J. Jance: Minor in possession

"I understand they charge," I responded dryly, but my sarcasm flew right over Joey Rothman's head.

"Like I said," he continued, "it's awesome. All you have to do is be up for it, if you know what I mean."

He grinned again, and gave me a sly man-to-man wink. And that was the second time that afternoon that I wanted to murder Ralph Ames.

That opening conversation had taken place three and a half weeks earlier. I had spent one frustrating session with Louise Crenshaw, Ironwood Ranch's no-nonsense Director of Client Affairs, pleading with her to let me move to another cabin and/or trade roommates with somebody else, but she had been adamant.

"Absolutely not. Learning to get along with all kinds of people without chemical assistance is a very important part of your recovery," she had told me icily, and that was that. No plea bargains accepted, at least not for me.

Since then, I had gotten along with Joey Rothman mostly by avoiding him, except when absolutely necessary at mealtimes or during the required group grope sessions. I heard some rumors to the effect that he had been dealing drugs both before and during his enforced stay at Ironwood Ranch, but I didn't pay that much attention one way or the other. It was, after all, none of my business.

Joey obligingly spent very little time in our cabin. When he did happen to be there, usually before meals, he spent his time absorbed in writing in a cloth-covered notebook. I assumed he was keeping a journal, one I figured reeked with post-pubescent sexual conquests. I much preferred him confining those overblown locker room exploits to the privacy of his diary rather than discussing them with me. In the evenings he was almost always out, tiptoeing into our cabin long after lights-out each night like some randy caterwauling tomcat.

A fifteen-year-old girl named Michelle had come into treatment at about the same time I did, on the same day in fact. I had thought for a while that Joey was actually sweet on her, if someone as screwed up as he was ever got sweet on anybody, but tonight I had been forced to revise that assessment.

And that revision was precisely why I was waiting up for him. It was the middle of my fourth week of treatment, Family Week, as they call it at Ironwood Ranch. It's the one week out of six when a client's family members are invited to come stay for five days to tell what they know about the client's past behavior and to make a stab at beginning their own recovery.

My own family, such as it is-two nearly grown children and my ex-wife Karen-were all three in attendance. As a consequence, you could say that my stress levels were up. Off the charts is more like it. In the ten years since our divorce, it was the first time I had seen Karen face-to-face.

The counselors at Ironwood Ranch must be some kind of salesmen. They had somehow managed to convince her that it was not only her duty but also in her own best interests to leave her new husband at home in Cucamonga, California, attending to the accounting needs of a chicken-ranching conglomerate, and come to Arizona along with Kelly and Scott to help confront me with all my sins remembered.

Earlier that afternoon, during a stormy group session, Karen had detailed to my chemically dependent peers and their visiting family members all the relevant gory details (at least the details she felt were relevant) about how too much work and too much MacNaughton's on my part had caused her to fall in love with another man and to have to get a divorce.

I had spent a miserable two hours in what we clients-there are no patients at Ironwood Ranch, only clients-refer to as the hot-seat. I had to sit there silently, with no opportunity for reply or rebuttal, and endure an emotional bloodletting, listening to a familiar litany of holiday meals missed or ruined, of things left undone that should have been done, of people I loved who had felt neglected and cheated because I had been too busy doing and being what I thought I was supposed to do and be.

After dinner I was still licking my emotional wounds. Karen and I were sitting on a couch in front of the roaring fire in the main hall, talking quietly, and doing a relatively rational postmortem on our marriage. Our son Scott, a serious-minded sophomore at Stanford, had gone back to the motel to study, and daughter Kelly had left the dinner table saying she was going off to the rec center with some of the younger people to play a game of Ping-Pong.

Things were going fairly well until I caught a glimpse of Joey Rothman standing on the patio outside the window. He had paused there while he planted a lingering kiss on the face of whoever happened to be with him. Only when he hurried away and left her standing alone did I realize that the kissee was none other than my own daughter Kelly-my seventeen-year-old daughter Kelly.

Trim indeed!

I went outside looking for him right then, ready to tear him limb from limb in typically fatherly fashion. Naturally Joey Rothman was nowhere to be found, and naturally Kelly and I got in a big beef about the incident that escalated into Karen and me being drawn into a verbal shouting match as well. Louise Crenshaw had wandered past the melee and had given me a look of unqualified disapproval. Karen and Kelly left in a huff a few minutes later, and I went back to the cabin to smolder and wait.

Eleven o'clock came and went but still no Joey Rothman. That was all right. I was prepared to wait however long it took. Half an hour later, the rain died down. In the sudden quiet I heard approaching footsteps. They seemed to be coming down the path from the main hall. Joey's and my cabin was the last one at the very end of the path. As the footsteps came past the final pair of neighboring cabins, I was sure my time had come.

Joey's usual pattern was to sneak into the cabin barefoot, carrying his shoes like some errant husband, and to get into bed without turning on the light. Tonight I planned a slight variation on that theme. I was just sitting up and groping for the switch on the bedside lamp when the cabin door crashed open, sending the doorknob banging into the wall behind it. Before I could find the lamp's switch, the overhead chandelier with its eight-bulbed wagon wheel flashed on in my face.

"You son of a bitch," I began as I scrambled to put both feet on the floor. Halfway out of bed I stopped, looked again, and froze where I was.

The panting man standing in the open doorway with his eyes bulging and his face a mask of undiluted fury wasn't Joey Rothman at all.

"Where the hell is he?" the man demanded savagely.

"Where is who?"

"Don't play games. Rothman, that's who!"

I recognized the man instantly as the father of Michelle, the mousey fifteen-year-old druggie. Because we had been admitted at approximately the same time, it was Michelle's family week as well as mine. I remembered the man from the family group sessions, an integral part of treatment, which are counselor-moderated discussions involving both clients and family members. I recalled that Guy Owens worked as some kind of honcho, a high-ranking officer, at one of the military installations in Arizona. His name surfaced, but the rest of the family details escaped me. During Group that week I had been far too engrossed in my own family's difficulties to pay much attention to anybody else's.

"Tell me where he is," Owens growled.

He must have figured I was personally concealing Joey Rothman from him. He took another menacing step into the room. Half sitting half lying on the bed, I was in no position to defend myself against attack if he chose to come after me with physical force.

"He's out," I said curtly, "and if you're coming in, do you mind shutting the door behind you? It's cold as blue blazes."

The timely invocation of good manners has stopped more than one unwelcome intruder in his tracks. Guy Owens was no exception. He paused uncertainly, glancing from me back over his shoulder toward the open door.