“I know. I couldn’t help myself,” Lexus said, rolling on her side and propping herself up on one elbow so that she looked like a spokesmodel for a mattress advertisement.
“You’re right. She does bounce back,” Sparky said.
“I told you. Lexus, honey, why didn’t you blow it up after you brought it up here?”
“Because I thought you two needed some time to discuss the serious stuff of life that in my exuberant way I am not very good at.”
“Not only does she bounce, she’s smart,” Sparky said.
“Now aren’t you glad you’re a Moonie? You’ve got people to watch your back. Don’t forget that,” Lexus said.
“I won’t,” Sparky said, and she meant it.
Chapter Two
Bereft
Standing in her scrubs staring down at the little girl, Cheryl was certain this was the worst moment of her life. They were in one of examination rooms in the Emergency Room at the University of Washington Medical Center. As an ER doctor she’d seen her share of tragedies, but this one seriously sucked, to use Lexus’s lexicon. The girl wore jean overalls with a tie-dyed T-shirt underneath. Her dark hair hung in ringlets around an elfin face filled with large dark eyes. She was thin and seemed small for her age. Cheryl glanced down at her chart.
“It says here your name is Penelope Sassafras. That’s an unusual last name,” Cheryl said. She chastised herself. How could she be standing here making small talk in the wake of what just happened?
“Martha Sue didn’t like her last name so she changed it,” the girl said.
“I see. What was it before?” Cheryl knew she was stalling.
“Snodgrass.”
Cheryl screwed up her face. “Sassafras is a lot nicer.”
“She died, didn’t she?”
Well, there it was—the crux of the matter. Yes, Martha Sue Snodgrass, aka Sassafras, had died from a blunt force injury to the back of her head sustained when she slipped in the bathroom and hit her head on the edge of the tub. She’d been drunk and, according to her tox screen, had ingested two or more tablets of hydrocodone. All this may have facilitated the fall, however, no one but the fates knew for sure.
“Maybe she’s happy now. She hated her life ever since she got her period on her birthday,” Penelope said. The girl pulled a shabby pink down jacket out of her South Park backpack. “Sucks to get your period on your birthday.”
“Yes, it does,” Cheryl said, wondering where Penelope thought she was going as she put her coat on. Did she have relatives? A grandmother, perhaps? And what was this about calling her mother by her first name? That was usually an indicator of a parent who didn’t want to be a parent.
“Why was she unhappy?” Cheryl asked, still trying to grasp how getting your period on your birthday facilitated a tragic life.
“Cuz she was sick of being poor. Then she got pregnant. If she’d never had her period, she’d never have had me and maybe she would’ve made somethin’ of herself. I don’t think so, though. She was kind of lazy.”
“Penelope?”
“Call me Pen.”
“Pen, do you have someone we can call to come and get you?”
“I’ll call the CWA,” Pen said, opening up her pack again and pulling out a change purse that appeared to be made out of yellow, red and purple duct tape.
“Who is CWA?” Cheryl asked, wondering if it was a relative with a weird name.
“Not who, what. It’s the Child Welfare Agency. Don’t worry. It’s not like I haven’t been there before. Martha Sue got us in jams all the time.”
“Jams?”
“One time she left me in San Francisco for three days cuz she hooked up with some people going to the Rainbow Festival up in the redwoods. She swore she’d dropped me off with our neighbor Elaine, but that was another time. She got confused. I didn’t have any money. So I found a shelter. I told the priest I was a dwarf, but he didn’t believe me. He called a social worker. I had to spend a week in a foster home till Martha Sue got it all sorted out. She had to tell a whopper of a lie to spring me.”
“What did she’d tell them?”
“That I got lost at Gay Pride. She told the police that the way she understood things I went home with one of her friends and when she went to get me I was gone.”
“Was she gay?”
“No, but it was the same weekend.”
“When did this happen?” Cheryl said.
“It was a while back.”
“How far back?”
“It’s been at least five years,” Pen said, acting cagey. Cheryl wondered why.
“How old are you?”
“Ten.”
“You were five?” Cheryl said, incredulous. What kind of mother loses a five-year-old?
“I’m pretty good at taking care myself.”
Cheryl refrained from saying “and a good thing too or you wouldn’t have lasted long enough to see your tenth birthday.”
“So there’s no one else we can call? No grandma or aunt?”
“Nope. It’s just always been Martha Sue and me. We ain’t, I mean, we haven’t got any people.”
Cheryl rifled her tired brain cells for a solution that an adult and not a child should be searching for. The CWA was not open at ten minutes to midnight. She was due off shift at midnight. She couldn’t, in all good conscience, allow a child who had just lost her mother to spend the night alone in the ER waiting room. Some weirdo was likely to cart her off. The image of her friend and hospital patient liaison popped up like a cherry Toaster Strudel in her mind. Agnes, nicknamed Agnes of God due to her generous and kind nature, would know what to do.
“Pen, I want you to wait here and I’ll be right back.”
“All right, I got work to do anyway.”
“Okay.” Walking down the hall, Cheryl wondered what kind of work a ten-year-old had to do. Pen did seem pretty mature, but a kid with a marginal parent probably had to be—it was about survival. You grew up fast or you were lost.
She knocked on Agnes’s door. Luckily she was the second-shift patient liaison or, to use Lexus’s lexicon again, she’d be epically fucked.
“Entrez,” Agnes said. She’d been studying French for three years because she planned on going to Paris some day. Unfortunately, being a workaholic prevented her from ever taking a vacation. Previously she’d planned on going to Madrid, so she was also proficient in Spanish. Before that she’d planned on going to Berlin so she also spoke German. This made her an exceptionally good patient liaison.
Agnes, a kindly looking woman in her early fifties with a short bob and red spectacles, looked up from a desk that was full of paperwork. So full that it gave Cheryl heart palpitations. It must have registered on her face because Agnes said, “Don’t look at it.”
This, of course, was impossible—to look at Agnes was to look at the paperwork. Cheryl did her best. “I’ve got a dead mother, a ten-year-old and nowhere to go.”
“This sounds a bit like Colonel Mustard in the library with the knife.”
Cheryl didn’t laugh. “Where can she go?”
“A good question and no real good answer, but let’s be clear—are we talking about the dead mother or the child?” Agnes said.
“The child. The mother is in the morgue.”
“We could put her in a room for tonight and place her in emergency foster care until Monday, at which point a more permanent situation can be found.”
“What will happen to her?” Cheryl asked.
“Does she have relatives?”
“She says not and I don’t think she’s lying.”
Agnes looked pained. “A foster situation until adoption is the ideal. The reality is that the foster system in Seattle is overloaded with kids. Everyone wants a baby, not a kid who will inevitably have baggage and potential behavioral issues. She’ll most likely end up in a state home until she’s eighteen.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“She just lost her mother. I hate to see h
er alone in a room all night.”
Agnes cocked her head as if to say “What choice do we have?”
Cheryl thought for a moment. “Can I take her home? Or is that even allowed, and if so, is much paperwork involved?” She felt guilty for the last part. Paperwork shouldn’t be an issue, but it was the bane of her existence.
“Yes, yes, and kind of.”
Cheryl ran the sequence through again. “How much paperwork?”
“Not too much. I’ll help. I have contacts at CWA and they can grant you emergency temporary guardianship.”
“My luck with the adoption people hasn’t been great.”
“Foster care is a totally different ball game. They beg people to do that.”
“Really?”
“Really, people want babies. Foster care isn’t fun. Some of these kids are severely damaged and it’s not easy for them to live under the threat of change, added to the fact that no one wants you for their own. Foster care is temporary and the kids know it.”
They filled out the paperwork, which only took twenty minutes—a record for paperwork, in Cheryl’s mind. It took longer to rent a car than to get a kid. Cheryl went back to find Pen writing in a composition book. She didn’t inquire. She didn’t want Pen to think she was prying into her private business.
“Pen, I talked to the patient liaison, and she says I can take you home with me tonight since everything is all closed up. What do you think about that? Is that all right with you?”
“Do you have a TV?”
“Yes.”
“With Animal Planet?”
“We have cable. So we probably have Animal Planet.”
Pen appeared incredulous. “You don’t know?”
“I don’t watch a lot of TV.”
“Me either. Martha Sue hocked ours.”
“Right. I have to tell you something first, though. I have a girlfriend.”
“Like the ‘I love you’ kind of girlfriend?”
“Yes, that kind. Is that a problem?” Cheryl tried to read Pen’s face, but it was inscrutably placid.
“Not as long as you have milk and cereal.”
“We do.”
“Then I don’t care who you live with,” Pen said. She seemed to reconsider. “She’s not mean, is she?”
“No, her name is Lexus and she’s really nice and a lot of fun.”
“Okay, then, I’m in.”
Chapter Three
Fruit Ninjas
Cheryl awoke to an inordinate amount of noise coming from the living room. She heard Lexus’s voice and then another voice, the voice of a child, and she remembered. She’d brought Pen home from the hospital. Lexus had been asleep when she got home, so she’d put Pen in the guest room and gone to bed. Pen had dutifully washed her hands and face and brushed her teeth. She even had her own bag of toiletries. Everything about Pen amazed and depressed Cheryl. What kid hauls around a toiletry bag unless you didn’t know where you’d be staying on a permanent basis? Pen was like an intrepid traveler always prepared for the next of life’s ventures into the unknown.
“No, slash high to low like this,” she heard Lexus say urgently. Then, “Yes, yes, like that. You’ve got it. Get the cherries. Okay, now the watermelon.”
They were evidently playing on Lexus’s Xbox 360 with Kinect. Lexus was in many ways an oversized child with a credit card and at last she’d found a playmate. Cheryl categorically refused to do the weird dance required to get the game to simulate chopping fruit. It was absurd and she would not do it.
Cheryl rubbed her eyes, acknowledged the fact that she was not going back to sleep and got up. She brushed her teeth, washed her face and desperately hoped that Lexus had not drunk all the coffee or, if she had, that she’d made a fresh pot. She wasn’t counting on this because Lexus had a friend and it did not take a herculean effort to distract Lexus, as evidenced by the fact that she had not one career, but three.
Lexus had had herself tested for ADD in order to prove to Cheryl that a person could have a multitude of interests and not be suffering from some mental condition. The doctor told them that Lexus was extremely intelligent and easily bored and that she had approached what could be an impediment with an astonishing amount of pluck and ingenuity—by taking on three very different jobs. She was a vet tech at the animal shelter on Tuesday and Thursday. She was a librarian for the bookmobile which drove to retirement homes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday. And she life coached at the Community Center every other Saturday. This schedule was actually a good thing because Lexus had a lot of energy and Cheryl worked a lot. As Lexus said, “At least I work instead of playing slots or philandering like the Babylonian upstairs.”
This was true. Some of this would need to be curbed when they had a baby, of course. Cheryl would cut her shifts and Lexus’s schedule would be altered to fit with a child going to school. Cheryl wanted a family, but she wondered if Lexus was fully on board. If she were mature enough for parenting. Children were not undersized playmates—they needed to be nurtured and mentored. Cheryl wondered if Lexus understood that concept.
Lexus must have heard the water running in the bathroom because she yelled, in order to be heard over the slashing fruit noises, “There’s a fresh pot.”
Wow, Cheryl thought, it was going to be a good day. She shuffled to the kitchen. Indeed there was a fresh pot of coffee. She poured milk and put agave syrup in her favorite cup, which had been set right next to the coffeemaker. It was the University of Washington cup that Lexus had bought her one year for her birthday. “So you’ll be reminded every morning what a fabulous doctor you are, because not everyone has the fortitude to make their dreams come true. And you did.”
Cheryl wouldn’t know what kind of cup to get Lexus—one with a dog logo? A book? Or a lightning bolt or whatever the symbol was for life coaching? Lexus had gone to college and gotten a library science degree, then gone back to school and gotten a vet tech certificate and then taken an online course for the life coaching thing. Cheryl still didn’t understand what life coaching was all about, though Lexus had explained it as “helping people meet and exceed their goals.” It appeared like they talked a lot about goals, made lists and then scheduled another session, which made no sense to Cheryl. It seemed to her that if they used all the time they spent making lists they could have achieved their goals already. What kind of a person needs a life coach to say, “Get off your ass and get a job?”
Cheryl walked into the living room. Lexus slashed a watermelon, hugged her and karate kicked three cherries all in one smooth move.
Pen stared at Lexus. “She’s awesome,” Pen said.
“Yes, she is. You should see her when she’s had sugar.”
“I made us oatmeal,” Lexus said. “And Pen had a couple bowls of Honey Nut Cheerios.”
“How’s the coffee?” Pen asked, no longer watching Lexus slash but focusing her full attention on Cheryl. “I made it by myself.”
“Quite good. Thank you.”
Pen nodded. “I drank the last cup so I made you some more. Lexus said that was your favorite cup.”
“You drink coffee?”
“I usually take mine black, but that agave stuff is awesome,” Pen said.
“You sound like a barista.”
“Nope, I was born in New Jersey.”
Cheryl laughed and tried not to envision Pen drinking coffee in homeless shelters. After she’d put Pen to bed, she’d gone on the Internet to research foster kids and what their lives were like. Pen and her mother had been living in a cheap hotel when Martha Sue hit her head. From what Cheryl could get out of Pen on the drive home, they’d been evicted from their studio apartment for not paying rent. Pen hadn’t said how long they’d been without permanent digs. Cheryl sensed it had been a while.
Lexus flounced down on the couch. “I’m beat. You?” she said to Pen.
“Yeah, sorry I wasn’t better at it.”
“You had a perfectly respectable score. Besides you’ll get better. Especially with me as you
r coach. By next week you’ll be an expert.”
Both Pen and Cheryl winced. Lexus caught it.
“What?” Lexus said.
Pen saved Cheryl the embarrassment. “I can’t stay.”
Lexus sat straight up. “Why not? You said your mum died and you don’t have relatives—that makes you an orphan, right?”
“I guess,” Pen said.
“Then why can’t you stay? We have a lifetime of Fruit Ninja ahead of us.”
“Lexus, it’s not that easy. There are forms and procedures. Fostering Pen is not like saving a cat at the shelter.”
“We have requirements too, you know. You have to fill out forms, and you have to promise to spay or neuter.” Lexus glanced over at Pen, adding, “Don’t worry, we wouldn’t do that to you.”
“We’re gay for starters, and I don’t know how foster care feels about that.”
Pen sat staring at her hands and probably wishing she was anywhere but there, Cheryl thought. “Besides, we don’t know how Pen feels about us being foster parents.”
Lexus stood up. “Let’s find out.”
Cheryl stood up. “Lexus, don’t do this. We should discuss this later in an adult fashion,” which was code for not-in-front-of-Pen.
“Can I go take a shower now?” Pen said.
The kid had better social skills than Lexus, Cheryl thought. If Pen were the adult here she would know better than to discuss in front of her the future of a child who didn’t have a very nice one in store for her. She was a ward of the state at the moment and living with people who were ill-equipped to take care of a ten-year-old street kid. Lexus didn’t get it, but Pen did. Cheryl could see it on her face.
“That’s a great idea. You go shower while I talk some sense into my partner,” Lexus said, putting her hands on her hips and shooting Cheryl a viperous look.
“There’s clean towels in the cabinet by the bath,” Cheryl said.
“Do you want to take a bath instead? I have bath toys to keep one’s mind occupied while bathing,” Lexus said.
“You have bath toys?” Pen said.
Lexus appeared nonplussed that her adultness had been challenged. “Well, not like the rubber ducky kind. I’ve got Rub-a-Dub Hoops, Tub Tunes Water Drums and Gone Fishing.”
Love Over Moon Street Page 2
