The Graft Read Online Free

whenever he spoke, would argue relentlessly about nothing, and was almost always fighting the world for what he saw as slights against him, both real and imagined.
     
    Yet through it all, the meetings with the school, the sitting in courts and the helping with paying the fines, Tyrell had never stopped loving this troubled boy who carried his name. And for all his faults he would never have put him down for this, never in a million years. Armed robbery? Because that was what it amounted to. He’d been armed and inside someone’s home.
     
    Their home.
     
    Tyrell imagined what it must have been like to see him standing there with a gun, and shuddered once more.
     
    The terror of it must have been overwhelming. His heart went out to the man who had fought back so furiously. He was sure he would have reacted in much the same way in that position.
     
    But why did his boy do it? That was what Tyrell wanted to know.
     
    Why?
     
    Sonny had been a little sod in the past, but this was big-time skulduggery and Tyrell would have laid money that his son was not so far gone he would do something like this.
     
    It seemed he would have been wrong.
     
    And if he was wrong about this, what else was he wrong about? How could he trust his instincts any more? How was he going to switch off the ventilator and then bury his eldest son? How was he to cope with it all once the plane landed and he was back on solid ground?
     
    He was questioning his whole life now, and finding it lacking.
     
    Distinctly lacking.
     
     
Verbena Hatcher was tired, but knew she wouldn’t sleep. Instead she picked up her Bible and, clasping it tightly, she prayed for her grandson. All around the room were pictures of her loved ones. Her children, her parents, even her grandparents. Every inch of space on wall or table was covered with smiling faces, and important events in her life and the lives of her family. Christenings, weddings - hers as well as her children’s - graduation photos . . . smiling children and grinning adults. They amounted to a life well lived.
     
    And among all those smiling faces stood a small photograph in a silver frame. It was of Verbena and Jude, with a tiny Sonny Boy asleep on his mother’s lap. It was Jude’s expression that Verbena most loved in that photo, rarely looking at her grandson when she glanced at it. For once Jude looked happy, completely and utterly happy, and Verbena had known it was because at last she had a family of her own in that little boy. Her own arm was around Jude’s shoulders. It looked almost protective, as if she was shielding the girl from the world. She knew Jude kept the same photo in her purse. And in her own way Verbena still tried to protect her, as she had tried to protect her grandson.
     
    Her lips moved silently in the Lord’s Prayer and then she beseeched Him to watch over her grandson. Begged him to make Jude’s grief easier to bear, and offered her own life in exchange for that of the boy she loved more than anyone else in the world.
     
    Her daughter Maureen came in then with a small black rum for her mother.
     
    ‘Drink this, you need it.’
     
    Verbena shook her head. She rarely touched alcohol.
     
    ‘Please, Mummy.’
     
    She knew then it was not good news and duly took the glass and drank it down. The burn felt surprisingly good and the taste was as she had remembered it. It brought back the smell of new-mown grass, the aroma of sunlight on polished windows, and relay radios playing along the street. It brought back the sounds of summer, hearing the cricket results and listening to Barrington Levy. It brought back the taste of Akee and salt fish, and the laughter of her father when he would allow her a small sip of dark rum from his heavy glass on a Friday night. The sounds of the cicadas and laughter, the sounds of happiness, were replaced by her feeling of dawning despair.
     
    It had been good remembering, but it was ruined forever now, replaced by the bad news she was