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Amanda enjoyed hearing them talk about their kids, though it always brought a pang of sadness too. She couldn’t ever imagine her mother talking with such excitement about what she bought Amanda for Christmas. The holidays were always pathetic and sad without extended family to visit or money to buy gifts. Sometimes April tried to do something rebellious like grilling hotdogs on Christmas day just to say, “F you,” to the rest of the world celebrating the birth of their lord. Other times, Amanda and April went to a café and ordered the Christmas special. The worst was when Amanda was ten and had been relieved because they were going to church services on Christmas just like everyone else. That false expectation made it all the worse when she realized they were at church for the free Christmas meal. That year had been particularly hard for them financially, and April couldn’t afford to buy presents or food for a nice meal. Santa Claus came to the dinner and embarrassed Amanda by presenting her with a bag full of candy canes and peanuts and a gift that turned out to be a Strawberry Shortcake lotion and perfume set. There was a tag on the gift that read “school-age girl.”

“What are you doing for Christmas?” Max asked Amanda, bringing her out of her trip down holiday memory lane hell.

“What?” Amanda asked to stall for time. She had known eventually her coworkers would ask about her family, and she hadn’t completely made up her mind how she was going to answer them. “I’m doing the traditional Christmas thing,” she said vaguely. “Turkey, presents, church …” That was the truth, because she would be doing all of that with Lucy’s family. Amanda looked down at her notebook and calendar, shuffling them around and trying to signal to him that she wanted to start the meeting.

Max took the hint. “I don’t have much for staff this week,” he told them. He had a thick file with a few papers clipped to the top, which meant that a new report had come in on a previously closed case. “It’s just a call from a school social worker that the Swazis are completely broke, and they didn’t sign up for the Christmas project or Toys for Tots, so their kids won’t have anything for Christmas.

“Oh, no,” Leah said. “Max, we must have something for them, don’t we? I know Jackie would want us to scrounge something up.”

Amanda knew that the reference to Jackie, another child protection social worker, meant that the Swazis must have been one of her old cases.

“I can call my church this morning,” Zoe said. “I’m sure they’ll find a hundred bucks in the social-needs fund for them.”

“Make sure they get a gift certificate for Wal-Mart,” Leah said. “Don’t give them the cash. I think the dad is drinking again.”

“Another success,” Becca said, speaking up for the first time that morning. She was in a particularly bad mood that day, so Amanda suspected she was not looking forward to the holidays with her crabby husband.

“The main thing we have is that a meth lab got busted over the weekend,” Max said, and told them about the trailer that had been raided on a search warrant. They’d found several grams of methamphetamine. Also confiscated were various meth-making supplies such as boxes of cold medicine tablets, batteries, coffee filters, and gun cleaner. When she had first learned how meth labs worked, with people making their own drugs using a complicated, multi-step process, Amanda was shocked that any of their clients could pull it off. The substances used to make meth were highly toxic, so the people exposed to the process, even if they never ingested the drug, could be poisoned by it.

“The mom had four kids, ages nine, five, four, and ten months,” Max said, and they all groaned.

“And I have to say is meth protocol is horrible,” Zoe said. “Mary Clark called me this morning and said the kids were all basket cases by the time they got to her house.” The Clarks were the foster parents on call for December.” She was pissed. She said they all had Band-aids on their arms from blood draws, and all of them had full physicals at eleven o’ clock at night in the ER.” The group groaned collectively again.

“That’s the meth protocol,” Leah said. “Those kids have been exposed to so much toxic crap that they need to find out right away if they have any health issues that need immediate treatment.”

“Yeah, well, it sounds like the whole crew was a little overzealous, with this being their first meth bust since the protocol was put into place. The nine-year-old told Mary that the police came in hazmat suits and gas masks. The little kids were completely out of their minds. Then they get dragged to the ER and get very complete physicals with blood draws and hair samples taken. They did sexual abuse exams on all of them too. On top of all that, Mary is just hostile about getting four kids right before Christmas.”

“I’ll bet they’re not too thrilled either,” Amanda blurted out, furious that a foster parent would be mad that these miserable kids were placed at her house. “Why does she do crisis care if she doesn’t want kids placed with her?”

“She does want kids placed with her,” Zoe said. “She wants pleasant, clean, grateful children who are free to be adopted and have no behavior problems.”

“Oh,
those
kids,” Leah said sarcastically. “Tell her we save the good ones for ourselves.”

“Okay, I’m crabby because she was so nasty to me this morning,” Zoe said. “Mary is usually pretty good, and her husband is fantastic with the kids.”

“I’ll share my Prozac with her if she’ll promise to cheer up,” Leah said.

“Anyway, “ Max said. “Let’s get back to this before Leah starts writing prescriptions. We need someone to write the CHIPS petition, and someone to check in with the kids. I’d like you to take this case, Amanda, since it looks like it will be labor intensive and your caseload is still small.”

“Okay,” Amanda said, wondering when she was going to get some easy, fun cases.

“I need to deliver a bunch of Christmas gifts today,” Zoe said. “Amanda, if you want to come along, we can stop at the Clarks’ house and you can see the kids.”

“How about a Christmas visit?” Leah asked.

“The police report says that both parents are in jail,” Max said. “Amanda, you can ask the nine-year-old where they usually spend holidays. I’ll also call the jail and ask the mom if she has any family in the area. Maybe they’ve got some wonderful grandparents who can pick them up and give them a great Christmas.”

“Yeah right,” Leah said.

“I doubt it,” Zoe added.

“Tough crowd,” Max said.

* * *

After the staff meeting, Amanda and Zoe loaded Zoe’s minivan with garbage bags full of Christmas gifts.

“We have four stops,” Zoe said. “Most of the clients and foster parents picked their stuff up last Friday. We still have a bunch of watches that were donated by the Lions Club, so I wrapped those and we’ll bring them to the Clarks for the meth kids. One of Jackie’s teen moms doesn’t drive, so I said I’d drop her stuff off. Then we need to go to Harlan’s and Freitag’s.”

“Do the kids get anything good?” Amanda asked, remembering her perfume set.

“I don’t know. What do you mean by ‘good’?” Zoe asked.

“When I was a kid, it was My Little Pony,” Amanda said. “Does anybody donate the big gifts that all the kids want?”

“That’s an interesting question,” Zoe said. “I guess I never really noticed. Sam and I usually donate a few things. This year we gave a bunch of board games.”

“Just curious …” Amanda said, drifting back into her thoughts of her own sad Christmases. She wondered if her mom even knew what the cool gifts were. Amanda stared out the window at the houses in the different neighborhoods. The further they got from the downtown area and the old railroad station, the nicer the houses appeared to be. Zoe pulled into the driveway of a newer looking two-story house belonging to Kathy and Joe Freitag, foster parents for an eight-year-old girl whose mother was developmentally delayed. Zoe grabbed two of the smaller bags to bring inside.

Zoe knocked on the door and was greeted by the foster child, Jasmine, holding a new beagle puppy that was wrangling to get outside. Jasmine was a beautiful blonde with fair skin and hearing aides in both ears.

“Did Kathy and Joe get a new puppy?” Zoe asked as they stepped inside.

Jasmine beamed. “Her name is Bubbles. They let me name her.” Zoe led the way into the kitchen where Kathy was trying to fit a huge turkey in the refrigerator to defrost. She gave it a final shove, closed the refrigerator door, and turned around patting her hair down. Kathy was no older than thirty with blonde hair and light skin that almost matched Jasmine’s.

“Jasmine, sweetie, will you take Bubbles downstairs and play chase with her so Zoe and I can talk for a minute?”

Jasmine coaxed Bubbles to follow her into the basement while they all watched her go.

Kathy suddenly turned to Zoe with tears and anger in her eyes. “Why do we have to let her do an overnight visit on Christmas? She doesn’t want to go. Her mom has ended the last two visits after an hour. How is this woman going to take care of her all night?” Amanda was shocked at how quickly Kathy went from beaming to seething.

Zoe tried to be sympathetic. “Jackie said mom’s attorney pushed for an overnight for the holidays. Isn’t the grandma supposed to be there too?”

“She’s almost ninety,” Kathy said, wiping her eyes with a tissue. “How much longer do we have to do this?”

“It’s been almost six months, and obviously the mom isn’t making progress,” Zoe said. “Jackie is hoping that mom will decide to terminate her rights voluntarily without going through a trial.”

“I just don’t understand,” Kathy said. “Her mother doesn’t even want her! But she gets to spend Christmas with Jasmine when she hasn’t wanted to spend more than an hour with her all month. What’s going to happen in the morning when Jazzy needs to put on her hearing aides? Her mom isn’t going to know how to do it, so Jazzy will go back to spending all day in silence because her hearing aides are too hard for her own
mother
to understand.” She spat the word “mother.”

“Do your best to hang in there,” Zoe said. “Jackie is pretty confident that this will settle quickly.” Zoe pointed to the bags on the table. “Here are a few things donated to us for foster kids. Coloring books, a little dollhouse, and a watch.”

“She really doesn’t need anything else,” Kathy said, smiling for the first time since they arrived. “We got her a Barbie townhouse, a bike, rollerblades, a new backpack, three new outfits, a new winter coat and snow pants set … And I know my family bought her a bunch of things too.”

“You could send these things along with mom on the visit,” Zoe said, and Kathy’s face darkened again.

“That’s probably true,” Kathy said darkly. “I’ll bet that woman didn’t get her anything.”

Zoe sighed. “We’ll say goodbye to Jasmine before we go.” Zoe and Amanda went to the stairs just as Jasmine was coming back up.

“Bubbles peed on the floor!” Jasmine burst out, running into the kitchen.

“That’s okay, sweetie. We’ll clean it up.” Kathy grabbed a bunch of paper towels and followed Jasmine back downstairs. Zoe and Amanda let themselves out.

“You know, sometimes I think it really doesn’t matter what I say in foster parent training about how the system works,” Zoe said as they walked to the car. “When foster parents get scared and attached, it all goes out the window.”

They both climbed into their seats in the van, and Zoe backed out of the driveway to head for their next destination.

“Guess she doesn’t care for Jasmine’s mom,” Amanda said.

“Jasmine’s mom tries, but she just doesn’t understand parenting. She’s too low functioning to get it. Jackie’s pretty confident that we’ll get the guardianship, but there’ll probably be liberal visitation. That’s going to drive Kathy crazy. Kathy and Joe don’t have any kids, and Jasmine was their first placement. They completely feel like Jasmine is their daughter, and they just get hostile at the idea of sharing her with people who won’t treasure her the way they do.”

“It seems like it should be so easy,” Amanda said. “Kathy can take care of Jasmine, and her own mother can’t. Seems like there shouldn’t be anything left to decide.”

Zoe rolled her eyes. “It’s never that easy,” she said.

As they drove through town, it was apparent that it was nearly Christmas Eve. Kids were out of school and playing in their yards, and several people were unloading bags of food or presents from their cars. Some homes looked abuzz with lots of company, and other homes were obviously empty, their owners traveling for the holiday. Over the past three years that she had spent holidays with Lucy’s family, she had learned to almost enjoy the holidays in a way she never did while she was growing up. Now that she had somewhere to go, she allowed herself to acknowledge December 25 as something other than an extra day off from school and work.

Zoe turned into a run-down apartment complex and pulled into a parking spot labeled for visitors. “That teen mom lives here,” Zoe said. “Do you want to come in?”

“Sure,” Amanda said. She was done shadowing other social workers as part of her training, but she still appreciated the chance to watch other people work since they all had different styles.

They trudged across the parking lot into one of the apartment buildings. Zoe opened the door, and Amanda immediately noticed the smell. It was a combination of dirty diapers, cigarette smoke, and garbage. Zoe led the way to apartment 112 and knocked on the door. A red-haired girl named Jenn, who looked well over twenty, answered the door. She was wearing a tank top and pajama bottoms and holding her baby in one arm. She wore a cell phone head set, which made her look like Brittney Spears in concert.

“I work with Jackie,” Zoe told her. “Jackie asked me to drop off some Christmas gifts for the baby.”

“Cool. Just a second. Ash, my social worker is here.” Jenn motioned them to come inside. The apartment was sparsely furnished with a couch that had no legs so it rested on the floor. Two plastic crates were set in front of it to serve as a coffee table. There was a beanbag chair, and a curved floor rocking chair that Amanda remembered lots of kids had in their dorm rooms. An old console TV blared “Teen Mom” on MTV. There were several empty Mountain Dew cans on the crates. On the floor were about fifteen balled up dirty diapers, as well as dirty paper plates with grease marks and globs of ketchup. There were clothes all over the couch and floor, possibly clean, possibly dirty. Two ashtrays on the TV were full of cigarette butts spilling ashes on to the TV screen. Only a small patch of the floor was visible with clothes and garbage covering most of the rest of it.