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He's polite, but he's not interested. He doesn't want to be here. He leans back, leans away, says little. No longer the eager kid.

She is exactly the same.

Their daughter is all dark-eyed intensity as she stands-and-falls stands-and-falls between them on the lobby couch. "Don't you be looking at me like some stranger," I think. "I've known you since before you were born." But out-loud I get down to business, "Who's going to watch the baby?"

"He will." He half nods in a gesture of doubt or reluctance or whatever-I-gotta-do. "Or my mom," she adds, looking at him. And I don't say, "You really think this is gonna work?" I make a note to talk to the nurse about calling Youth in Need.

And then we parade down to Guidance, where arms are grudgingly opened more thanks to a cute baby than the plight of a teen mother. I step out of the counselor's office to the strains of, "How many times are you going to come back?" and wait for slumped boy to look up and face me. At first he misunderstands. "No, it's just boring to me," he says.

I don't argue that point. "No, do you think SHE is going to come? Do you think she'll really do it?"

Again with the shrug. "I don't know. Maybe."

I push on. "In the morning, when she doesn't want to get up, will you kick her out?" I push against his shoe with mine. Finally, the smile I remember.

"Yeah."

"Will you make her go when she doesn't want to?" A nod. "Get her and her sister on the bus?"

"Will you make her do her homework?" He's chuckling at being the taskmaster.

"That's your job." Dead serious. Not really expecting. But maybe.

"Tell her to go to school and make the homework. Okay."

"You do that," I say, as I walk back down to to round up a baby who has crawled away from her tenth grade mother. Or at least that is the plan.