Page 10 of Den of Iniquity

“Because we’re going to need lots more food around here, for one thing. For another we need to get another cable box so we can hook up the TV set in the guest room. I doubt Kyle will be interested in watching what we watch.”

That’s one of the things I love about Mel. She can sort out problems long before I know they exist.

Chapter 4

Bellingham, Washington

Saturday to Monday, February 15–17, 2020

After a surprisingly extensive shopping spree, we spent the remainder of Saturday and all of Sunday getting Kyle moved in and settled. After some discussion, we decided that, for the time being, the best place for the drum set would be in the far corner of the garage, tucked in among Mel’s moving shelves of Christmas decor. That’s the part of the garage farthest from the house itself and also from Hank and Ellen’s place next door. If he was going to be doing his drumming in the garage, and since it’s generally icy cold in February, I added a space heater to our Kyle-related shopping list.

When we sold the condo in downtown Seattle, we had dragged some pieces of furniture from there to here. I’d been unwilling to part with two of the easy chairs from the family room, and they hadbeen literally gathering dust in the garage ever since. I was glad to haul them inside and put them to good use in the guest room. The sixty-inch flat-screen TV from the condo had also ended up in there, perched on an oversize dresser. It had been sitting that way for a couple of months. I hadn’t exactly rushed out to get another cable box to hook it up, but now it was time.

I spent most of Monday in the uncompromising purgatory known as public education. Mel had made getting Kyle enrolled in school sound easy. It wasn’t. Rather than simply walking him onto the campus and signing him up, we had to jump through all kinds of hoops. As an eighteen-year-old, he could enroll without parental permission, but we had to be able to prove that he really was eighteen and also that his residence would be inside district boundaries. The second matter was solved by a simple phone call to the chief of police, who just happens to be my wife. The first was much more challenging and involved several difficult conversations with Kelly and Jeremy. Since Kyle had been living with Jeremy, I tried him first. He quickly and unhelpfully informed me that Kelly always handled all the “paperwork junk” and that I should ask her. My call to Kelly didn’t go much better.

In the old days, Kelly used to be something of a daddy’s girl, but that counted for nothing when it came to laying hands on Kyle’s birth certificate and school vaccination records. Right that moment, as far as Kelly was concerned, I was public enemy number one, and considering everything that was happening in her life, that was to be expected.

Her initial response to my request was to say that she had no idea where those documents might be, but I didn’t buy that story for a minute. My daughter may be stubborn as all get-out, but she’salways been levelheaded. I knew she would never go off and leave important paperwork behind in a house that was about to be occupied by her soon-to-be-former husband’s new girlfriend.

I finally played my trump card. “Look, Kelly, I’m sure you remember how hard it was when you had to start from scratch with a GED instead of a high school diploma. I know you’re pissed at me right now, and considering the circumstances, I can’t say that I blame you, but we’re talking about your son’s future. Kyle either finishes his senior year here in Bellingham or he can kiss his high school diploma goodbye. So how do you suggest we go about fixing this?”

For a good ten to twenty seconds the line went dead silent. At first I thought she had hung up on me again. Finally I heard her sigh. “Okay,” she said, caving. “I can make copies and send them. Where do they need to go?”

I gave her the registrar’s email.

“What about his school transcripts?” she asked.

Kyle had previously managed to obtain those on his own. “They’re already here,” I told her.

“All right,” Kelly said. “I’ll have to leave work and go back to the apartment to get them. It’ll take about half an hour.”

Half an hour was a hell of a lot better than never. “Thanks,” I said. “Appreciate it.”

Even with the proper documents in hand, it took another two hours to get the job done, but eventually we prevailed. With Kyle successfully enrolled as a Bellingham Bayhawk as opposed to an Ashland Grizzly, we drove home with everything we needed: a class schedule, all required textbooks, an ASB—Associated Student Body—card, and even a parking permit. That’s something I neverhad when I was in high school—a parking permit. Back then, unlike Kyle, I didn’t have my own car.

Once back at the house it was time to deal with the television issue. In the old days, if you wanted a new TV set, you bought one, dragged it home, plugged it in, slapped a pair of rabbit ears on top, and you were in business. That’s not the case now. So after all the rigamarole of getting Kyle signed up for school, we came home and went to work getting the cable box and TV set hooked up and working. We also connected to and initialized all preferred streaming services, both his and ours. Since Mel had agreed to bring home takeout, at least I didn’t have to worry about dinner.

Kyle was a cheerful enough worker but not a talkative one. We had been dealing with various electronics issues for some time when suddenly, out of the blue, he muttered, “She came on to one of my friends—to Gabe.”

Mrs. Reeder, my senior English teacher at Ballard High, was a killer when it came to faulty pronoun references. Pronouns aren’t designed to stand on their own two feet. They’re supposed to refer back to the nearest noun. In this case, there wasn’t one, so I wasn’t sure which “she” we were discussing, and I hadn’t the foggiest notion about who Gabe might be.

“Gabe who?” I asked.

“Gabe Lawson. He plays bass guitar in our band—the Rockets.”

“And who came on to him?”

“Dad’s girlfriend, Caroline. I mean, Gabe’s just a kid. He’s only a sophomore. They were getting it on, right there in our house. The band was down in the basement hanging out. I came upstairs and caught them in plain sight, right there in the kitchen.”

“Caught them doing what?”

“They were all over each other. Her top was pulled up, showing off her belly, and her hand was inside his pants, feeling him up.”

My face must have registered shock. “Really?”

Kyle nodded. It was clear that he was still terribly upset by what he’d witnessed, but with that in mind, his sudden exit from Ashland made a lot more sense.

“When was this?”

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