A Favor (12 page)

I want to help him but he shakes his head and pushes me out the back door. Almost fifteen minutes later he’s back beside me in the truck.

“How are you feeling?”

“Umm, I don’t know yet. I still can’t believe it. I feel like I’m going to wake up and it was just a dream.”

“No dream, sweetheart, come on. Let’s see this little town a bit. It seems a waste to just head back so quick.

He talks me into a winery tour where both of us are only good at spitting out the wine we don’t like it. He buys a case of two different wines we both like. We stroll through the streets and find a pretty little café and we realize we had spent a lot more time at the winery than we thought. The food is excellent and even though I beg to at least leave a tip, Sam firmly overrules me. The sun has set and twilight is around as we make our way back to the truck.

After the wine and good food, I’m dozing to the soft country music on the radio. It takes a little while before I realize nothing looks familiar.

“Sam, where are we going?”

“Got a little surprise for you.”

He turns his attention back to the steep incline and then the unpaved road levels out. Turning off the truck he slides out without a word, what is he doing I wonder and finally I give up and slide out of the truck to see what he’s up to.

He’s messing with the cover on the bed of the truck. It’s heavy and vinyl and could be rolled up.

“Come on, baby, help me roll it up.” I follow his instructions and as I roll the cover back toward the cab I can see what the cover hid. The two remaining paintings are on top of what looks like a bed out of a magazine. Light soft pillows are everywhere. White sheets and a pretty old patchwork quilt is on top of the sheets. He’s careful with my paintings and sets them against the truck.

He pushes up and his muscles flex and then he holds out a hand to me. I give it to him without hesitation. Sam pulls me up as though I weigh nothing. It’s one of the things I love the most about him, his strength and ability to carry me around with ease but how gentle and careful he is with me. Moving pillows and the quilt he settles in and I follow him down. He pulls me into his arms, my head on his chest. The moon is a bright white against the inky black of night. Stars sparkle and dot the sky.

“This is amazing.”

“You know, baby, in all that I’ve gotten from you and Taylor, everything starts in Austin, there’s nothing from Chicago. Taylor says you never talk about your life there, it was like once you hit Austin that’s when your life started. It was a nice city except for the damned cold. What was it like growing up there?”

Closing my eyes I tighten my arms around him. I don’t want to remember Chicago, there is so little that had been good there that it was easier to forget it all. Allowing a shaky breath to escape I attempt something I have always disdained before. I attempt to divert his attention with sex, my hand strokes his chest and then down his stomach. His hand catches mine and settles it back up to the middle of his chest laying it flat against his heartbeat he holds me there, his hand covering mine gently but firmly.

“Okay, I’ll start. You saw where I come from. My grandfather had a chicken farm, it was a small business but then when he died he left my father in charge and pop killed himself to make it bigger and better. He’d work sun up to sun down trying to compete with big companies. He was dead by the time I was ten but he’d tripled the size of the place so maybe to him it was worth it. I’m not so sure about that.”

“I’m sorry, Sam.”

Sam shrugs, “It was important to him, wasn’t nothing mom could say or do to deter him. Mom kept on and took on more help but it was a struggle. Mom was no stranger to hard work but the business, hell, all that went above her head. All she could do was keep the agreements in place, she wasn’t sure if they were good deals or not and the men working for her were just as lost as she was. By the time I hit my teens my mom was adamant I had to go to college so I could take over the business side.

I wasn’t happy about it but she wasn’t to be talked around it. I tried to talk her into letting me stay in Texas so I could come home on vacations and help out but no. I’d managed to get into Harvard and I was going and I was going to focus on learning what I could about business and it would be worth it, she told me.”

“That’s the thing that has driven me nuts from the first day. What the hell is a Harvard graduate doing in the Army?”

He chuckles but there’s no humor in it and I wish I could see his face more clearly.

“You tell me about Chicago and I’ll tell you how a Harvard graduate ended up in the Army.” His hand strokes the back of the hand he had captured and held.

Lying under the stars with Sam so hard and yet soft, big and yet gentle with me, Chicago feels far away. Melting into Sam, I barely notice that I shiver but then the sheet and quilt are pulled up around us. “I don’t like to talk about Chicago because there isn’t a whole lot of good to remember there. I was actually born in Wisconsin and lived there until I was about three. My mom, she had problems. Besides, having me only a few months after sixteen and having no idea who my father was, she was diagnosed as a manic depressive, or what everyone now calls bipolar. She’d have these moments where everything was amazing and she loved life and then she had moments when the world was out to get her and nothing could go right.

She was very abusive, but it was a gradual build. We left city after city when neighbors would report her because they heard the beatings. She did everything on high volume. It’s funny but I think she thought in a bigger city she would be more anonymous but she wasn’t and it was more expensive. Things got harder for her so the beatings were worse. When I was four she had to take me to the emergency because she broke my arm. They took one look at the break and put me in a room with a social worker. The social worker undressed me and started taking pictures of the bruising.

I didn’t see my mom for almost a year.

They took me to an emergency set up foster home and then a few days later another foster home that was okay. The people were older, but it was chaotic there. Two other girls had been there for years and they did whatever they wanted and were worried about me taking attention away from them. So supposedly my mom has been doing better and they put me back with her because she’s on her meds and she’s stable.

It lasted almost a year but then she lost her job and health insurance and she managed to break my collar bone. This time the emergency room bought it and they didn’t find any bruising so it was all good. Another year passed full of her careful but still beating the hell out of me for stupid shit like a wrinkle in my dress, not facing out the cans in the cupboard. Then she had to send me to school and she hadn’t been as careful as she thought, there were a lot of bruises. I was in school for about two weeks before the school social worker pulled me out of class.

I never saw my mother again.

Another emergency set up foster home. The couple was nice, there was only a baby there. It was a few months and my social worker, I have to say she really tried. I had her until I aged out of the system and she was the only constant who really tried. I’m sure she thought I was still young and pretty enough I would easily be adopted so she looked for that couple.

The couple they were nice, and were looking to adopt through the system because it was cheaper. She couldn’t have kids and they were stuck in firm working class, I think he was a manager of a fast food place and she was a secretary. I liked them and they were nice but it was too much too fast and I was still trying to understand it all. My mother had signed away her rights, that was hard to get, that she wasn’t my mom anymore. I was a really angry kid, angry at her for being sick, angry at myself for being relieved she wasn’t my mom anymore, angry that she didn’t want to be my mom anymore. I was just angry and those poor people, they tried but it wasn’t long before they couldn’t do it anymore. Because of how bad I was they put me in a hospital and doped me up for a couple of months.

Then the therapy started and it was all bullshit. But while I was there I finally figured it out. You have to play the game. You smile when you’re sad, you laugh when you want to cry, you always say that you’re good when people ask you how you’re doing. Smile and agree and they’ll think everything’s good because they want to believe, they need to believe so they can move onto the next.

Finally, I was out after two years there and I was put in a home where the family wanted to adopt a girl because they already had three boys. Right from the start though, I hated it. The boys had no restrictions, and no discipline and they either shoved me around or were trying to cop a feel or see me naked. I hung in as long as I could, almost two years. Right up until the couple said they wanted to move forward with the adoption and I just couldn’t. I told the social worker what had been going on and she pulled me out that night.

A new foster emergency place and the lady was so nice. She preferred taking in babies on an emergency basis. She had back problems and was on disability but she liked me being able to help her. She liked to read and she was always giving me books to read and we’d go to the library and pick out books. It was supposed to be short term but turned into almost two years. My social worker, she hadn’t given up on me, she wanted me to be adopted and she had the perfect couple.

I understood, my social worker wanted a happy ending for me and Nancy and Gene were a really nice couple. They wanted to adopt through foster care to save money because Nancy couldn’t work, she had medical problems. So it was just Gene working but he worked at a good company and did pretty well. It was a nice home in the suburbs right on the edge of Chicago but like a whole other world. I was thirteen by then and it was at that time where everything was changing as far as school and the other girls jealousy about boys coming around me. Nancy handled it amazingly, and Gene he wasn’t hands off. He made sure we all together had the sex talk and he was adamant I know that I know I deserved better than just anyone. Choose carefully, he would stress again and again. He’s the one who taught me how to cook, Nancy was a horrible cook, he was patient and kind. He taught me how to take care of myself, how to turn a guy down nicely and then when to not be nice. He taught me how to break out of a hold from behind and how to make a guy cry from not just a knee to the groin.

Nancy, she was the one who taught me how to paint. I can’t sketch worth a damn, straight lines weren’t for me but I loved to paint. At first it was just keeping Nancy company because she wasn’t very active and she painted to pass the time. But Nancy saw how well I did and she encouraged me and enrolled me in a class. She was a good woman, it’s sad she didn’t get to have kids she was a good mom while it lasted.” I’m lost in that time for a moment, Nancy encouraging me not to give up and Gene right beside her telling me of course I could do it.

“What happened?” I feel the rumble of sound beneath my ear more than I hear the question.

“They had already started the adoption process but that stuff takes forever. On my sixteenth birthday we went into the city for a fancy dinner and show. Me all dressed up and they were happy. Then Nancy, on the train home she just keeled over. I think Gene thought she was dead, for a minute I did too. She wasn’t dead though it took six agonizingly long months for that to happen. I did what I could to take care of her and she was sweet, telling me not to worry she would be fine but she knew she wouldn’t be.

I didn’t know it but when Nancy was in the hospital, Gene called and put a halt to the adoption. I don’t know why exactly but I can imagine kids were Nancy’s thing not his and although he was active and involved maybe he just couldn’t see doing it without Nancy. They were a team and he was lost without her, they’d been high school sweethearts, he was still scared of a life without her. It’s kind of what he hinted at, the day after Nancy’s funeral when he told me the social worker was on her way to pick me up. I could take everything from my room, he didn’t want any of it. It was all mine anyway. But I just took the clothes and a few small things, because it wasn’t mine, I wasn’t the same person who used to live there anymore.

I had just graduated that year. I hated school and had skipped a year after Nancy had me tested. But I wasn’t eighteen yet and I couldn’t get out of the system yet. My last place was with an old lady who wasn’t all that bad. She just wanted someone to take care of her, run errands, clean the house and take her to the doctor. She encouraged me to get a job and save up for after foster care for when I would be on my own, all she cared about was that it didn’t interfere with the stuff she asked me to do. She even gave me some of the money that came in each month for my care. She was comfortable, it wasn’t the money so much as she didn’t want to spend to have stuff done.

When I turned eighteen I left Chicago and came to Austin because I’d read about it being a nice place and it was warm. So yeah, I don’t talk about Chicago because my life up until then was to please other people. It wasn’t until I moved to Austin I could finally be who I really was. It wasn’t until Austin until I could figure out who I was.”

“Have you seen her since, do you want to see her?”

I shake my head firmly, “No, not at all. Before I moved to Austin, a last part of me felt the need. I talked to my social worker and she told me my mother was in criminal mental hospital. She had a child when I was six and she had beat the baby so badly he was pronounced brain dead and removed from life support and that’s where she was sentenced. Stupidly, I called and she came to the phone and said she didn’t have a daughter, she didn’t have any children and I must have the wrong person. It made it easier then to let it all die there in Chicago after that.

I changed my last then, I wanted to change my first name too but the old lady talked me out of changing my first name. She said Zoe meant life and I was full of life and to take that away would be wrong. I asked if her if I could take her last name. Lawrence seemed easy and common and since this end would help me into my beginning it seemed fitting. She was touched and told me that worked for her.