Built

Deciding to change the subject because I wasn’t sure what happiness really looked like or how I went about getting it for myself, with or without Zeb in the picture, I asked him when the baby was due and when they would know if it was a little boy or girl. His excitement over impending fatherhood was contagious. I knew he and Salem would make wonderful parents, and when the sisters joined us a few minutes later, both looking emotionally wrung out but finally at peace with one another, the weekend that was meant to be a celebration finally started.

None of us came from families that taught us to love and to care about others. All of our backgrounds were fractured and cracked. It was a flat-out miracle we had all found one another and through fight and persistence now had a solid foundation of real family and love to rebuild on. My niece or nephew would never know what it felt like to be unwanted or unloved. He or she would never have to worry about living up to unrealistic expectations and being judged harshly for any of the struggles and failures life liked to test us all with. That baby would know what a real family and what a real home was like, and just like that, I felt the edges of that wound I pretended I didn’t have, and had told Rowdy would never heal, start to tug themselves closed somewhere deep inside of me.

CHAPTER 10

Zeb

I wasn’t this nervous when the cops slapped cuffs on me and hauled me off to lockup.

I wasn’t this nervous when the judge issued my sentence and I learned that I was going to be locked up for a minimum of two and a half years of my life.

I wasn’t this nervous when my high school girlfriend, who had eventually become my fiancée and then ex-fiancée after I had gone away, told me that she thought she might be knocked up when I was only sixteen. It was a false alarm, one that you would have thought taught me a valuable lesson about birth control, but no, it was another lapse in judgment when it came to women and sex that had me walking into the massive Denver court building with Sayer looking serious and ready to fight tooth and nail at my side.

In fact the only other time I had been this nervous was that first day I got to meet my son. It was overwhelming how important someone I had just met could be and how vital that little boy had become to not only my future but my happiness as well. Every chance I got to see him I took it. It was tricky scheduling visits around his current foster-care situation and my work schedule, but I did it, and so far I had been fortunate enough to get a few hours each week with the little boy. Every time I saw him he took a bigger chunk of my heart with him when I had to say good-bye, and I could tell he was getting more and more attached to me as well. After our last visit he had wrapped himself around my legs and refused to let go. It took both me and Maria, plus a promise of an extra visit, to talk him into letting go.

The pep talk Sayer had given me for an hour in her office had done little to settle my jangling nerves. She was the perfect mix of feminine and fierce in a black pants suit that was tailored to her long and lean frame perfectly with some kind of pale pink lacy thing poking out behind the lapels, but the more she told me that it was all going to be fine, the less I wanted to believe her. She was trying to be confident and reassuring, but we both knew what was at stake. She kept telling me to answer the judge’s questions honestly, that I needed to keep my cool if they asked about my prison sentence, and that I simply needed to show the court how much I wanted to have Hyde in my life. I needed to convince the judge I had what it took to be a father. Over and over again she told me nothing was going to be off-limits, so if I had any skeletons hidden deep in my closet she needed to know. They were going to judge me, my biggest sore spot, but she told me repeatedly they wouldn’t find me lacking. It was nice to hear coming from the woman I wanted more than almost anything but it didn’t make my nerves any less taut.

Sayer mentioned that she had been before this particular judge in the past and that he was stern but ultimately fair. She told me he was going to grill me about anything and everything and that all I had to do was give him factual and succinct answers. I reminded her that I was an open book and had hidden nothing from her since the beginning. Telling the truth about who I was and where I had been sounded so easy because I never tried to hide it. Declaring all my faults and putting every mistake I had ever made on display in front of the person that would ultimately decide if I should be a father or not amplified every insecurity I had. Sayer tried to tell me over and over that it would all be fine and I wanted to believe her, but I could see that she was just as nervous as I was in the way she couldn’t stop fiddling with things in front of her and the way her toes kept tapping under her fancy desk.

All I could do was nod at her and assure her that I understood how much was riding on what happened today and how I presented myself to the judge. For this initial meeting, it was only me and Sayer, plus Maria from CASA, going before the judge. She told me that moving forward she would also plan on involving my mom as well as Beryl in the proceedings if the court needed any kind of character witnesses on my behalf. She was hoping it wasn’t going to come to that, but I wasn’t so sure. I had cleaned myself up but there was no hiding some of the outward trappings that would always mark me as a man that had done and paid for things that would never make a good impression on anyone. I could have shaved my beard off, put on a suit and tie, found some fancy wing tips, and made a big production about how hard I had worked to turn my life around since getting out of jail, but I decided that I needed to be truthful not only with the court but with myself. There was no getting around my past, it had made me who I was today, and I was proud of that man. That man would take care of his son to the best of his ability, he would love him, and he would care for him and make sure the boy never wanted for anything. I could do all of that whether or not I was clean-shaven and polished up. Plus I liked the way Sayer’s eyes roved over me and lit up with a spark of hunger when she saw me. She liked the man I was, too, and if I was good enough for her then I was good enough for the judge. She didn’t need me spit-shined, and that made me even more determined to break through those walls she kept stacking back up around herself whenever we spent time apart.