Fostering Death (10 page)

“Yes, ma’am. I sure will,” I said, pocketing the card and going back out to the car.

Kelly wasn’t asleep. She was crying. Great blubbery sobs, her chest heaving and her nose running.

“I’ve really messed up, haven’t I?” she asked, reaching for a crushed box of tissues on the floor of the back seat.

I looked at her, not sure how to respond.

She had messed up. But not so much she couldn’t get it back together. This was someone who’d been kind to me when she didn’t have to be, who’d treated me like a regular person when she knew I was a convicted murderer on parole. Someone I cared about. Not to mention the only woman I’d ever slept with.

“Nothing that can’t be fixed,” I said. “If you want to.” That, of course, was the key. Kelly had to want to. Nobody else could do it for her.

She blew her nose noisily and hiccupped. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

I’m not good at comforting gestures, but she looked so forlorn. Awkwardly, I reached my arm around her shoulders and drew her as close as the center console of the car would let me. I expected her to shrug my arm off and reach for the key in the ignition.

But she leaned toward me, her face collapsing into my shoulder. The sobbing resumed in earnest. Her breath smelled of morning-after sour whiskey.

I gave her shoulders a squeeze and kissed the top of her head. I didn’t know what else to do. The gearshift must be digging into her side something fierce, but she didn’t seem to notice.

Finally she sat up and took another tissue. “You really think I can turn it around?”

I almost said, “You’re asking me?” I hadn’t exactly made a huge success of my life so far. Being determined not to go back to prison was about the outer limit of my goals.

“If you want to,” I finally said. “Probably not gonna be easy, but you can do it if you set your mind to it. And get some help.”

“Help?”

“Like AA.”

She pulled away from me and turned the key in the ignition.

“Will you come over the house for a while?” she asked, not looking at me. “I could really use a friend right now.”

“Sure.” Maybe she’d feel better, and we could get something going here.

When we got back to her kitchen, I made two mugs of instant coffee and put some slightly stale bread in the toaster. “You’ll feel better if you get some food in your stomach.”

Kelly sat at the table, stirring her coffee and looking miserable. “You think I’m in trouble at work?” she asked.

“Probably not. John said you’d called in.” I thought of all the time Aaron had missed, and he still had a job. Of course, the police had probably asked the company to keep him on until he provided them with the information they wanted, and they picked some people up. Like me.

But it was a union shop. The first couple of absences would result in warnings. There were a set number of incidents before someone would actually be fired. I doubted Kelly had reached that point yet.

She seemed to be reading my mind. “I got one warning. Last year. And I promised them I’d do better.”

“You can check with Victor Sunday night. He’s the shop steward. He’ll know for sure.”

Kelly wrinkled her nose as she nibbled at her toast, but she ate it. She was still sniffling. “How did the kids seem?” she asked.

Sugarcoating the truth wouldn’t do anyone any good. “Worried. And scared.”

“How can I be doing this to them?” she wailed, tears spilling down her cheeks.

“By putting yourself in front of them,” I said bluntly. “They can’t do a damn thing about it. They just have to take what you dish out.”

She turned on me, her eyes flashing. “And I suppose you could do a better job with kids?”

I didn’t take the bait. “I don’t have kids. But you do. And you been messing up. I been a kid—one who ended up in foster care because my mother died, and my father went to prison. I don’t want to see any kid put in a position like that if somebody can help it.”

Kelly dissolved in tears again. “They wouldn’t put them in foster care, would they?”

“If you and your ex are both boozers who can’t provide a decent home, yes, they can put the kids in foster care. And you won’t have an easy time getting them back. You think you feel bad now? Wait until you have to see them by appointment in the social services building. And they cry when you have to leave.”

She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue. “You’re not very sympathetic.”

“Sympathy won’t do no good. Not for you or the kids. You got to make up your mind what you’re going to do. Then you got to do it. Me feeling sorry for you, or you feeling sorry for yourself, ain’t gonna cut it.”

She nodded. “I guess you’re right. What do I need to do first?”

I looked at her bleary eyes and smelled her stale next-morning breath.

“Go take a shower. Get some sleep. Then as soon as you get up, call AA. Find out when the next meeting you can make is, and go.”

While she was in the shower, I picked up the bottles, glasses, and tissues that surrounded her bed. I found clean sheets and tidied up the bed.

She came out of the bathroom with her hair wrapped up in a towel. She had on a worn terry robe. When she stepped into the room, she stopped and looked at the bed. She glanced up at me. “I don’t feel real good,” she said softly. “But if you want to…”

I shook my head. For one thing, she needed to get some sleep. For another, I didn’t find her especially appealing right now. “Just get some sleep.”

She climbed into the bed. I smoothed the quilt over her shoulders and up under her chin.

“Will you be here when I wake up?” she asked.

“If you’d like,” I said.

“I’d like.”

I was tired. I lay down on the sofa in the living room and fell asleep.

When the kids got off the bus from school, I got up and let Kelly sleep. The way her schedule worked out, I bet she never got quite enough sleep during the week.

I insisted they unpack their book bags and get to work on their homework.

“It’s only Friday. We have all weekend. Why do we have to do our homework now?” Brianna dumped the contents of her book bag, crumpled papers, old pencils, crumbs and all, out on the dining room table.

“Then it’ll be done & you won’t have to worry about it anymore,” I said as I went for a wastebasket and began sorting things from the pile.

Chris grumbled, but he got out his books and started in on his homework.

“Ask if you have any questions,” I said. “I don’t know all of it, but if I can help, I will.”

“Thanks,” he said, “This is math. I can do that myself.”

“Good.” I’m not so sure I could help with the math.

Brianna was drawing pictures of stick people and cats on her paper.

“What are you supposed to be doing, Brianna?” I asked.

“Lists,” she said.

“Lists?” That wasn’t an assignment I was familiar with.

“Yeah. You know. Lists of things that go together.”

“How do you mean?”

She looked at me as if I were a total idiot. “Yellow things. Green things. Things that walk on four legs. Flowers.”

I started to say that was too easy for homework for a kid her age, but then I remembered she was having lots of difficulties in school. “How’s the reading coming?” I asked.

She pressed her lips tight together and closed her eyes. “It’s hard.”

“It’s supposed to be hard. You have to work at it. Do you have any reading homework?”

“The lists are reading homework.”

“Then we’d better get to it,” I said. “Do you get to choose what things to use to make the list?”

“Yes.” She continued to doodle.

“How many have to be in each list?”

“Five.”

“What’s the first list we should make?”

“I was going to do ‘green.’ I thought of lots of things, but I’m not sure how to spell it.”

“Spell what?”

“Spell ‘green.’”

“G—R—E—E—N.”

She looked up in surprise. “You can spell?” she asked.

“Yeah. I’m pretty good at it.” I’d helped a lot of fellow inmates read and write letters. And I’d spent the best part of twenty years reading. I wasn’t a perfect speller, but I was pretty good.

“I thought only teachers could spell.”

“Nope. Lots of people can. And you can always look up a word you don’t know how to spell.”

Chris raised his head from his work. “I always wondered about that. If you can’t spell a word, how are you going to find it in the dictionary?”

I thought about that. Smart kid. “I think a lot of people use computer spell check programs these days instead of a dictionary.”

“Do you know how to use a computer?” he asked.

“Not really,” I said, thinking of the new computer system at work. “A lot of stuff I don’t know how to use. Computers. Cell phones. Video players.” A lot had been introduced in the twenty years I was in prison. I had a lot of catching up to do.

Brianna took a new sheet of paper and placed it in front of her. “Could you spell that again?”

I did, and she carefully wrote the letters.

“What did you think of that’s green?” I asked.

“Frog. But I don’t know how to spell that.”

“How do you think?” I asked.

“Fa-fa-fa. Does it start with an F?”

“Very good.”

“Rrrrrr…Is that an R?”

“Yep. Way to go.”

She beamed and sounded out the O sound.

“The vowels are hard,” I told her.

“Yeah. Is it an O?”

“You’re really good at this.”

She had no trouble with the G.

We added grass, peas, shamrocks and the glass “stone” in her bracelet.

I thought about the green jewel in Montgomery’s ring, which I bet wasn’t glass. It would really cut up someone’s face if he punched them with that hand. My hand strayed up and fingered where Belkins had smacked me.

I fixed hot dogs and beans for supper. Chris and I debated the merits of waking Kelly up for dinner, but he thought that hot dogs and beans could always be reheated easily enough, and might not be worth getting up for in the first place.

The hot dogs weren’t the world’s cheapest chicken dogs, and I thoroughly enjoyed mine, but I saw his point. It was no gourmet meal.

Now that I had a little more money, maybe I could add hot dogs to my food rotation. And frozen pizza. But I wouldn’t keep any of it in my pocket.

“Isn’t your dad supposed to come get you for the weekend?” I asked.

Chris turned away and stared at the dark window. “He was supposed to pick us up from school.”

“And you didn’t wait for him?”

“He was supposed to get us before the buses came. He didn’t come, so I told Brianna we had to get on the bus. ‘Cause if he never came, we’d be stuck at school.”

“Has that happened before?”

“Yeah.”

I shoved my chair back from the table. “You wanna watch TV while I clean up?”

Brianna looked at me wistfully. “Could we play Candy Land instead?”

“I guess.”

Chris thought for a minute. “And would you play a game of checkers with me?”

“Sure. But first I have to do the dishes.”

When I’d finished, they had the Candy Land game set up on the dining room table. We played that, and then Chris beat me at checkers.

“Brianna gets to play the winner,” I said, moving over so she could set up her checkers.

“She’s not very good,” Chris said. “She hardly knows how to play.”

“Then it’ll be good practice for her. And you can explain if she has any problems.”

Some of the stuff from Brianna’s book bag still lay in a heap. I finished sorting it, smoothing out the papers.

Many of them were school work, connecting pictures and words. I cringed to think that Brianna was almost through first grade and still working on things like that.

A few were notes that seemed to require answers.

I frowned and smoothed one out.

It was a letter saying that Brianna wasn’t doing well in school. No surprise there. The teacher requested a conference. Three weeks ago. And there was a request to test her for special education services. Suspected learning disability. Made sense to me.

“Did your mom ever see these papers?” I asked her.

Brianna shrugged.

“They need to be signed and sent back to school. And your mom needs to go in and talk to the people at school.”

Tears brimmed in her eyes. “I don’t want her to go in and talk to them. They’ll just tell her how dumb I am.”

“But you’re not dumb. You’re a smart little girl.”

“I can’t read,” she said, setting her mouth stubbornly.

“That don’t mean you’re dumb,” I said. “Lots of people have trouble learning to read. Even lots of smart people.”

“They’ll put me in Reading Resource,” she said. “Only the dumb kids go there.”