Parents Surmount Temptations in Bid to Get Clean for Keyona

In the fifth in a series of stories, staff writer Mary Otto recounts one couple's journey through the Family Recovery Program, an experimental Maryland court attempting to help drug addicts get clean, then get their children back from state custody. The story reflects scenes the reporter witnessed or, when noted, were recalled to her. In the previous story, Stacy Coleman and Keith Cromwell were doing well in treatment programs.

June 2006

It's Saturday, the day before Father's Day. At 6 a.m., Keith Cromwell gets a call. His father, Freddie Cromwell, steelworker, Vietnam vet, absentee dad, is dead.

Cromwell struggles with a way to feel his way through this, sober.

He has been clean for more than four months, living in a treatment program with other recovering men. He wants to honor his father but worries that his hard-won sobriety cannot withstand a funeral and a trip with his family.

He heads out to Crownsville to see his fiancee, Stacy Coleman, who has just finished a parenting class at the Chrysalis House treatment center and has been keeping their 11-month-old daughter with her for increasing amounts of time. By the end of the month, Keyona is scheduled to go live with her at Chrysalis House.

Amid the usual crush of Saturday visitors -- grandmas, little kids, boyfriends -- Cromwell tells Coleman he thinks he should catch a ride to South Carolina for his father's funeral. Friends and relations will be driving down.

Coleman reminds herself she can't tell him what to do. "I'm powerless over other people," she says.

But she tells him that once he gets with his family, he will start drinking, and then it will be over. He'll be back on drugs.

"I worked too hard for this," she says angrily. "I'm not falling with you this time."

After months of group and individual therapy, yoga, home cooking and meetings, she is no longer the needy waif he invited in off Baltimore's St. Paul Street.

She seems much more a woman, with carefully cut and highlighted hair, flashing green eyes, hands on her hips.