RECLAIM MY HEART(2)

Zach wasn’t a bad kid. Sure, he’d been having some problems lately. Acting out a bit. He was a teenager. Rebellion was normal at this age, wasn’t it?
But…?arrested?
Two policemen barreled through the front door, the woman sandwiched between them kicking and shouting her innocence, then yelling threats, as they dragged her through the full length of the lobby. The three of them disappeared down the hall.
Tyne felt her heart pinch, thinking of her son somewhere down that same hallway. Zach had never experienced anything like this before. He must be terrified. But in the same instant, a flash of annoyance jolted through her, buoyed by a devastating fear for her son’s safety. What was he thinking leaving the house after dark? He knew the rules, knew there were reasons for them, and that he was expected to follow them.
Was this her fault for trusting him to stay home alone?
But he hadn’t been, damn it. Not tonight, anyway.
Catering required her to work a lot of nights, overseeing the serving of the food she prepared and supervising clean up crews of the parties of the people who hired her. Things had started getting a little dicey a couple of years ago when Zach began to complain that he was too old to stay with Mrs. Armstrong next door. Then her elderly neighbor had fallen, broken her hip, and had ended up in an assistedyth an ass living facility.
Desperate for a way to keep her son from spending his evenings alone, Tyne had turned sneaky, and she refused to feel guilty about the babysitting gigs she set up for him, or asking him to tutor the children of her friends. Keeping tabs on a teen was hell, but she did what she had to do. When he’d turned fifteen, she set a nine o’clock curfew. If she had to work later than that, she usually finagled some reason for Rob to drop by the house until she arrived. Tonight had been no different. Rob and Zach were supposed to watch a game on ESPN.
Tyne had arrived home around eleven-forty-five to find Rob asleep on the couch, a replay of some violent kick-boxing nonsense droning on the TV. She’d touched the power button on the remote, awakened Rob with a gentle shake, and they’d chatted for a few minutes. Rob had told her Zach had stayed in his room most of the evening. He’d said he’d tried to coax him out when the baseball game started, but that he’d had no luck, and that he must have drifted off sometime before the ninth inning.
The hours she’d spent on her feet tonight had exhausted her, so when Rob reminded her that he was meeting his sister for breakfast, she’d actually been relieved that he wouldn’t be staying over. She’d walked him to the door and kissed him goodnight. She had been just about to go slip into her pajamas when her cell phone vibrated—and this nightmare had begun.
She glanced down the hallway leading to the back of the building. Was anyone ever going to come? On the adjacent bench, Charlie’s chin had slumped to his chest, his snoring soft and rhythmic.
Tyne had been surprised by the phone call from the policewoman, but not overly concerned. She assumed the woman had chosen the wrong Whitlock in the phone book. In fact, she’d been so certain that the officer had made some huge mistake that she’d asked her to hold on so she could check Zach’s room. The sight of her son’s empty bed made lifting the cell phone back up to her ear sheer torture.
And now here she sat. In a police station. Waiting to see her son. Her son who was under arrest.
Should she have seen this coming?
Sure, Zach hadn’t been easy to deal with lately, but she hadn’t had any serious problems with him. Not anything that would allude to this scenario, anyway. His defiant behavior had begun some time ago. He’d started smarting off to Rob and back-talking her. Not all the time, just every so often. Then she’d noticed that he’d forget to do his chores, leaving his bed unmade, his room a wreck, or the kitchen garbage mounding in the can.
Tyne had called him on it, if not in every instance, at least often enough so that he still knew who was in charge. But his behavior hadn’t overly concerned her. Defiance and moodiness were just part of growing up, especially with kids Zach’s age. Teens saw pushing the limits as their primary goal. To make their parents, and every other adult they came into contact with, utterly miserable. To stick their big, hairy-toed feet out of the box as far as they could until someone shouldered them back inside the boundary lines of acceptable behavior.
The shouldering part fell under her job description. It didn’t matter that she was a single parent. Well, she did have Rob, but he was her boyfriend. Wait. Her fiancé, she mentally corrected, thumbing the diamond ring on her finger. But Rob knew squat about raising kids, or if he did, he didn’t let on. It was Tyne’s responsibility to see that her son followed the rules, even when he felt those rules were unfair or harsh, or just plain ‘whack’ as he would say.
She’d excused it all away as puberty, raging hormones and all that. But then his grades started to slip last winter. A frown bit into her brow as she realized this had been going on much longer than she’d first thought.
His thth="5%"history teacher had complained that Zach was missing homework assignments, that his class participation had taken a nosedive, and there had been several instances of blatant disrespect. Tyne had cracked down on Zach. Hard. Although she hadn’t heard from the teacher again, it seemed as if her son had limped through the remainder of the school year, finishing with mediocre grades in all his classes.
Tyne continued to preach at him at every opportunity about the importance of education, although her lectures seemed to bounce off him like a rubber ball against a brick barricade. Now, with summer vacation in full swing, she’d tried to find something to occupy his free time. He’d been appalled by the idea of working with her. Even a paycheck hadn’t been enough to persuade him. Apparently, cooking offended his masculinity; it didn’t matter how many famous male chefs Tyne had reeled off. Until Zach found a business owner willing to hire a fifteen-year-old, filling out working papers was useless. She hadn’t had too much of a problem with him hanging out with his friends at the mall, or playing basketball in the park, as long as she knew where he was and who he was with.