*****
“I thought I’d be hearing from you, but not this soon,” Nate said after brief introductions on the telephone. His normally gruff voice and demeanor was somewhat less so now, tempered by the prospect of a couple of days at home with his wife.
“It is unusual,” Barbara admitted, thankful that the seasoned truck driver wasn’t as resistant to her request as the two kids she’d talked to earlier in the day. “But we managed to finish the investigation faster than usual and didn’t see the need to put it off.”
“That’s a good thing, I suppose?”
“Yes, a very good thing.”
“So does your call mean I need to be somewhere?”
“I’m afraid so. Just in case the defendant changes his mind about entering a guilty plea, we’ll need you available for trial.”
Nate’s situation was a little different than Robert’s or Landon’s. He lived too far away to just be on call. He would have to be at the courthouse or at least in the same city as the courthouse the morning of the scheduled trial, just in case Jacob pulled a fast one and called it for trial. She told him so, and then gave him the address, date and time. Afterwards Nate said a rather pleasant “goodbye,” much more so than Robert’s and Landon’s, anyway. He was sitting on his back porch with the telephone handset still in his hand. He thought about that Good Samaritan stop he had made several months before, and that memory led him once again to think about retirement, and life in general, for a few lingering moments anyway. He put the phone down on the wrought iron table next to the padded patio chair he had been relaxing in. Lucy, his wife of thirty years, was sitting in an identical chair on the other side of the end table between them.
“Who was that?” she asked, knowing from the conversation that it had something to do with the highway incident he had described to her weeks before.
“The prosecutor,” he answered as he did his best to get his mind back to what it had been concentrating on before the call. Ah—his newspaper. He ruffled out the creases for the dual purposes of making it easier to read and suggesting to Lucy that he was in no mood to talk. He’d just returned a couple of hours earlier from a three-day haul and he was trying his best to unwind before retiring to the bedroom for a three-hour nap.
“What did she say?”
Can’t you take a hint? He thought, still staring at the paper. He said, “I got to go to Darkwell Monday so the sniveling idiot defendant doesn’t back out of his plea.”
“Do you ever wonder how that boy’s doing?”
All the time, he thought. “No,” he lied.
She looked over at him and grinned. He was focusing on his paper. “It’s okay if you have, you know?”
He looked at her with a frustrated look. “I know, but I still haven’t wondered about him. I’ve got enough of my own problems. Why worry about his?”
Lucy picked her coffee mug up off the table and took a sip, gazing out into the yard, which had patches of flowers carefully planted and groomed throughout. “We’ve been married more than thirty years, raised four beautiful kids, and loved each other like no other two people could. Do you think I haven’t learned how you think all these years?”
“Humph,” he exclaimed in almost a grunt, following it with a deep, guttural laugh. He looked over at her and said, “Okay, so I think about him every now and then. I wonder if he’s okay, and if not, if he’s going to be okay.”
“Why don’t you ask the prosecutor? She’ll tell you.”
Turning his attention back to the paper, he replied, “I’ll ask her Monday.”
He caught a headline, Dallas Could Win It All, in the sports page. He was a diehard Cowboys fan, so he paused at seeing the headline and briefly scanned the article underneath it. For those few moments, his mind was pleasantly distracted from the case of the severely injured boy down in Darkwell. Lucy reached over the table and gently patted her husband’s shoulder, then took another sip of her coffee as she admired her flowers. Both smiled, silently thanking God for all he had given them and spared then from. All of their kids had grown up under their care relatively unscathed, and a couple of them were raising families of their own without any major, life-threatening accidents occurring so far. Sure, they had a fair amount of cuts, bruises, and even a bicycle or sports-related broken bone or two, but nothing even remotely like what the boy in Darkwell and his family were dealing with.
For some reason as he sat reading the paper, the Bible story of Job popped into his thoughts. He wondered if that boy had ever read it.
Broken: A story of hope and forgiveness Page 44