by Eric Smith
“What do you mean?” I asked Luke.
“We’d, well, I’d like to adopt you. Officially. If you want it,” Luke said. “You wouldn’t have to change your name or anything. You’d just always have us as your people.”
I was floored.
And I’m ashamed to admit it, but I thought he only asked to stop me from getting engaged. I pushed my chair in and hauled ass out of the sun porch and across the field. Luke’s parents lived on thirty acres. In the place where their field became someone else’s property grew a massive tree stump and a fledgling willow. I took a seat on the stump and watched the winter wheat ripple like a green ocean. I am not sure how long I sat there. Only that I replayed that conversation more times than I could count. “We’d, well, I’d like to adopt you.”
People don’t adopt adults.
He thought I was a child, or worse, childish. And I’d been an effing grown-up for longer than most effing grown-ups.
Luke’s hand touched my shoulder.
I was not surprised he’d followed me. The balcony off the back of the house faced these trees. “Lucy’s African sunset,” he told me the first time we’d stood on the balcony. The sun was yellow to orange to red, and I imagined how once this tree had been fifty feet tall, alone in thirty acres, and why this place felt more like a safari than a field. Lightning struck the tree the month after Lucy died, and Luke had planted the willow. “For someone else’s Lucy,” he’d told me.
Since we met, we’ve been drawn to the same places.
“You should open that.” He pressed an envelope into my hand. “Because I know what you’re thinking—”
“What am I thinking?” I asked as I tore the top from the envelope.
“That I’m trying to fix you.”
“Are you?” I asked. I could take many things, but I could not take his pity.
“Fixing a situation isn’t the same thing as fixing a person,” he told me.
“Rachel and I don’t need to be fixed,” I argued. “Same as you and Lucy didn’t need to be fixed.”
“Open the envelope,” he said.
Inside was a series of emails between him and Judge Gillby discussing the logistics of adopting someone over the age of eighteen. Was it possible? Yes. Was it difficult? Not under these circumstances. What did Luke need to do? Hire a lawyer, get my approval, set it up.
“Look at the date,” he whispered.
Now, you guys, here’s the part I can’t put into words. The date was from three months before. Luke had that conversation with Judge Gillby before I ever considered asking Rachel to marry me. This invitation had nothing to do with her.
It had to do with me.
“I don’t know what to say,” I said.
“Say you’ll think about it,” he told me.
I told him I would. But really, by the time we crossed the field and I had a pile of pork on my plate, I knew what I wanted. I wanted to belong not just with someone like Rachel, but to someone like Luke Estes and his parents. With their African sunsets and their uncommonly good pork shoulder. With their conversations and their acceptance. With their love.
One day, when I had my courage up, I asked him, “Why?”
And you know what he said? He said, “Some kids aren’t born to you. Some kids just arrive.”
That’s when I realized it wasn’t anything I’d done or hadn’t done that made Luke love me. And it might sound silly, but I’m glad for his answer. I’d rather him love me for who I am, because I’ll always be me.
And that’s why Denton asked me to come speak to you all. Your house parent understands what you need to hear. Some of you think since you’re fifteen or sixteen or seventeen you should give up on family. Or maybe you’re looking around at each other thinking . . . this group home . . . this is all I’ve got. Or maybe you’re like me and you’re thinking you’re full of piss and inertia and that’ll get you by until you can make your own way in the world.
But I know you. You’re writing words on shower stalls. You’re weary with not belonging to someone. You’re thinking that the girl or guy you love will fix the hole inside your chest. You want a piece of a paper to be a peace, p-e-a-c-e, of paper that says you’re worthy. Here’s the thing: you are worthy already. Every single one of you. Regardless of who does or doesn’t love you.
This is the story of Kevin Taylor Estes, twenty-five, and I’m telling you that family doesn’t happen on a specific timeline. You don’t have to be a cute little kid for someone to want you. For someone to love you.
Sometimes you get the girl.
And sometimes you get the dad.
I was lucky enough that I got both.
And I think you can too.
Courtney “Court” Stevens grew up among rivers, cornfields, churches, and gossip in the small-town South. She is a former adjunct professor, youth minister, and Olympic torchbearer. She has a pet whale named Herman, a band saw named Rex, and several novels with her name on the spine: Faking Normal, The Lies about Truth, the e-novella The Blue-Haired Boy, and Dress Codes for Small Towns. As an educator and author, she visits schools, designs retreats, and teaches workshops on marketing, revision, character development, and “Channeling Your Brave.” She also likes chips and queso and feels deeply sorry for the lactose intolerant.
“I come from a small, tight-knit family who do holidays and vacations together. I have a brother and three first cousins. One of those cousins was adopted by my aunt after he graduated from high school. He is ours, and this one was for him.”
Happy Beginning
by Nic Stone
The End
July 24, 2003
I can’t stop crying.
I’m quiet about it because I don’t want to wake up my dad, but I dreamed about you last night, and I woke up crying and now I can’t stop.
Five days ago, you texted that you’d found her, but when I asked how she was and if you were okay, you didn’t respond.
I haven’t heard from you since.
Mrs. J said you needed to sort this out on your own, that she and Mr. J were allowing you the space you requested to do so, and that I should do the same.
And I’m trying. But it’s killing me that you don’t seem to be thinking of me at all.
I grab too many over soft Kleenex and shove my face into them. Partially because you would’ve hated to see me be so wasteful. I blow my nose and squeeze my eyes shut, but your face is there inside my eyelids, looking at your phone, reading my message, shoving it back into your pocket, smiling at the woman you left me—left us—for . . . the woman who left you to fend for yourself—
My phone buzzes.
When I see the number on the screen, I wipe my eyes and nose and run my fingers through my hair. “Hello?” Only when I hear your voice do I realize you can’t see me.
“Hey,” you say.
And I can hear it, that edge in your voice that makes it sound like you swallowed a handful of sand: you’ve been crying too.
The control I’ve fought to maintain explodes in my head, and a million and one emotions tumble out like the contents of a battered piñata—we had one at our graduation party, remember?
I want to thank you for calling, scream at you for leaving, beg you to come back, tell you she’ll only hurt you again, remind you that I know what this is like—
“Are you okay?” I say instead.
“She’s married,” you say. “I have a brother, eight, and two sisters, four and eighteen months. She’s totally smitten with them.” You sniffle.
It’s there, tiptoeing around the back of my throat: the reminder of how I went looking for the mom who abandoned me and found her living a life full of dreams I obviously was never a part of. The I tried to tell you.
I force out an “I’m sorry” and choke everything else down.
“Yeah,” you say. And you si
gh.
That’s when I know.
“So?” I ask, because I know you need me to. I know what you’re about to say is probably the hardest thing you’ve ever had to say in your life. “What now?”
“I’m, um . . .”
I sit up. Close my eyes, clench my fists, hold my breath.
“I’m . . .” you say, “I’m coming back.”
I exhale.
“I’m coming home, Jenna.”
Gone
July 20, 2003
Three days you’ve been gone.
Mrs. J doesn’t say a word when she opens the front door to let me in. She’s still in her pajamas, and her usually bright blue eyes are shaded with gray and rimmed with red—like a stormy sky at sunset. It’s like looking into a mirror.
The moment we make eye contact, we both start crying.
She spreads her arms, and I step into them. We stand there in the open doorway, sobbing together.
After who knows how long, she pulls back and says, “Will you come in and have tea and cookies? I just pulled some out of the oven.”
I nod and step inside. The house smells of cinnamon and wood as usual. You used to say walking in always made you feel like it was autumn. Mrs. J points me to the living room, then comes in a few seconds later and sets a tray on the coffee table. Two mugs on saucers, two metal mesh balls filled with loose-leaf tea, a kettle of hot water, a plate piled high with white chocolate macadamia nut cookies.
Watching her pour makes me mad. To think you just walked away from this amazing home and these wonderful people? That you refused to call Mrs. J “Mom” because her skin was a different color than yours?
“I can’t believe she just left,” I say. “You guys were so good to her, and she just walked away and hasn’t looked back.”
Mrs. J sits down next to me and rubs little circles in the space between my shoulder blades. “Do you have any idea what I would give for a mom like you?” I say.
She sighs and looks away.
“My mom walked out on us when I was a baby,” I continue. “Just dropped me off at daycare one morning and never came back.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Jenna.”
I shake my head. “Ny had all of this. She had you,” I say. She had me, I want to add, but don’t. “I just don’t get how she could take it all for granted so easily.”
Mrs. J shakes her head. “It’s not that simple, Sweetheart. She’s been through so much, and this place—Mr. J and I—it’s all so different from anything she’s ever known.”
“But it’s also the best place she’s ever known. You and Mr. J are the kindest people she’s ever lived with. She told me.”
Mrs. J looks at the picture above the mantel. It’s you, leaned up against a tree with your arms crossed. I have a matching one of me—they were our senior portraits. I think about the day we took them and smile a little. “For the first time in her life, she never wanted for anything. Why would someone walk away from the best thing that ever happened to them?”
You said that to me once. Do you remember? “You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Jenna.”
Hearing you say that was the best thing to ever happen to me.
“Seems strange, doesn’t it?” I say. “That a person who knows the pain of abandonment would be so quick to put someone else through it?”
I look down at my hands. I polished my nails orange the morning Mrs. J called to let me know you’d left. It’s your favorite color.
Mrs. J passes me a box of tissues, and I take one to blow my nose. “She hated those,” she says.
“Huh?”
“Those tissues. The first time she touched one, she asked why it was so soft.”
I look at the box. Kleenex with lotion and aloe. “Really?”
“Mmhmm.” She sighs. “Ny was pretty upset. She said, ‘There are kids with no parents starving in overcrowded shelters, and people are putting lotion in their tissues?’”
I look at the floor.
“We get it so wrong,” Mrs. J goes on. “Giving everything to someone who’s used to nothing isn’t a blessing. It’s a burden. We knew that. We knew, and yet . . .” Her eyes lock on your picture again.
“This is much bigger than us. You understand that, don’t you?”
I shake my head no. Might as well be honest.
“You, me, Mr. J . . . we did our best to make her feel at home, but that only goes so far when you live with people who are so different from you,” she says. “Seventeen months with us can’t erase the seventeen years before. There are just some holes none of us could ever fill.”
Going
May 17, 2003
We’re sitting in opposite ends of the big garden tub in your bathroom. This was strange for me at first—who fills a bathtub with pillows?—but then you told me about that foster home you were in for six months when you were twelve. It had eight other kids, and your one place of solace was the empty bathtub you’d crawl into with a book while everyone else was asleep.
“I’m confused,” I say. “Didn’t your parents sa—”
“They’re not my parents.” You turn a page in the magazine you’re reading.
“Well, they would be if you’d let—”
“No, they wouldn’t.”
I roll my eyes. “You’ve been here for over a year, Ny. You have everything you need, they’re super good to you, they bought you a freaking car, but you still refuse to refer to them as your parents?”
“They’re white,” you say.
And there it is. Again.
I hold my arm up. “So am I.”
“That’s different. Black girls can have white best friends. They can’t have white parents.”
“You keep saying that, but you’ve yet to say why—”
“Parents are supposed to teach you how to navigate the world. Mr. and Mrs. J can’t really do that for me. I’ve got baggage they could never understand.”
“Because they’re white?”
“Yep.” Another page flips.
“What about people who have one white parent and one black?”
“Couldn’t tell you. I’m not biracial.”
“I seriously don’t see how it makes a difference—”
“And you wouldn’t,” you say. “You can’t. It does, though. Take my word for it.”
That’s the phrase that usually means drop it . . . but then you shift your legs and your warm skin brushes up against mine. It makes me so delirious that all the stuff I’m not supposed to say comes spilling out like an unclogged pipe. “Is being here really that bad?” I sit up and push your magazine down. “You said yourself you’ve never lived in a house this nice. That Mr. and Mrs. J are the best fosters you’ve ever had. I was sitting there when they offered to—”
“I found my birth mom.”
I stop talking. Stop breathing, even. Look at your eyes, your nose, your lips, your eyes . . . You’re looking at my lips. “Say something,” you whisper.
I already told you what happened when I found my mom. “What do you want me to say, Ny?”
You sigh and look at our intertwined legs. “Can I tell you something?”
“Of course.”
Our eyes meet again. “Most of the time, I feel so connected to you, I don’t mind my heart missing beats because I feel like yours catches them for me.”
I gulp.
“It makes me forget,” you say.
“Forget what?”
“That you have no idea what it’s like.” And you look away. “I know your mom left you just like mine left me, but when you look at your dad, you see the same blue eyes, sloped nose, pale skin.”
I trace circles on your knee. “So I need a tan,” I say.
“I’m serious. I was two when my mom gave me up. I know nothing about who or where
I come from. You say stuff like, Oh my god, I sound like my dad, without realizing how miraculous that seems to me.”
Now you’re crying.
“Ny, I didn—”
“This is a really big deal for me. Finding her.”
I gulp. “I didn’t mean to minimize it. I’m sorry.”
When you look away, I know you’re about to say something I don’t want to hear.
“I’m leaving,” you say.
“What?”
“A week after I turn eighteen.”
So many questions—Where? How? Why? Why? WHY? Exclamations—NO! PLEASE! DON’T!
It all rushes up from my gut and jams in my throat, so when I open my mouth to speak, nothing comes out.
“She lives in Biloxi,” you say, turning back to me. “We’ve talked on the phone a few times. She said she’s glad I reached out.”
This is going to be a disaster. I know it. No matter what she says over the phone, she won’t be what you expect. If she really wanted you in her life, she would’ve come looking for you . . .
But of course I don’t say that.
“Wow,” is what I say. “That’s great, Ny. I’m happy for you.” Except I’m not.
You smile.
I try to smile back, but then I get a lump in my throat and have to turn away.
“Hey.” You shift so you’re kneeling between my legs, and you bring your face right up to mine. “You know you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me, right? I’m only going because I have to—”
I kiss you.
The Beginning
August 3, 2002
I’m behind you in line for pictures. Four times now, I’ve opened my mouth to say something: how nice a day it is outside (but what if you don’t like small talk?), how ridiculous the fake tree trunk and painted backdrop are, considering how beautiful a day it is and how many trees are outside (but what if you don’t think it’s stupid at all?), how pretty I think you look (wouldn’t want you to take it the wrong way, though that is how I mean it).
I shut my mouth again and go back to staring at your hair. Wondering how long it took to put in all those little braids, and inhaling the scent of your flowery perfume.
