“Aunt Del, if I walk away, she’s still his agent,” I said.
“It was never about the house.
Whoever holds that paper decides who sees him.”
PART 4
I was arrested eleven days before the hearing.
I want to state plainly that it was my own fault.
I drove to Ridgemont at nine at night because Ruth’s investigator told me Royce had been seen loading boxes into a truck, and I stood in the street — in the street, not the driveway — and I shouted my father’s name at that house, and Vonetta called the police.
With a felony record, on the street, at night, shouting.
I was held eleven days.
It was the single stupidest thing I have ever done and it is also the reason the image of that day exists at all, because I appeared at my father’s guardianship hearing in county custody clothes with a sheriff’s deputy at either shoulder.
Ruth Adler was furious with me.
She was also, she told me later, not entirely sorry, because “Josiah, a judge who has read a file about a woman hiding a man from his son does not mind seeing the son in an orange shirt.
It makes her wonder who put him in it.”
