The Same Place (The Lamb and the Lion #2) - Gregory Ashe Page 0,77
door doesn’t lock. I won’t be able to approve the home until that’s fixed, so we’ll need to arrange a second visit. It’ll be much shorter than this one, I promise.”
“Tell you what,” Jem said. “I keep some tools in Mom’s garage. Let me fix that door for you, and you can check it off right now.”
“I have another appointment,” Lily said.
“Nope, don’t worry about it. I’ll be done in five minutes. You ask your questions, and then I’m going to snooze on Mom’s couch while she makes me chocolate-chip-and-banana pancakes.”
“They’ve been his favorite food since he was twelve,” LouElla said with a gentle roll of her eyes. “I keep telling him protein, protein, protein.”
The mommy-and-son shtick was so good, so easy, that Jem was starting to wonder why he hadn’t run a game like this before. Not with LouElla, of course. But with someone the right age, someone who could hit the right notes the way LouElla did.
“All right,” Lily said. “If you really think you can fix it quickly. Mrs. Arnold, I’m afraid this next set of questions won’t be pleasant. Although the child involved in this alleged incident denies that anything happened, a neighbor reported seeing you strike the child—”
Jem missed the rest of it when he went into the garage, but he didn’t need to hear it. He could have written the script himself. Strike the child with a belt, with the sole of one of the black flats you’re always wearing, with a rolled-up towel, with the collapsible antenna from an RCA TV. The scar that ran from shoulder to hip on his back had healed almost fifteen years ago, but he could feel it now, the red-hot line she’d opened across his back. He stood in front of the pegboard full of tools, his hands curled into fists, blind. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not even next week, but pretty soon kids would be back here. He picked up a screwdriver. What the fuck, he wanted to ask himself, was he doing?
When he passed Lily and LouElla—she was crying now, just the right amount, touching the corners of her eyes with a tissue—he offered a sad smile, as though he wanted to check in on his mom but was too polite to interrupt. Any doubts Lily might have had about the answers, any reservations about LouElla, were buried under the performance Jem and LouElla had put on: the devoted foster son, a college graduate, a state trooper, the kind of guy who helped people even when he was off duty. Those stories about LouElla—whatever they were, whatever she’d done—couldn’t be true. Not with a foster son who still came to check on her and zonk out on her couch for a few hours. Not with banana fucking pancakes.
The bathroom door was an easy fix: loosen the strike plate, move it down a quarter inch, screw it into place. The door shut. The thumb lock worked. Presto chango.
He was using the air compressor from the garage to fill Lily’s tire when she and LouElla emerged from the house.
“This is what we want to see,” Lily told them, clutching a clipboard to her chest. “If we can’t help families stay together, this is what we want. Thank you both for what you’ve shown me today. I just—I just needed to know that the system works, I guess.”
They waved—just a friendly, mom-and-son wave to see off a favorite guest. When the Camry turned out of sight, LouElla said, “Help me pull down the bunk beds. I can still return those to IKEA.”
“You are one cheap bitch.”
She still had her arm around him. Someone walking past might have smiled, might have thought what a pretty picture. LouElla could be very elegant when she wanted to be.
“If you want that name, Princess Jemma, you’ll do what I say.”
And he did. He wanted it bad enough to do this, to put kids back into this house, to put them where LouElla Arnold could lash them down to the bone with an old RCA antenna. He wanted it for reasons he couldn’t even say to himself. Because something had been stolen from him, yes. Because he wanted to be able to rent an apartment without a cosigner. But really, it was about something he couldn’t even put into words. Something he saw in everybody else’s life, just not in his own.
When they’d finished pulling down the furniture and boxing up the parts, LouElla handed him a slip of paper with a name