Room for One More

I got my cast off in June, six weeks after the placement, in a house that smelled like cut grass instead of bleach, with a foster mother named Bridget who asked me, the very first week, what I liked to eat, and then actually remembered the answer without writing it down.

Nell and Toby went to separate homes, which worried me for exactly nine days until I found out both families had agreed to weekly visits so the two of them wouldn't lose each other the way kids in the system so often do. Wren, too young to remember any of it consciously, was placed with a family that specialized in infant emergency care, and Bridget drove me to see him twice that spring, just to watch him laugh at nothing in particular the way babies do when nobody's taught them yet that laughing loudly is a risk.

The state closed the licensing gap that had let Paulette disappear and reappear under a different name in a different county — not because of me specifically, the caseworker told me, but because Nathaniel's file and mine, filed fifteen years apart, finally sat next to each other on the same desk at the same time.

Bridget asked me once, gently, over dinner, why I'd spent two years taking hits meant for a five-year-old.

"Because somebody had to not be small," I told her, which is the truest answer I've ever given anyone about those two years, and the first time saying it didn't feel like explaining a rule so much as remembering one I finally didn't need anymore.

That night, for the first time in longer than I could measure, nobody in the house needed me to trade anything for anyone.

I had dessert first, just because I could, and nobody aimed anything at all.