R.S. Guthrie - Detective Bobby Mac 03 - Reckoning by R.S. Guthrie Read Free Book Online Page B

parenting and he’d be one hundred percent correct. The problem between us went deeper than a dad still trying to tell a son what he should do.
    I was robbed of my parenting when Cole was in his late teens. He completely shut down, lived with his grandparents for a while after his mother died of cancer. He couldn’t understand why I wanted him in my life. To that point I thought I’d done the best possible; that all I’d done was the best I could. Sometimes parents are wrong, and we forget that fact too often with our children. Simply because they lack years does not always mean they are wrong, and even when they are wrong about a fact of life it doesn’t alter the reality that their belief system still affects them profoundly. I’d taken that truth into account far too infrequently.
    On the other side of the same coin, all I’d ever asked of him was the best he could do. As a parent I could accept a C-student, for example, if that child had worked his ass off to arrive at a C grade. But Cole would turn in half his assignments and end up with a D or an F. I refused to accept that as the “best he could do”, but what never occurred to me was the idea that under the circumstances it was the best he could do.
    All I was capable of focusing on was the fact that the assignments he did turn in, he averaged a ninety-five percent score .
    D’s and F’s were absolutely not the best my son could do. Not even in the same neighborhood. So I rode him. And rode him. I preached the sermon of the bewildered parent a hundred times. Rinse and repeat.
    They say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result.
    The lies he began to tell—in part to appease me, in part to simply avoid the “same old conversations”—totally destroyed me. A child does not understand the significance of a lie, no more than the toddler understands the significance of a hot surface until they touch it. You cannot touch a lie; it is a completely intangible thing and, in the end, something I was both incapable of accepting and incapable of explaining to my son.
    I remember the first lie he ever told me—I don’t mean the four-year-old saying he didn’t eat the cookie; I’m talking “look me in the eye and tell me the truth, no matter what the truth is, and we can work this out” and him looking me straight in the eye and lying completely, without a second thought or so much as a pause in his breathing.
    I’ve had many a perp who could not lie as soundly as that.
    It is also impossible to make a child understand that the one thousandth lie cuts as deeply as the first. I no longer remembered all of them, of course. The lies, too, became one thick, storm-filled cloud where the lightning could strike you from anywhere at any time.
    We eventually made amends. The prodigal son returned, the father with (mostly) open arms. The younger we are, the more forgiveness seems to come with little or no cost. As we age we become petrified in our viewpoints, so much less capable of letting go of the past. But as I said, we made amends and by that time in our lives took on roles more peer-like than father and son—those years were gone and I could never have them back. It didn’t stop me, however, from being a parent.
    The current impasse had to do with Cole’s acceptance at the Law College at the University of Wyoming, just across the Colorado northern border, about a hundred and thirty or forty miles north. Out of the blue, my son didn’t think UW was prestigious enough. Admittedly he had applied himself at Denver Metro, worked his way into the University of Colorado system, and yes, finally graduated with honors. But it wasn’t as if he’d aced Harvard or Stanford or NYU.
    “Wyoming is a decent school,” I said. “They broke the top one hundred a couple years back. Firms would respect a J.D. from that school.”
    “ That’s exactly what I am talking about,” Cole said, poking at his chicken. “You