PART 2
I called the number back. It went straight to voicemail.
The sheriff’s dispatcher was still on my other line. I told her everything. The adoption decree. The terminated rights. The smell. The locked doors.
“Sir,” she said, “a possible meth lab with a child inside is our highest priority. Units are on the way. Do not go out there yourself.”
I went anyway.
Misty grabbed my arm at the door. “Jake, you’ll make it worse!”
“It’s already worse,” I said.
The trailer was twenty-five minutes outside town at the end of a dirt road. I got there in seventeen. Two sheriff’s cruisers pulled in right behind me. Then a fire truck with a hazmat crew.
Rylan came out on the porch in his boxers, squinting at the lights.
“What is this? That’s my kid in there! I got rights!”
A deputy held up my phone, with the adoption decree on the screen.
“No, sir. You don’t.”
Two deputies in masks went through the back door. A minute later, one of them came out carrying Brody wrapped in a blanket.
His eyes were red and swollen. He was coughing. He saw me standing by the cruiser and reached for me with both arms.
“Dad!”
I’ve never held anyone so tight in my life.
The hazmat crew found what I knew they’d find. A working meth lab in the garage. Chemicals in open containers. A camp stove. No ventilation. The garage shared a wall with the bedroom where Brody had been sleeping for six nights.
At the hospital, the doctor said he had chemical irritation in his eyes and lungs. He’d need follow-up tests. But he’d recover.
“Another week in that trailer,” she said, “and I wouldn’t be so confident.”
Rylan was arrested on the porch. Manufacturing methamphetamine. Child endangerment. Violating his parole. Kidnapping a child he had no legal right to.
He went back to prison for twelve years.
Then the detectives talked to Misty.
She’d known about the garage. Rylan had told her he was “getting back into business” to make money for “their new family.” She’d let her son stay there anyway.
She was charged with child endangerment too.
When the judge read the adoption decree in family court, she asked Misty one question.
“Ma’am, you signed this two years ago, standing next to Mr. Ellison. Did you forget?”
Misty didn’t answer.
The judge gave me full custody.
I quit the pipeline jobs. I took a local job with an ironworkers’ crew in Tulsa. Home every night by five. Brody’s eyes healed. His cough went away by spring.
His mother sees him on supervised visits. He decides when he wants to go.
Last month, Brody had to do a family tree for school. He came home and showed it to me.
At the top, under his name, there were two boxes.
In the “Mom” box, he’d written Misty.
In the “Dad” box, he’d written my name.
And underneath it, in pencil:
“Not my real dad. My REALLY real dad.”
THE END.
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A father isn’t the man who shares your blood. It’s the man who shows up when you call. Every time.
What would you have done if you were Jake? Tell us in the replies.