Mom is still on the phone, biting her nails as she listens with worry. Only earlier today was she telling him to man up and go to work. Now, I’m sure she’s wishing she never pushed him into that job in the first place.

“Sixteen is old enough,” I remember her saying. “If you don’t carry your own weight you’ll be hungry and homeless, I assure you, I will not hold with a son who is not a team player….”

In my mind, it’s more likely that the dingy blue Subaru my brother described to us last week is not, as Mom had tried to make it, a figment of Tom’s imagination, a fruit of the paranoia an oldest son might face when the responsibility of a family is placed on his shoulders all too young. It’s more likely that it’s real than that Tom would dare come home late, risking Mom’s alcohol-inflamed rage, as crazy as it sounds. And since it’s been hours, and Mom is crying sober tears, and there are red-white-and-blue lights arriving in the street, it seems to me that I’m right.

Tom has been kidnapped.