Fireside by Susan Wiggs Read Free Book Online Page B

supposed to be, but he was pretty sure AJ was puny.
    As they passed a trash can, the kid took the tag from around his neck and dropped it in the garbage.
    “Hey, I sure wish we were meeting under different circumstances,” Bo said to him. He didn’t know what the hell else to say.
    No response. Maybe the kid was in shock, or something. If so, it was understandable. This was probably the scariest day of the boy’s life.
    Bo played Yolanda’s phone call over and over in his head. That she’d called him at all was unprecedented. Over the years, she had called him only a few other times—to tell him of AJ’s birth, to advise him she was marrying some guy named Bruno, and—just last year—to let him know she was getting a divorce.
    For reasons of his own, Bo had been more than willing to abide by her wishes, to keep his checkbook open and his mouth shut. He didn’t know diddly squat about being someone’s father, but he sure as hell knew how to give money away.
    And then yesterday…the urgent call that didn’t leave him a choice. “Thank God, you answered,” she’d said in a voice he barely remembered.
    “Yolanda?”
    “I’m in trouble, Bo. There was a raid at work. I’m at the Houston Processing Center of the INS.”
    “The INS.” It took a second for him to realize what she was talking about. Then it came to him—Immigration and Naturalization Service—and he felt a sick curl of apprehension in his gut. “Hell, Yolanda, what does that have to do with you?”
    “There’s no time to explain,” she said. “I’m not supposed to be making any calls, but I’m desperate, Bo. I’ve been detained.”
    He wasn’t quite sure what that meant, but he knew it was nothing good. “What, like a foreigner? I thought you said you grew up in the U.S.”
    “I did. They say I’m undocumented, and I have nothing to prove otherwise.”
    He winced, hearing her voice shake. There was nothing quite so compelling to Bo as the sound of a woman whose heart was breaking. Truth be told, he couldn’t remember a hell of a lot about Yolanda Martinez—but he remembered what was important. That she had a tender heart and beautiful eyes. That they had been each other’s first love. That she’d been the first to teach him that love alone couldn’t save a person from hurt.
    “What do you mean, ‘prove otherwise’?” he’d demanded. “Nobody ever asked me to prove I’m a U.S. citizen.” Even as he said the words, he knew he was being willfully ignorant. People didn’t ask light-haired, blue-eyed Anglos if they were citizens. Such inquiries were reserved for people with dark skin and Hispanic surnames…like Yolanda Martinez. “Okay,” he’d told her, “then just clear it up for them. Show them whatever paperwork they need and everything will be fine.”
    “I don’t have anything to show them. Don’t you remember, Bo? They way we ended things…The way my parents were?” She reminded him that she was the only child of ultra-conservative parents. Having a baby at age seventeen had strained her relationship with them, and the years had only increased the distance. Her father had died a while back, and her mother had returned to Nuevo Laredo, her Mexican hometown, just across the Rio Grande from Texas.
    Yolanda had no time to explain much more about the situation, but suddenly Bo was part of it. Although he felt sorry for her, he also felt himself suppressing a surge of anger at her, hiding it from AJ. The kid had enough troubles without being told his mother had screwed up. The last thing Bo wanted to do was lower the boy’s opinion of Yolanda.
    Rounded up en masse with undocumented employees at the factory where she worked, Yolanda claimed she had no one other than Bo to turn to. “I’m being sent to a detention center,” she’d said in a voice strained by terror and dread. “AJ’s at school…” She related the rest in a furtive, terrified tone. The armed raid had begun without a breath of warning.