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“You can set the presents in the corner,” Jenn said. There was no Christmas tree, but she had set up a lava lamp and draped tinsel all around it like it was a tree. There were two other gifts by the lava lamp wrapped in Sesame Street paper. “I can’t believe he would do that to you. He’s such a fucker.” Jenn was still talking to her friend on the phone, but since she wasn’t actually holding a phone, it seemed to Amanda like she was either talking to them or herself.

“Can you tell your friend you’ll call her back?” Zoe asked.

“She’s fine. She’ll wait,” Jenn said.

“Please hang up for a minute,” Zoe said.

Jenn glared at Zoe for a second. “The social worker wants me to hang up. I’ll call you back. Bye.” She tapped something on a box attached to her pajama bottoms.

“Happy Holidays, Jenn. Jackie tells us that things are going pretty well for you, but I’m worried about how your house looks today. You need to clean up in here,” Zoe said. “You can’t just leave diapers on the floor after you change the baby. You need to throw away all the garbage on the floor, pick up the dirty clothes, and get rid of the pop cans that are everywhere.”

During the entire time that Amanda and Zoe were at the house, Jenn held her baby with one arm facing away from her. The baby was very fat, and amazingly did not fuss as he was bounced all over the apartment with his mother.

Jenn glared at Zoe. “You know, it’s not exactly easy to clean when you have a baby to take care of.” Suddenly Jenn turned the baby around and held him close to her face, cooing at him for the first time since they arrived. His face burst into a smile, and he cooed back and drooled.

“I know it isn’t,” Zoe said. “I have two of my own at home. But that doesn’t change the need for you to throw away your garbage.”

“Are you done?” Jenn asked.

“That depends on whether or not you are going to clean up after we leave,” Zoe said.

“I have to get ready for Christmas,” Jenn said. “I need to bring, like, two salads to my aunt’s house.” Even this girl had somewhere to go on Christmas.

“Will it help you remember to get it done if I come back in a couple days to check on your progress?” Zoe asked pleasantly.

Jenn glared. “I’ll clean up, all right? Jesus!”

“That’s all I wanted to hear,” Zoe said. “Happy Holidays!”

They let themselves out again and trudged through the parking lot.

“Do you think she’ll end up keeping her kid?” Amanda asked as they climbed back into the van again. “It looks like she isn’t too focused on her baby.”

“You know, I think this is the girl who Jackie said does really well with her baby,” Zoe said. “If she doesn’t keep her baby, it will be because she does something stupid like hooking up with a sex offender or drug dealer. If she manages to stay away from all the bad influences, she might do okay. Her baby looked good.”

“How could you tell?” Amanda asked as they drove away again.

“I don’t know. I guess you can’t tell in a five-minute visit,” Zoe said. “The good things were that he looked smiley, she made eye contact with him and he cooed back. That’s big. It looks like she holds him a lot—big too.”

“She probably had to hold him with all the junk all over the floor,” Amanda said.

Zoe tilted her head to concede that point.

As they continued their trek through town, Amanda thought about Jenn. Her own mother had been about Jenn’s age when she’d had her. The lava lamp tree stuck in Amanda’s head for some reason, and a vivid memory played in her head:

Wood paneling … if she picked at the white covering on the Christmas tree, the fake snow came off revealing bare metal wires. She didn’t like the way the metal looked, but she couldn’t stop picking. She was hiding, trying to be very quiet, so she could stay. She wanted to stay in this house with the white tree.

“Are you coming in?” Zoe asked, interrupting her memory. They had pulled into a trailer court, but it wasn’t the same one where she had visited Marlys’s sister. There was one very wide, paved road, and twenty-five to thirty neatly kept mobile homes on either side of the main road. They pulled up next to a mobile home with a painted sign that said,
Beware: Grandchildren Spoiled Here
.

Amanda wordlessly climbed out of the van and helped Zoe carry in several large bags of toys and clothes.

“Hello, sweetie!” A small, round woman with snow-white hair and a permanent smile opened the mobile home door.

“Merry Christmas, Gracie!” Zoe yelled out.

“You wait right there, sweetheart, and Lars will come help with all those packages.” Gracie moved aside to allow Lars to pass through the doorway, because he never would have fit with her standing there. Lars was well over six feet tall with long arms and huge hands. His face was worn with deep laugh lines around his blue eyes. He looked like he could have picked up Gracie and palmed her like a basketball.

“Thank you, sir,” Zoe said, and Lars nodded. He held out his arms as they piled on gifts and bags. He nodded for them to walk ahead of him inside the mobile home.

When she walked inside, she felt like she had entered Mrs. Claus’s home away from home. On every surface was either a porcelain house or a Santa Claus figurine. There were ropes of Christmas lights and tree garland encircling the doublewide living room. The couch was draped in an intricate red-and-green quilt embroidered with Santas. The enormous tree was proudly displayed in the front of the living room, and was filled with ornaments.

“Lars, honey, please set the gifts under the tree. You girls, come sit and share a cookie before you go.” Gracie hooked her arm through Zoe’s and led her to the dining room table.

“Gracie, this is Amanda. She’s our new worker. Amanda this is Gracie and Lars Harlan. They have been foster parents for twenty-eight years.” Zoe beamed as she introduced them.

Gracie smiled modestly. “We’ve had 112 foster children in our home. Legally adopted six of them. Another three took our name after they turned eighteen. Loved each and every one of them.” She scurried to the tiny kitchen and brought back a platter of beautifully decorated Christmas cookies. There were intricately frosted Santa Clauses, trees, angels, and stockings.

“These are too pretty to eat,” Amanda said, afraid to touch the masterpieces.

“Oh, no, sweetie. If you don’t eat them they’ll just go to waste. Now do you want cold milk, hot chocolate, or coffee with your cookies? Ooh, and I also have spiced cider.” Lars had finished unloading the gifts under the tree. He sat in the recliner nearest the tree and drank his coffee from a Santa coffee cup. As he rocked in his chair and watched his wife, he had an amused smile on his lips.

They both requested cider, and as Gracie went off to the kitchen to prepare their mugs, Amanda watched her with an emotion that closest resembled longing. This home was like nothing she had ever experienced. She imagined children being delivered to this home, pulled away from their parents due to drug use, abuse, or abandonment. She pictured Gracie cooing at toddlers and putting her arm around teenagers. She wondered if kids ever wanted to leave Gracie and Lars, or if they begged to stay forever.

Amanda knew that she would compare herself to the children she worked with when she started this job, because there were clearly times while growing up when she could have been removed from her mother. When Amanda was in first grade, they lived in a frigid garage with a space heater for heat, and they had to pee outside. And there were countless times that Amanda slept on a stranger’s floor while her mother got high and then disappeared into a bedroom with another faceless, scary thug. The irony was that even though she was employed to provide this safety net for other children, she had always believed in her own life that with her mother was better than being anywhere else. Yet now that she had met Gracie and Lars, she wondered what difference a foster home like this might have made in her own life.

Two little boys, ages four and seven, padded down the hallway and stood behind Gracie, pulling her pant leg.

“Is our mama here, Gramma?” the older one asked.

“No, precious, it’s Zoe and her friend,” Gracie said, wiping her hands on her apron and turning around. “Remember, honey, your mama isn’t coming today.” Gracie held the boy’s face in her hands. “Oliver, I feel very lucky because I get to have you and Stevie at my house for Christmas this year.” Oliver grabbed onto Gracie’s wrists while she was still holding on to his head and tried to lift his feet off the ground so that she was holding him suspended in the air. Gracie let her arms drop, and Oliver fell to the ground laughing.

“Gramma, you dropped me!” Oliver yelled. Little Stevie was jumping up and down next to Oliver, wanting his turn to fall on his back.

Zoe stood up. “Will you jump with me, Oliver?”

“Yea!” He grabbed Zoe’s hands and began jumping wildly up and down. Stevie jumped up and down next to her until she gave him a turn, too.

Gracie maneuvered around the boys with two steaming cups of cider. She set them down next to Amanda, and then sat herself in the chair on the other side of Amanda.

“I love to meet the new workers,” Gracie said, patting Amanda’s knee. “So, are you enjoying being a social worker?”

Amanda smiled at Gracie and wanted to answer, but suddenly felt a lump rising in her throat.

Gracie leaned in, watching Amanda’s face closely. Amanda willed her chin not to quiver, but she was still unable to speak. Gracie reached down and held Amanda’s hands in her own soft, wrinkled hands.

“You look like you’ll be a wonderful social worker,” Gracie said quietly, looking Amanda intently in the eye and squeezing her hands.

The boys finally tired of jumping and ran over to Lars, climbing on his lap. “Can we play marbles, Grampa?” Lars stood up and reached for a Chinese checkers board and a bag of marbles that was resting on top of Gracie’s curio cabinet. He set them on the floor next to the boys, and Oliver immediately grabbed the velvet bag and dumped the marbles out on the floor. The boys scrambled to retrieve the marbles that were rolling under the furniture.

Zoe sat down next to Amanda. “You have your hands full with these two,” Zoe said, a trace of worry in her voice. “Has Jackie told you how long they’re staying?”

Gracie shook her head and whispered, “I think their mother is gone. She hasn’t visited the kids since Thanksgiving, and Jackie said their mom didn’t show up for court last week. Their dad passed away. Suicide,” she whispered. They all watched the boys sadly. “We’d adopt them if we could, but I’m sixty-six and Lars is seventy. It’s just not fair to them.”

They sat for a minute, finishing their cookies, and then Zoe reluctantly stood up. “I suppose we should go …”

“Wait a minute girls,” Gracie said, popping up with surprising quickness. She went to the freezer and took out two little packages. “Here are some cookies for you two to take home.” Lars came over and stood by the door as they left, having not spoken a word the entire time they were there, but still making them feel like he was glad they were there.

As they were walking to the car, Zoe said, “I love visiting them. I could stay all day.” Amanda got back in the van and buckled her seat belt, staring out the window to hide the tears running down her cheeks.

* * *

The Clarks lived in a big, beautiful house in a new development on the edge of town. It was beige, like every other house on the block, with a three-car garage that was open and showed off a BMW, a huge SUV, and a substantial boat. They parked on the edge of the driveway, and Amanda marveled at an elaborate playhouse in the backyard that had rope ladders connecting it to two large trees, each of which had a small tree house built in it.

“This house must be heaven for all the kids who come here. How do you ever get them to go home?” Amanda asked.

Zoe looked at her. “With a few exceptions, kids always want to go home, no matter how great the foster parents are.”

They stood at the double door entrance and rang the bell. Mary Clark opened the door and stepped back, wordlessly inviting them in. The house was even more impressive on the inside, with vaulted ceilings and an open floor plan. The large, modern kitchen was on their left, and to the right was the living room with tall windows along the back wall overlooking their wooded backyard. The house looked like it had been professionally decorated for Christmas in ice blue and white, and their huge Christmas tree matched with blue tulle and icicle ornaments dangling from every branch. It was like a model home, gorgeous and impersonal. Amanda followed Zoe’s lead and immediately slipped off her shoes.

“Mary, this is Amanda. She’s a new worker with our office. She’ll be taking the new case.” Mary was tall and willowy, with expertly highlighted blonde hair and icy blue eyes. She looked like she could have won beauty pageants, except for the frown. Mary nodded at Amanda for a brief second without offering her hand, and then looked back at Zoe.

“We weren’t supposed to be on crisis care in December.” Mary glared at Zoe. “I’m hosting a party tonight. Kids aren’t invited.”

“Mary, you agreed to this after the Jacobsens quit.”

“No, Larry agreed to this. I wanted this month off.”

“I’m sorry if there was a misunderstanding. Maybe you can hire a babysitter tonight to watch the kids during the party.” Zoe was trying to keep her voice down in case the kids were close by.

“Actually I’d like them to go to respite care until the twenty-sixth.” Mary said.

Amanda’s jaw dropped.

“Mary …” Zoe said, looking angry but choosing her words carefully. “I think it would be really rough to have them go somewhere else for Christmas. They’ve been through so much already.”

“They barely know us. Why would they care if they spend Christmas here or someone else’s house?” Mary’s expression was unreadable. Something else was going on here.

“Mary, may I ask what this is about. You seem very angry about this placement, but it really seemed that you were okay with getting placements when we met last week. We talked about the party, and last week you said it would be fine if you got some kids.”

Just then they heard a door open in the basement, and kids voices. Mary suddenly turned and walked back to the kitchen, ignoring the kids who had just come back inside. Amanda looked at Zoe questioningly, and Zoe looked back and shook her head. Mary busied herself in the kitchen as her husband, Larry, walked upstairs holding a rosy-cheeked baby in his arms.