Riven - Jerry B. Jenkins [108]
At the medium-security prison Brady found enough mischief and dope to keep him high and in trouble—and behind bars—for the next six years. Every time Brady involved himself in a fight or a scheme, time was added to his sentence.
By his release, Brady was a full-grown man, twenty-five years old and—he believed (along with most others)—beyond hope.
Peter, now seventeen and a junior in high school, looked like a full-fledged hoodlum himself, and he refused to be called Petey any longer. But despite dressing the part and talking a big game, he had never been in trouble, worked at a local grocery, and had his own car.
Brady’s mother, now working at her fourth different restaurant since he had been sent up, was heavy into alcohol and spent her off hours sleeping when and if she was home, according to Peter. There was no steady man in her life, as far as he could tell, but he told Brady, “There must be at least one somewhere, because she can’t be working all the hours she’s away.”
Brady again moved back home. He strung his mother along for a couple of weeks, promising to find a job and pay rent. But he slept most of the time, and while Peter seemed to enjoy the novelty of sharing a room with his big brother again, he soon told Brady he didn’t want to lend him his car all the time. “I gotta keep it running good if I ever want to make something of myself and get out of here.”
Brady told him he would pay for gas and mileage when he needed to borrow it, but he had to use it to try to find a job.
But everywhere he went, the application asked if he had ever been convicted of a felony. When he answered honestly, he didn’t even get an interview.
At a landscaping firm he checked the NO box and during the interview spun a story of how he and his father had had their own little nursery in Indiana before his dad died a few months before. Brady said he could do anything they asked, humbly admitting that he was “not the creative one; that was Dad. But I know what it means to do hard labor in the sun.”
He was hired on the spot, asked to cut his hair, and issued two sets of colorful work clothes.
This time, Brady thought. This time, for sure.
Adamsville
While Brady Darby was trying to turn his life around, Thomas Carey was growing old. People always said he had aged before his time anyway, and the mirror did not lie.
In the nine years since Thomas’s crisis of faith, much had changed in his life, but not nearly enough in his heart. If he was honest with himself, he had never recovered from the disappointment the night Henry Trenton was hung. But as he ruminated about it over the years, Thomas realized—or at least felt he got closer to understanding—that it was what God’s silence had revealed to him about himself that had sent him into such a tailspin.
Thomas remained as devout and disciplined as he had always been, but still nothing seemed to really work for him. He wondered what he was doing wrong. It was as if God had turned His back on Thomas.
If his despair over the Henry Trenton debacle had birthed anything, it was a steeliness in Thomas that made him finally able to confront Grace about her health. As lovingly as he knew how, he had put his foot down and told her they both knew what her continuing bouts with fatigue and the return of her inexplicable bruises meant.
Against her wishes, he drove her to the doctor. “Don’t rob me of a healthy wife. You’re the only thing I care about anymore, Gracie.”
She lectured him about that, reminding him that there was his calling, his ministry, his daughter, his future son-in-law. “I know you care about all of that. You must. I’m as heartbroken as you over how a lot of our life has turned out, but we have many miles to go.”
The doctor, half Thomas’s age, confirmed their fears, and Grace was put under vigorous treatment for a slow but steadily debilitating form of leukemia.
Thomas met with the young man alone and demanded to