“Have a seat,” Lucas said to Colt.
Colt rolled his eyes. “Jesus fuck,” he said, slumping into the sofa hard enough to rock the trailer. “It was just a goddamn game.”
Until he found something. Lucas pulled on a pair of latex gloves and searched the trailer from top to bottom, starting with the bedrooms. The three younger boys were lined up on the floor at the foot of their mother’s unmade bed, gazes avidly fixed on the television. They ignored Lucas entirely as he methodically took the trailer apart, room by room.
When he shifted his search to the living room, Cody and Alana stood beside the door. Alana held a large sketch pad. Cody’s shoulders were hunched over, his attention obviously split between this invasion of what little privacy he had, and Alana’s careful examination of the pad’s contents.
“You drew pictures,” she said.
“I don’t think in words.”
Both Lucas and Alana looked around at that. “You don’t think in words,” she repeated.
He shook his head impatiently. “I don’t. I think in images, sketches, colors. Lines.”
“He always has,” Colt added from the couch, without taking his attention from the television. “He learned to draw before he learned to write.”
“How do you do in school?” Alana asked.
This forced a laugh from Cody. “How do you think I do?”
The blush flared on her cheekbones. “Stupid question,” she said. “I like these.”
Lucas peered over her shoulder, blinked, then refocused. The page was rough, like Cody had erased a drawing to make room for this one. The colored-pencil rendition on the page was obviously the library building, but yet vastly different. Where the interior now was an institutional green relieved only by wooden shelves in the front and taller metal stacks at the back, Cody had drawn seating areas, some clustered around tables, others just chairs and pillows on the floor. The industrial carpet covering everything except the entryway was gone, and hardwood floors gleamed in the light pouring down from the Reference balcony. The drawing was as precise as any architectural rendering Lucas had ever seen, but with an astonishing amount of feeling. It held beauty and possibility.
It held hope.
Alana flipped through the pages again, stopping on a picture of the storage room in the basement transformed into a technology center.
“You said it needed to be high tech,” Cody said. “I didn’t want to put all that stuff upstairs, where the sunlight would glare off the monitors. And once you sell all those books, you’ll have space downstairs again.”
“Cody, this is spectacular,” she said. The admiration in her voice was evident as she once again paged through. “It’s amazing. It’s exactly what we need for the final proposal.”
He shrugged, but even Lucas could see the effect her words had on the boy. He straightened ever so slightly, and tension eased from his shoulders. “It’s just a couple of drawings.”
“You should see what he can do with a story,” Colt said, arms folded across his chest. “He’s a word weaver. A dream spinner.”
Lucas shot him a look, then strode into the kitchen to finish his search.
“I have seen,” Alana said absently as she handed the pad back to Cody. “He does a great story hour at the library.”
Cody tossed the pad on the crate next to the mac-and-cheese pot. “Find anything?”
Lucas stripped off his gloves and turned to Colt, who, unlike his brother, had the good sense to keep his mouth shut. “Found a job yet?”
A muscle jumped under the precisely shaved sideburn. “Like I told my parole officer, I’ve put in applications.”
“Where’s your mom?” he asked Cody.
Lucas knew the answer to that question, but he still had to ask. Cody knew he knew, so the boy struggled to keep a lid on his temper. “Work. She gets home at eleven most nights.”
He nodded, then turned to leave. Alana stopped him with a hand on his arm. She pointed at the discarded sketch pad. “May I take this and scan the pictures?”
Cody blinked. “I’ll just tear them out,” he said.
“No, don’t do that. Your sketch pad is a record of your growth as an artist. I’ll give it back to you.”
Cody flipped the pad open, sectioned off pages, then ripped them from the spiral binding. “Just take them.”
“All right,” she said. “Thank you. Bring your notebook with you tomorrow, and we’ll tape the pictures back in.”
“Forget about it.”
Alana looked ready to argue with Cody until daybreak. Lucas put his hand firmly between her shoulder blades and turned her toward the door. “’Night,” he said.