It was much darker out than it had been only fifteen minutes earlier, and it was raining again, but he didn’t bother to put on a jacket. He wasn’t going to be out long.

Hunched against the cold, he searched his truck. Sure enough, the onion had fallen out of the bag and rolled under the seat. He’d found it and was almost back inside when he heard raised voices.

“Give me those keys! You don’t have a license!”

“Oh, my God! Will you chill out? I’m just going to get a six-pack. It’s right down the street.”

Tobias leaned around the corner of the house to take a peek at what was going on. He could see two figures in the halo of the porch light at Uriah’s house. Carl and Uriah were outside, arguing.

“Then you’ll have to dust off the old bicycle in the garage and ride that in the rain, because I’m not letting you get behind the wheel,” Uriah said.

Carl wrenched open the door of his vehicle despite his father’s protests. “I’m almost forty years old. You have no say over what I do!”

“Are you going to force me to call the cops?” Uriah grabbed the door handle, trying to stop him. “Do you want to go back to jail? Is that what you’re after? Because that’s what’s going to happen if you do this.”

Carl yanked the door so suddenly it nearly made Uriah fall. “You’d do that, too. Wouldn’t you?”

“Carl, don’t make this any harder than it has to be. We can live without beer for one night,” Uriah said, speaking more calmly. “I’ll pick some up tomorrow.”

Setting his jaw, Tobias strolled down the drive, tossing the onion between his hands to keep them busy. He wanted to throw it and break Carl’s windshield, but he knew the psychologist he’d worked with at the prison would say it wasn’t an “appropriate response.” They’d talked a lot about appropriate responses, mostly because what was appropriate in prison—because it was inevitable or sometimes the only way to survive—wasn’t appropriate out of prison. And while he’d learned to cope with living on the inside, she’d wanted him to understand that living on the outside would require a different set of skills.

“What’s going on?” he asked as if he didn’t already know.

Clearly agitated, Uriah gestured toward his son. “I can’t let him drive. If he gets caught, he’ll be in even more trouble than he is already.”

“I’m not going to get caught!” Carl snapped. “It’s a straight shot. I’ll be back in less than twenty minutes. I don’t know why you need to get involved. I can run my own life.”