What Makes a Family?

Ishould have expected it,Cort Morente thought as he tried to avoid being caught up in the jostling, noisy mob on their way to the buses and waiting cars.This is what you get when you decide to start the rest of your so-called life on a Monday. It was quitting time at Luna Hermosa Middle School and it looked to Cort as though every kid in the place was trying to get out the doors at once. Every kid except the skinny eleven-year-old boy who'd left him standing here in the midst of all this chaos looking stupid. And he didn't have a hope of finding him in this crowd. "Don't say I didn't warn you." Alex Trejos, the middleschool principal, walked up to where Cort stood. Cort had known Alex since they'd gone to junior high here and he knew from Alex's smirk that he was enjoying himself way too much at Cort's expense. "I told you Tommy was skittish." Cort cursed under his breath. "Yeah, but you didn't warn me he also kicks like a mule. If this is your idea of therapy, I think I'll go back to sitting alone in my apartment and feeling sorry for myself." The only reason he was here was because he'd been doing largely that for longer than he cared to admit. And he didn't like what he was turning into--brooding, withdrawn, uncharacteristically short of patience and long on frustration. He was supposed to have been easing back into normal life after nearly two months in the hospital and then another nine months of intense physical therapy. The problem was he'd lost what had passed as normal life for him after one of the suspects in a drug case he'd been working on took offense at being investigated and decided to let Cort know it by attempting to make him part of the pavement. In the collision between Cort and the pickup truck, the truck had won. The doctors had told him he was lucky to be alive. Instead, it was his career with the sheriff's department that had died. They'd put his right arm and shoulder back together, but the nerve damage was permanent, along with, it seemed, the headaches that at times laid him flat for hours. He'd never again be fit enough for any job at the sheriff's department other than riding a desk and he knew he wouldn't last a week at that before boredom drove him crazy. So for the last several months, he'd been dutifully going through the motions of therapy, recovering while his life fell down around him and he tried not to think about having to start the whole game over with a completely new set of rules. When Alex called to ask him for a favor, he'd reluctantly agreed, not because he particularly wanted to do it but because it was doingsomething.He wasn't used to sitting around. Most of his ten years with the sheriff's department had been as part of the special-narcotics task force. He'd worked undercover a good amount of the time and had gotten addicted to the adrenaline-spiked cocktail made up of lack of sleep, regular infusions of caffeine and living on the edge. The withdrawal had been hell. He suspected Alex knew that and had asked him to talk to Tommy Lujan more as a distraction than because he thought Cort was the best person for the job. Tommy had problems of his own. Abandoned by his mother when he was two, no idea who his father was, living for years with an abusive uncle who was now in prison for the foreseeable future, then bounced around foster homes from which he was always running away. The kid had never been in any real trouble but Alex was worried that unless someone could reach Tommy, befriend him, it was only a matter of time before things got worse. Cort hadn't been confident about his ability to become any kind of mentor to Tommy. The only kids he was used to talking to were of the high-school dealer variety and his nephews--who at two and a half and eight months were still largely into monologues instead of dialogues--none of which had prepared him for an actual conversation with a kid. He'd pFoster, Nicole is the author of 'What Makes a Family? ', published 2007 under ISBN 9780373248537 and ISBN 0373248539.