A Favor

by Fiona Murphy

  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.

  Austin was my start over and that’s how I think of it. Starting over and building something new, me the way I want to be.”

  Sam’s stroking of my back is almost hypnotic and I just want to stay like this forever. The feel of Sam all around me, the dark and stars glittering what feels like just for us. Sam carries my hand that had been lying flat on his chest to his mouth and presses a kiss to the middle of my palm. My hand closes over his mouth and then runs over his face, wanting to soothe the tension in him. The skin below my hand is the scarring and again I remember how I felt when I really took it in, anger and oddly grateful. Anger that he had been hurt so badly, knowing he had gone through so much pain. Then pure unadulterated gratitude that he had come through the pain and suffering and was still here, and safe.

  “Why, Sam? Why would you throw it all away and go into something so dangerous when you could have
gone and been safe in a place where the worst thing that could happen was a paper cut?”

  His sigh is captured and carried off in the wind but it sounds heavy all the same. “The forces are where you go when you have nowhere else to go and that’s what it felt like. That and I felt like I had failed and had to make up for it, some kind of atonement.

  I worked hard in school and yeah I managed to make it into Harvard but my mom should never have sent me. There were no scholarships for a business owner’s kid so she worked her ass off to keep not just the business going but to pay tuition. I came back to Texas and worked the first two years during the summer and I came home for Christmas but the last two years there was an internship and she was just straight and told me she didn’t have the money for a ticket home.

  She wouldn’t tell anyone how bad it was and she was so proud of me. She flew in for graduation and she was so happy I thought it was worth it. Then we went back to Texas and I was back about two weeks, she kept putting off going over the books. Instead, she kept telling me she wanted me to look over the changes and how maybe I could make updates and improve it. We were walking back into the house and she went down and never came back up. Massive heart attack, the doctor said she was probably dead by the time she hit the floor.

  I couldn’t believe it, I was in shock. It was a good thing she had already bought and planned out her funeral arrangements because I couldn’t have done it, as in make decisions or pay for it. The day after she died the bank came and hit me with it all. She was in debt so bad the bank was in trouble. Had they been a bigger bank with more oversight they never would have leant anyone that much money. But they were a small bank and our families had known and done business since hell, since Sweeny was founded practically. They hated to do it but regulation was talking fines and penalties unless they evened out their books and they needed at least half of the debt back in days. I went home and looked at it all and I don’t know how she had lasted so long on so little. There was nothing, the contracts my father had written were still in place almost fifteen years later. She had managed to add stores to supply to but all she did was use the same damn contract and change the names.

  John was mom’s right hand and he’d been practically my father since my dad died. He taught me how to take an engine apart and put it back together. He taught me to ride and how to shave, I never understood why he stayed all those years when my mom kept pushing him away. He told me straight up to not even try. He’d seen the place take my father, my mother and he’d be damned if he’d see it take me too. I had to let it go, there was no room to try.

  In business people hear things and I’m sure with my mom they saw it before I ever did. The day of her funeral I was dealing with low ball offers left and right. I stood on the front porch and as far as the eye could see was land that had been in my family for generations and I was supposed to let it all go. I didn’t know what to do so for a few days I did nothing, I just couldn’t. Then I get a knock on the door. It’s an offer, not for the land but the chickens, the coops and basically all but a few pieces of equipment, the man had his own land and didn’t need mine. However, he was looking to add and he could take it all. The offer was for just a little more than bank needed so I did the only thing I could and said yes. I put the check in the bank and still didn’t know what the hell I was going to do with empty land, and still owing the bank money.

  Two weeks later I get a call and sales pitch. Could they maybe take a look for natural gas deposits, they could be valuable and the numbers they gave just blew my mind. I say yes, because it’s the only thing I can think to say but that night I get to thinking. I call John and he tells me yeah the men had called before and my mom sent them on their way. She never did trust something that sounded too good to be true. Unless it was actual oil she didn’t believe gas would be that valuable. That night I go to work and I’m pissed at her for turning it down. Until I find the results and the stuff put out by people not controlled by the natural gas companies. It was poison and it was leaking into water supplies. My mom had said no for the wrong reason but it was the right thing to do.

  They come out, they find what they want and they offer me rights that would have paid it all off and let me walk away a millionaire. But I told them no. What I did do was look into the wind farms, they had come up again and again as alternatives to natural gas. I made a few calls and within about three weeks I had finally hammered out a deal, where I got to keep the land and they leased. It was enough to pay off the banks and send some John’s way and the few other men who’d worked so hard for so little. I get quarterly profits and a yearly payment for the lease. It all worked out in the end, I guess. But I couldn’t stay there anymore. It didn’t matter I had saved the land from being sold I felt like I failed. All of that work, all of those years for nothing.

  I got a call from a classmate who heard about it all because he worked for one of the companies that had put in an offer. He told me he could get me a job and come into Houston for an interview. Driving into Houston, I was on autopilot I said the right things and I got the job but as I walked out of the building I just wandered the city. I walked and walked until my feet were killing me and I stopped at a coffee shop. Across the way was an Army recruitment center and as I drank my coffee I thought about what my life might turn into if I stayed and I stared at the center and just knew it wasn’t what I deserved. The nice house in the burbs, a couple of kids running around, I hadn’t earned that life that my mother paid for with an early death. I walked across and joined that day. I shipped out a week later.

  I was only in about a year when I was encouraged slash ordered to sign up for the Rangers where I belonged. And it was, it was where I finally felt alive. Where I became me, just like Austin was where you became you.”

  His phone went off, indicating he’d gotten a text, but he ignores it. Instead he sighs and his arms tighten around me for a moment before he sits up. “We have to get going, I don’t want to speed with you in the car but I’ll be cutting it close.”

  Slowly, we both slide out of the back and then put the cover back on and he slides my paintings underneath. Back in the truck he holds out his hand for mine and I give it to him. The drive back to Austin feels quicker than it had leaving it and he pulls into the driveway and comes around to help me down and gives me the paintings. I take them and he brushes a kiss across my cheek but he doesn’t say goodbye and neither do I. I’m on the porch and I turn and watch until he’s out of sight.

  Once I’m inside I put the paintings back and look around and notice the empty spots that were only there because of Sam. They were gone but in their place was something else, hope. Hope that they would sell and happiness that they were finally being seen by someone else besides me.

  I’m tired and as I prepare for bed it takes longer than normal and laying in bed, even though he’s not here the memory and scent of Sam is all around me. I want to sleep but I can’t because I finally understand why everything has felt so different. This is what love feels like, now my only question is now that I’ve found it, how do I keep it?

  Chapter Sixteen

  Three weeks later and I’m hanging up with Dale, all four of my paintings had sold. I’m stunned and so happy I want to call Sam but I eye the clock and decide against it. I know he would be trying to sleep, that didn’t mean he would be asleep, only that he was trying. I’m starting to get worried about him, he only seemed to sleep deeply once I had come home and we drifted to our room after dinner.

  Quincy Tucker had worked out and been staying at the house, he’s a nice guy but Sam didn’t like me without a bra in front of anyone but him. So I wore a bra after I changed out of my work clothes and we would usually all eat dinner together and then Sam would pull me into our room and remove the bra I wore. Many times it would lead to making love but not always and we just lay in bed, wrapped around each other, talking about our day or sharing memories. Then he would fall asleep and sleep deeply. I couldn’t always fall asleep but I loved to watch him
and sometimes I could escape just enough to reach my ereader and read the night away in his arms.

  “Did you get a call back on that prospect?” Taylor comes out of his office, he’s tense. We hadn’t found someone since Quincy Tucker.

  “It’s a no, drug abuse. Maybe we should reach out to Dean? The way things ended between you two, he won’t be rushing back to admit he made a mistake. Yet, I heard from gossip that he and the slut broke up for the fourth and what has to be the final time. If I approached him, it might be easier for him to save face. Tomorrow is Saturday, I don’t mind going tomorrow instead of waiting for Monday.”

  “Hmm, maybe.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know if Sam would be okay with that.”

  Instinctively, I hate the idea of being limited by anyone telling me what I could or couldn’t do. After I exhale and think about it, I know Taylor is right, Sam would not be happy about me going up to Dallas to see Dean. How the hell did Taylor know Sam so well, and that it would matter so much to me about making Sam angry?

  “Let me deal with Sam. If I can get Dean back, I want Sam on days. He’s not getting sleep and I don’t like how tired he looks all the time.”

  Taylor doesn’t like demands, hates them, but he just looks at me for a long minute and then he nods. “Bring back Dean and Dean will go to nights and Sam will go to days.”

  “Maybe on the drive up to Dallas you can pump Sam for another recruit.”

  This time I just look at him until he walks away. He was right, Sam would be with me when I went to Dallas. After the way we had met Sam wouldn’t allow me to try and talk someone into a job without him right behind me the whole way through.