The Dreams of Ada by Robert Mayer Page B

graduated from high school in June 1984. She married her sweetheart, a local boy named Billy Garrett, in August.
    And then there was Tommy, Tricia thought, sitting alone in the living room, stunned by his call from the jail. He’d been the baby of the family for six years, till Kay came along. The other boys used to tease him. “The runt of the litter,” Tommy was smaller than Jimmy and Joel and Melvin, even when he reached his full height of five-feet-eight-and-a-half. As a kid he was sweet, polite. He loved going to church with her; when she and Bud started dating, Bud took a liking to Tommy, would take him hunting, fishing. He was eleven when they got married; in their wedding album, starting to fall apart now after thirteen years, there were pictures of Tommy at the wedding, cute in his new blue suit.
    Then had come the turning point: the death of their father. Of all the kids, Tommy had been the closest to Jesse; he took it the hardest when their dad developed cancer. The doctors operated, found it had spread all through him. They sewed him up and sent him home to wait for death. For three months Jesse Ward lay in the house on Ashland Avenue that he had inherited from his father, the pecan tree he had planted still bearing fruit out front. The last few days they took turns sitting at his bedside, Miz Ward and all eight of the kids, and Bud. Two of them, Melvin and Tommy, couldn’t bear it; they would disappear for days at a time, unable to watch their father waste away.
    To ease the pain of his father’s death, someone gave Tommy a joint to smoke. Some say it was Jimmy; some say it was Robert Cavins; some say it was a friend. Whoever it was, within a week the family could see that Tommy was doing a lot of dope. Perhaps Jesse Ward could have stopped him if he were alive, perhaps not. Susie Ward couldn’t. Tommy quit high school, grew fond of beer, of cheap wine. He began to run with a bad crowd in the streets. He got arrested occasionally for misdemeanors, had to be bailed out, might sass the police in the process; he was another one of “those Wards,” in the eyes of the town.
    But would he kill somebody? It was impossible, Tricia thought, pacing the living room, unable to sit still. Jut-jawed, Tommy had a temper; he would get angry sometimes; but when he did he would punch a wall, or the refrigerator, and hurt himself, not the person he was angry at. The house on Ashland had plenty of holes in the walls to prove it. The time his former girlfriend, Lisa Lawson, broke up with him, Tommy had gone out and banged himself up on his motorcycle; he’d never laid a finger on Lisa. Then he had come home and put his head in Tricia’s lap and cried.
    Now the police were saying he killed the Haraway girl. Tricia didn’t believe it, not for a minute—not if Tommy said he didn’t. She knew he might do a lot of things, but not kill.
    Get a lawyer? Thanksgiving was only a month away; she’d been wondering how they were going to afford a turkey; Bud was planning to go to a loan company to get money to pay the October bills. How could they afford a lawyer?
    She thought of Susie. Of Mama. She would have to tell Mama, though it would break her heart.
    Miz Ward was staying in Tulsa at the time, to help Joel, who had hurt his leg at work and was having trouble getting around. Tricia had to summon all her self-control to get her fingers to dial the number correctly.
    Crying, she told her mother about Tommy’s arrest. Miz Ward listened with a quiet bewilderment. It wasn’t so; Tommy wouldn’t do such a thing.
    She remembered the time the police came looking for Tommy, a few days after the girl disappeared. He had gone down and talked to them. There had been no problem. They had let him go. Why would they arrest him now, six months later?
    It was all a mistake, Susie Ward thought. Things would get straightened out.
    “We have to get him a lawyer,” Tricia said.
    “Yes, I guess we do,” Miz Ward agreed, in the soft, laconic