The Way Things Are by A.J. Thomas Read Free Book Online Page B

number the call is actually being answered from.”
    Ken nodded. “I know about it, yeah.”
    Patrick couldn’t keep the grin off his face as he nodded to the backseat. “So does Jay.”
    “I only did that once!” Jay called.
    He dug his cell phone out of his jacket pocket and pulled up the application that allowed him to manage his contract from his phone.
    “What if he needs his phone?”
    Patrick turned to the side and found Ken looked amused but not angry. “We’ve got a landline. And he knows the rules. When he’s grounded, it gets shut off. This is a lot easier with a smartphone too. I can suspend his phone service with the push of a button. The first time I had to do this, I still had a regular phone and I had to wait on hold for a friggin’ hour….”
    Patrick thought he might have actually heard a chuckle from the driver’s seat.
    “Plus, they can still dial 911 and all that if they’re not hooked up. If there’s an actual emergency, he’s still covered. Otherwise….” Patrick shrugged. “He’s out of luck.” If Jay needed to get in touch with him for any of the usual teenage emergencies, he’d have to sort things out for himself.
    “911 isn’t going to give me a ride home if I miss the bus,” Jay grumbled.
    Patrick finished shutting down Jay’s cell service, then returned his own cell phone to his pocket. “I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not very good at this,” he whispered, staring anywhere but at the hot probation officer sitting next to him. “For most of Jay’s life, I wasn’t really involved in, you know, raising him. I went to work and my old lady took care of him. I rubbed his head before I went to sleep each morning, hugged him before I left for work. That was it. I know I’ve got to find something else to keep him in line, and I really am working on it. But a lot of it’s been one big trial-and-error joke.”
    Ken nodded slowly. “All right. First, where am I going?”
    “Oh,” Patrick glanced around at the street signs, trying to remember this part of the city from when he was last here as a teenager. “Take the Spokane Street Bridge. I was working over on Harbor Island last night.”
    “Harbor Island. Got it.” Ken guided them into the line of traffic waiting to merge onto the bridge. “So, let’s see what we can do that might makes things turn out different this time, okay? I can’t take notes, obviously,” he said, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. “But since I’ve got quite a few questions to go over, would you mind if I use a voice recorder to keep track of everything?”
    “I don’t mind.”
    “Jay, are you okay with that?”
    “Whatever,” Jay muttered.
    “He’s fine with it,” Patrick translated.
    “All right.” Ken reached for a small digital voice recorder sitting in the console cup holder and flipped it on. “Okay, Mr. Patrick Connelly, father of Jayden Connelly,” he began. “I need to get an accurate picture of Jay’s life, covering everything from how he’s doing at school to his home life. As you probably know from working with your son’s last probation officer, the role of a JPC is a bit different from an adult probation officer. The juvenile justice system takes a rehabilitative approach, so my job isn’t just to make sure your son complies with the terms of the court order in his case, but also to provide community supervision on a weekly basis, refer him to any services he’s qualified for, and to get him help for any substances issues he may have. That’s pretty much the whole spiel. Punishments and restrictions aren’t working, so I think providing more structure, and maybe some redirection, might be worth exploring. Any questions?”
    “Is the community service already set? The way it worked before, he got a list of places he could volunteer at.”
    “Vandalism comes with a few hours built in,” Ken smirked. “He’s got to clean up his mess or pay for someone else to do it if he can’t. We’ll