand. ‘Jesus. Can you lay off for a little while? Maybe give me a break? Not treat me like I’m five freakin’ years old or something?’
Bell was startled. But knew she shouldn’t be. The Carla she’d seen that morning, the gentle Carla, the Carla who’d been frightened and needy in the wake of a terrible event, was temporary. An aberration.
In the past year or so, Bell’s earnest, good-natured little girl had somehow morphed into a sour, bitter, rude smart-ass, suspended twice so far this year from Acker’s Gap High School – once for smoking in the girls’ bathroom, once for mouthing off to her math teacher.
And then came the night a month and a half ago when Carla rammed a tree with her car over on Riley Pike. Bell’s ex-husband Sam had bought her a bright red Mustang. The car, Bell thought, was a ridiculous, shortsighted, show-off gesture that had concerned her from the moment Sam had delivered it, dangling the keys in front of Carla’s face and chuckling when she tried to catch them between her smacking hands, like a happy kid chasing a firefly.
Carla wasn’t hurt in the accident, but she had screamed obscenities at the deputy who’d arrived on the scene within minutes. The reason for her outburst was quickly determined: Three ounces of pot were found in the glove compartment.
Along with suspending her license and requiring her to perform forty hours of community service, Judge Terrence Tolliver had ordered Carla to attend the Teen Anger Management Workshop at the RC for the rest of the school year.
All of which had only enraged Carla even more, because she couldn’t understand why her mother didn’t intervene with the judge. ‘You know Tolliver,’ Carla had said on the night of the verdict, her voice a pissed-off hiss, eyes narrowed, fists bunched and held tightly at her sides, like two grenades with the pins already pulled. ‘You know the guy. Like, personally. You’ve gone to lunch with him. And you couldn’t have asked for a favor? One lousy freakin’ favor? I mean, it’s not like I’m this big criminal or something.’
Carla’s tone had grown even darker, marbled with bitterness. ‘Oh, right – you’re so worried about what people in this craphole of a town think of you. You’ve got to be Ms Perfect all the time. You’re better than everybody else, aren’t you? It was a little bit of pot, Mom. Like, a handful. And a freakin’ fender bender. Jesus. You couldn’t have, like, just asked him to go easy on me?’
The reason Bell didn’t call Terry Tolliver and ask him to cut Carla some slack – which he surely would’ve done had she requested it – had nothing to do with appearances, nothing to do with her reputation, nothing to do with her job as prosecuting attorney, nothing to do with justice or fairness or reelection campaigns.
Carla was at a crossroads.
Bell knew it, just as surely as she knew that the sun would rise over the mountains in the morning, painting Acker’s Gap in colors of peach and gold and pink. One nudge in the wrong direction – the slightest indication that shortcuts were permissible, that she didn’t have to answer for her actions – and Carla could fall right off the edge of her own life.
Everybody’s life had that kind of moment. A moment when the world hesitates, when the future is not quite set. Still a mix of brilliant possibilities. A moment when things can go either way. Right or wrong. Up or down.
Bell could point out just such a moment in the backstories of a great many of the criminals, punks, and bad-asses she dealt with. The thieves, the drug dealers, the people whose lives were shaped and fired and glazed by violence.
There was always a moment when things could’ve turned out differently. Always a moment when a life was up for grabs.
She’d be damned if she would let her little girl slip away, just because it was easier, in the short run, to give in.
Carla coughed. With a bare foot she kicked at the brown wool