My boss’s lips curved upward.“Sounding a little parentally defensive, there, are we?”
I shrugged grudgingly. I couldn’t help being protective of Dustin. “Well, you know, the whole macho power trip thing was just a little hard to take first thing in the morning.”
Taz fished a chocolate twist from the box, checking the hallway to make sure the secretary, Bonnie, wasn’t within line of sight. Bonnie was the most maternal twenty-something I’d ever met. She wanted a husband and kids but hadn’t found Mr. Right, so she’d taken up raising dogs and mothering everyone in the office, including the boss.
Shifting his coffee cup so that it dangled next to the doughnut, Taz snatched up a coffee-spattered file folder and tucked it under his arm.“I’m an adult. I can have a doughnut if I want, can’t I?” The question had a touch of the rhetorical to it, as if it begged an answer, but he already knew what the answer would be.
I shrugged, wisely remaining mum as he turned to leave.
Passing by the copier, he took a bite of the doughnut, then glanced back at me, dropped the remainder in the trash, and offered a little closed-lipped smirk with chocolate frosting on top. “Sometimes, it’s the principle of the thing, Henderson. Even when someone is looking after our welfare, we don’t like being told what to do.”
Leaning over to check the trash can, he seemed pleased with himself. “A high school football player from Fort Worth broke his back jumping off the Scissortail last fall. Had a fundraiser for him on Channel 9. Nice-looking kid.” Taz’s gaze slid slowly from the trash can to me, his eyes suddenly seeming steady and wise. “It’s all in your perspective.”
He walked away without further conversation, and I stood there with my coffee cup suspended halfway to my mouth, thinking,
Andrea Henderson, you have just been counseled.
The primary reason I was still mentally rehashing this morning’s conversation with the game warden was that I didn’t want someone else telling me what my son needed.
Pride goeth before the fall.
One of those inconvenient proverbs that lurks in the back of your head once you’ve heard it a few thousand times from your mother. Megan was always the pliable one in the family, and I the notoriously determined child who seemed to find trouble without even looking for it. My mother always complained that I took after my grandmother’s sister, Lucy, the black sheep who lived an odd life hip-hopping around the world with the Peace Corps, until finally she took a medical ship bound for Africa, where she contracted anthrax and died.
In our family, Lucy had always been held up as an example of pride, stubbornness, and getting too big for your britches, but I admired her. I wanted to be like her, even though I’d never had the courage to step that far outside the lines. I was a frustrated crusader, afraid to leave my own backyard because my mother would make a federal case of it. Taking this job was the first out-of-the-box thing I’d ever done. Insecurity, in this situation, was defeat. I had to find ways to remain certain of myself, of my own plans, to provide Dustin with a sense of security and a vision of the future. I had to show him that we could create something good from pieces of our old life and pieces of the new.
Bonnie came out of the supply closet and passed by with an armload of printer paper. She was cheery, as usual, bouncing up the hall with a ponytail of slick-as-glass blond hair sweeping the back of her neck like a windshield wiper. “Hey! Mornin’!” she chirped, stopping a few steps up the hall. “Everything okay at home?”
“Sure,” I said. “Fine.”
“How’s your son?” Nothing happened in the office without Bonnie getting in the middle of it. She already talked about Dustin as if he were her little brother or her nephew.
“Oh, well, you know. He’s just becoming a teenager. Having a few growing pains.”
Bonnie stood watching me with curious, empathic blue eyes, as if she knew there was more to tell. Drifting a few steps closer, she hugged the paper to her chest.
“He’s never had to move before,” I added.
She sucked in her cheeks, the action making her narrow face seem even thinner and more angular. “Oh, sure,” she breathed, one side of her mouth pulling downward in a sympathetic frown. “It’s rough, moving at that age. We relocated from Texas to upstate New York when I was in the eighth grade, and I just about went suicidal. The kids there thought I was some kind of alien from Howdy-Doodyville. Of course, it didn’t help that I was already five foot eight, skinny as a rail, and had a flatter chest than most of the boys. If the basketball coach up there hadn’t taken me under wing, I don’t know what I would’ve done. She saved my life, I think.”
I felt the inconvenient tug of shared emotion. I could relate to being the gawky, skinny, tall girl, and aside from that, I wanted to believe that someone here in Moses Lake would spot Dustin’s talents and take an interest in him. “I’m hoping it will work out that way for Dustin – that he’ll find some people at school he can relate to, I mean.”
Bonnie squinted toward the ceiling, seeming to comb her memory banks. “I think there’s a guy in my apartment complex who’s, like, a coach out there at Moses Lake. I’ll see if I can catch him and tell him about Dustin. It never hurts for someone to be on the lookout for you your first day, right?”
I had the urge to break all the rules of professional decorum and give Bonnie a great, big hug right there in the office hallway. “Thanks.”
“Oh, sure.” She batted a hand as if to say,
What’s a little favor
between girlfriends, hon?
Then she fished a few printed papers off her stack and handed them to me. “Here. Notes from the morning meeting. I’m working on contacting the appointments you missed yesterday and doing reschedules. A lot of these CPS families don’t have phones, so all I can do is leave a message with a neighbor, or a relative, or whatever. I’ll try to get them – especially the family that got reported by the bus driver – scheduled as soon as I can. You never know from one day to the next who’ll be in the household and what the mood’s gonna be. I guess Taz told you that. They just change when the wind blows. If you give them too much time, they’ll come right back around to deciding they don’t need family counseling, and then their CPS caseworker has to start all over again, trying to get them to cooperate with us.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking the morning meeting notes.“And thanks for offering to make a contact for Dustin.”
Bonnie smiled brightly. “Oh, it’s no big deal.The teenagers from the little church out at Moses Lake come over and do stuff with the youth group at my church, sometimes. I’ll find out when they’ve got something planned, and you could bring Dustin. He can get acquainted, and you and me can go . . . have a latte in the coffee shop. I’ll tell you all Taz’s secrets.”
My mind did a rapid rewind, racing backward. I hadn’t meant to get sucked into an invitation to Bonnie’s church. After having been ditched and gossiped about by so many friends and fellow church members during the divorce, I wasn’t ready to build any social networks. I just wanted to live a quiet life, find purpose in my work, make a difference to kids who needed help, and take care of my son. “I think we’ll be pretty busy until school starts. Thanks, though. Really.”
I continued on down the corridor to my windowless office in the back of the building. Taz had been apologetic when he’d shown it to me. My accommodations didn’t really matter, anyway. With so much fieldwork, I wouldn’t be spending much time in the office.
After I’d glanced over the morning meeting notes from Bonnie and gathered yet another load of CPS referrals via e-mail, I headed off for my first appointment, and the day limped by in a strange mishmash of trying to locate homes and apartments that even my Garmin couldn’t find, trips through creepy neighborhoods in various economically deprived little towns in the area, and awkward first meetings with families on my list of referrals. Compared to the two weeks of training, the actual job was a shock.
What Taz had referred to as
A position contracting with Social
Services,
was really me driving around in my car, seeking out people whose reasons for being referred for counseling services were generally described to me in short, hurried descriptions dashed off by overburdened caseworkers. Complete addresses were a plus, but not a requirement. Names added another level of challenge. When faced with questions such as, “Was you lookin’ for Big Bo or Little Bo?” I had no choice but to admit that I had no idea. At one household, I spoke to four different generations of a family, and not one person admitted to being the individual whose name was on the referral form. When you don’t know whether you’re looking for a client who’s eight or forty-eight, it’s anybody’s guess. The referral e-mail simply read,
Bo Brown: family issues, depression. Please counsel for anger
management.
Late in the day, I finally visited with the family who’d been referred for fighting in the yard while the bus driver was running the summer-school route. We held a family counseling session on the front porch. The boyfriend who’d caused the commotion wasn’t present, but I talked with the children and then with the mother, Lonnie. Lonnie had a black eye that had turned yellow and brown. Her boyfriend hadn’t caused it, she insisted. The kids’ horse had butted her in the face while she was feeding it. In the muddy lot beside the house, the old, rawboned horse looked like it hadn’t seen oats in quite some time.
After getting Lonnie’s side of the story, I asked to talk to the children alone. Lonnie shrugged and said, “Suit yerself. They don’t got nothin’ to say, except that the bus driver scared them the other day when he wouldn’t let them off the bus. The kids on the school bus pick on my kids all the time, too. I want you to talk to the school about that. Tell them those kids’re pickin’ on my kids.” She stood up and went in the house.
The little boy, John, and his older sister, Audrey, shared the horse’s tired, dull-eyed look. While we talked, they sat on the porch floor, pressed against the railing, eyeballing me as if I were an alien invader. A half-grown cat wandered by, and the little boy, John, picked it up and began searching through its fur.
“That’s a nice kitten,” I said, scooting forward on the old sofa that served as porch furniture. Dampness from the cushions had soaked into my pants, and I was quickly realizing that I wasn’t properly attired for this job. My father’s car wasn’t the right vehicle for it, either. Right now it was parked out front, covered in mud and road goo.
“It’s my favorite,” John answered, then pinched something off the kitten’s skin and dropped it into the weeds below. “He gots ticks.”
A crawly feeling slid over my skin, and I wanted to get up and stand in one small spot, not touching anything. “Well, it’s a good thing he has you to look after him, then, huh?”
John peeked up at me with a sliver of interest. “Tamp says if the little turd gets ticks in the house, he’s gonna take ’im down and drown ’im in the lake. Tamp don’t like cats.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw Lonnie stiffen behind the screen door and shake her head at the unflattering mention of the man of the house. “Tamp never said he was gonna drown no kitten, John. Don’t be makin’ up stories.”
I ignored her input and remained focused on John. “He’s a beautiful kitten. He’s your favorite?”
“Yup.” John brightened again. His sister reached across the space between them and scratched the kitten’s head. “Sissy had one, too, but Tamp run over hers with the truck.”
“Tamp didn’t run over no kitten,” Lonnie corrected from behind the screen door. “I told you, that was my fault. I forgot to look before we got in the truck.”
John slanted a sideways look at the door, then shrugged and began searching for ticks again.The timer on my cell phone vibrated in my pocket, which meant I was due to leave. I didn’t feel that I’d accomplished anything beyond, perhaps, the building of a smidge of rapport.
“I’ll bet that was sad,” I said. “Losing your kitten.”
Audrey nodded. “The coyotes or the bobcats got two. Or maybe a mountain lion. A mountain lion jumped on one of them hikers in the park a couple months ago.” She looked up, her eyes a soft, golden brown in a frame of red hair. I wanted to lead her off the porch, put her in my car, and take her home.
“I hadn’t heard that. I’m sorry about your kittens, though. Losing a pet is like losing a person in your family, huh?”The cell phone vibrated again. Time to go.
“My daddy died,” John offered. “He liked cats.”
A lump rose in my throat. “That’s good. I like cats, too.”
The next thing I knew, the cat was in my lap, and John was sitting beside me on the sofa. I stroked the kitten, and it purred.
My cell phone vibrated again.
“How come your pocket’s buzzin’?” John asked.
I chuckled. “It’s time for me to go.”
“You gonna come back?” He tilted his chin up, his eyes meeting mine.
“Next week.”
For a moment, he studied me, seeming to wonder if I really meant it. Then he took the cat from my lap, tucked it under his chin, and returned to the other side of the porch.
I confirmed next week’s appointment with Lonnie, then left feeling useless and defeated. On the porch, the kids stood watching, their gazes tracking my movements, as if they were afraid for me to go, yet afraid for me to ask any more questions. Clearly, they knew what not to say. They’d already been in foster care five times in their short lives. All they really wanted to know from me was whether I was going to send them back.