Family Blessings

by LaVyrle Spencer

“You guess so?”

  “And ’cause I knew if I did, they’d call you.”

  Christopher left his chair and hunkered down facing Judd, sitting on one heel. “Hey, listen to me, okay? ’Cause this time it’s really important. I can’t put you in foster care without your parents’ okay, and I don’t think they’ll give it. But we’ve got one other possibility. I’ve got the power to get you out of there and put you on a police hold for twenty-four hours. As soon as I do that a social worker will start proceedings with the county attorney, and there’ll be a detention hearing before a judge. If we go that far, you’ll have to tell the judge what you just told me, about your parents trying to get you to use coke. Will you do that?”

  When it got that far, children often refused to testify against their parents, fearful at the last minute of losing their parents and home after all.

  “Will you do that, Judd?”

  Judd stared down at his dirty hands through plump tears that trembled on his lower eyelids.

  “Can I live with you then?”

  Don’t break my heart like this, boy. “No, you can’t, Judd. But there’s a good chance I can be appointed your guardian during the proceedings.”

  “My guardian?” Judd looked up.

  “It would be my sole purpose to look out for your welfare and make sure the correct decisions were made for you. But you have to understand—if I start this, if I put you on a twenty-four-hour police hold and talk to child protection, once they get in touch with the county attorney we’re talking about taking you away from your parents permanently.”

  Judd thought that over for some time before coming up with one paltry defense of the mother who didn’t deserve him. “My ma— sometimes she cooks supper.”

  Chris felt his throat thicken. When he spoke his voice sounded as if he were trying to swallow and talk simultaneously. “Yeah, I know. Sometimes they’re okay. But most of the time they’re not. They’re sick, Judd, but they refuse to get help. Maybe if you don’t live with them anymore they’ll get it. We’d find you a good foster home where you’d get baths and meals and lunch money every day. But the choice is up to you—you’ve got to say.”

  “Could we still play basketball sometimes, you and me? And go to the workout room together?”

  “Yes, Judd, we could. I’d make sure we did.”

  Judd found it impossible to make the final decision, so Christopher made it for him. He rose to his feet and put a hand on the boy’s head. “Tell you what—we’re going to get you out of school for today. You wait here, okay?”

  In the principal’s office he found Randy Woodward, Mrs. Hubert, and the teacher whose money had been stolen, Ms. Prothero. He closed the door and said without preamble, “I want to put him on police hold and get a court hearing.”

  “You think it’ll do any good?” asked Woodward.

  “I’m going after a CHIPS petition.”

  “A CHIPS petition?” said Woodward. “You’re sure?” A CHIPS petition—Children in Need of Placement or Supervision—meant trying to remove a child permanently from his home. No responsible police officer or social worker began such a procedure without questioning himself to make sure it was the right thing to do.

  “He stole the money because his parents fenced his subsidized lunch tickets and used the money to buy cocaine, then tried to get Judd to sniff some of it.”

  Ms. Prothero—a clean-cut all-American-girl type perhaps two years out of college—visibly blanched and put a hand to her mouth. Mrs. Hubert sat behind her desk looking sober but thoughtful. Randy Woodward said calmly, “I’d like to tie those sonsabitches on about a thirty-foot cable behind my snowmobile and go for a fourhour ride through the woods.”

  Christopher replied, “Trouble is, when they came to, they’d only ask for a snort. The boy needs a bath and some food. I don’t think he’s eaten in a while. He also needs clean clothes, which I don’t think you’ll find at his home. Will you contact Social Services?” he asked Woodward.

  “Right away, if it’s all right with Mrs. Hubert.”

  She nodded and said, “I think that’s best.”

  “Ms. Prothero?”

  The young woman came out of her daze, looking ill. “Yes, of course. Dear God, I had no idea it was that bad at his house.”

  Christopher said to Woodward, “I’ll take him to the foster home myself after you make the call. He knows me. He’s going to be scared.”

  “Sure. Glad to have you do it. These are the ones that break your heart.”

  Break your heart—sweet Jesus, this one damn near shredded Christopher’s. He transported the scared little kid to a small, neat house on the southwest side of Anoka and walked him between the snowbanks up the driveway. Judd stared straight ahead, wearing a stoic expression and a denim jacket scarcely warm enough for midwinter. All the while Chris remembered how hard Judd had hugged him in the counselor’s office at school.

  A buxom fiftyish woman in a moss-green sweater and slacks opened the door and let them inside.

  “This is Mrs. Billings,” Christopher told Judd.

  She said, “Hello, Judd,” with such false brightness it made Christopher feel guilty as hell for leaving the boy with her, though the house appeared clean and had holy pictures on the living room walls.

  He said to the woman, “He needs food and a bath. He’s on a twenty-four-hour hold pending a detention hearing.”

  Before leaving, he put a hand on Judd’s shoulder. The boy was too tall to be knelt before, yet too short to be hugged chest to chest, so Christopher settled for a squeeze of the shoulder before he could no longer help himself and gathered Judd against him in a mismatched farewell hug. This time, before a stranger, Judd gave no hug in return.

  “Hey, listen, you’re going to be okay now.”

  “When will I see you again?”

  “There’ll be a hearing within twenty-four hours. The law won’t allow me to be present at it, but I’ll come to get you for it myself, in the squad car.”

  “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  “Will I go to school tomorrow?”

  “No, probably not tomorrow. The hearing will probably be then.”

  “What’s the hearing for?”

  “Well, the legal language says it’s a hearing for probable cause. That means the judge will decide if there’s enough reason to keep you out of your home permanently. The county attorney will be coming to talk to you about it beforehand. Just tell the truth. Tell him what you told me at school.”

  Judd studied his friend the policeman with a downcast expression.

  “Well, now, listen, I’ve got to go. I’m on duty, you know.”

  Judd nodded.

  He ruffled the boy’s hair, thanked Mrs. Billings and left. As he was opening his car door he glanced back at the house to find Judd standing motionlessly in the front window, watching him. Inside the squad, he had to blow his nose and clear his throat before he could pick up the radio and report to the dispatcher.

  He realized something as he headed back toward Social Services to find out about when the hearing was scheduled: the kid hadn’t lapsed into rap talk once today. Fear had robbed him of all vestiges of bravado.

  HEcalled Lee that night and said, “I’ve got to see you.” “Something’s wrong,” she said.

  “Yeah, it’s . . .” What was it? His job, his damned thankless job during the training for which he’d learned never to become emotionally involved with the people he served. “It’s Judd.”

  She gave him permission straightaway, without asking a single further question. “Come anytime. I’ll be here all night.”

  He got there at 8:30 feeling heavy-limbed, heavy-hearted, and needing . . . needing something . . . something he couldn’t quite put into words. Succor, maybe.

  She let him into the shadowed front hall, took one look at his drawn face and said, “Darling, what is it?”

  Without even removing his jacket, he took her in his arms and put his face against her hair. She fold
ed her arms up his back and they stood in the dim entry behind a stub wall that left the back of her quite visible through the living room archway. The entry lights had been left off, as had those in the kitchen. One dim lamp cast light onto their ankles from the living room where, for once, no television chattered, no Joey sprawled.

  “Just one of those days I could have done without.”

  “What happened to Judd?”

  “I started legal proceedings to try to have him taken away from his parents permanently.”

  “What started it?”

  He told her about the lunch tickets, the cocaine, the scene in the principal’s office and taking Judd to the foster home. “The thing is, after all that kid’s been through, I’m still not sure I’m doing the right thing.”

  “But, cocaine . . .”

  “I know. I know.” He held her loosely, needing the feel of her warmth and closeness, the faint pressure of her arms bolstering his back. “But I’ve been there, Lee, and I know how it feels. It’s home, but it isn’t like other kids’ homes. Still it’s the only one you’ve got, and if you lose your mom and dad, how do you know there’ll be anybody there at all for you? I saw it in Judd’s eyes today. I felt it when he latched onto me so damned hard I thought he’d break my neck. Then he said, ‘I want to live with you, Chris,’ and I had to say no. Jesus, Lee, you should have seen him. There he sat on that hard office chair, looking like some little refugee, dirty, bedraggled, smelling bad. He didn’t even have on a decent winter jacket, and I knew damned well nobody’d fed him breakfast . . . and I’ve got an empty bedroom, and I make enough money that I could easily take good care of him, but what am I going to do with a boy of twelve when I work nights half the time and there’s nobody to watch him?”

  She had no answers. She only held him and let him go on whispering gruffly, working out his feelings.

  “They warn you not to let this happen, never to get too close to kids like him, but what kind of a heartless human being would I be if I didn’t?”

  “Judd is warm and fed and being taken care of tonight. You did that much for him.”

  He sighed and rested his chin on her head, closing his eyes. He tried to draw strength from her, enough to blot out the difficult memories from that day, but they persisted. In time, he said, “The kids are the hardest part of this job. Not the felons, not the crooks, not even the accident victims. It’s the kids that get to you.”

  “I know,” she said, rubbing his back. “Greg always said the same thing.”

  “A couple years ago, the first year Greg joined the force, I got a call from the North Side saying someone had spotted a little girl walking down the street barefooted. It was a beautiful summer day, about two o’clock in the afternoon when I found her. I’d guess she was about three years old or so, and I swear to God, nobody had done one single thing for her that day. You could tell by her clothes that she’d dressed herself, poor little thing. She was wearing some dirty little dress and no panties underneath it at all, and then those bare feet, and her hair all scruffy and snarled. She was just toddling down the street dragging a hairless doll by one arm, blocks away from home. She’d just wandered out and nobody had even missed her. When I pulled the squad up beside her and got out, she was sucking on her fingers and crying, and even before I got to her, she reached up both arms, and once she’d put them around my neck, nobody could pry them loose. I had to call for a backup because she cried when I tried to let her go to drive my squad. I took her to the emergency foster home myself, and when I tried to give her to the woman there she sobbed and refused to let go of my neck.” He was quiet awhile, then added, “I’ll never forget that day as long as I live.”

  When he grew quiet, she said, “You mustn’t feel guilty for not taking Judd.”

  “But I do. I started this big-brother relationship with him and I feel like I’m letting him down.”

  “You’re too softhearted.”

  “How can a person be too softhearted?”

  “Dear Christopher, this is one of the reasons why I love you.”

  “Oh, Lee . . .” He drew back and took her face in both hands, holding it like a chalice from which he would drink. He kissed her in gratitude, in beatitude, then continued holding her face.

  “Tonight I wasn’t sure if I needed a lover, a mother or a wife. So I came to you for all three.”

  “A wife?” she repeated.

  “Cops have to lay a lot on their wives and I haven’t got one.” He grazed her cheeks with his thumbs. “Thanks for being here.”

  “If I was any help at all, I’m glad, but I have my own reasons for opening my door to you, and they’re not totally altruistic.” She went up on tiptoe and reached up one arm to draw his head down. “I thought about you all day long.”

  They were kissing when Joey came out of his bedroom and walked down the hall, stockingfooted. He entered the living room from the opposite end and came up short at the sight of his mother standing beyond the far archway of the room in the shadows of the entry hall, wrapped tightly in an embrace with somebody, kissing him.

  He got a funny feeling in the pit of his stomach. A lift. A stir. An odd buoyant sensation that made his inner thighs feel liquidy and weak. It was Christopher, Joey was pretty sure, though all he could see was his jacket sleeves and his hands on his mother’s back and head. He knew that jacket, though. Chris’s left arm slipped down and caught his mother around the hips, pulling her deeper against himself. She whispered something Joey couldn’t make out, and the murmur from a masculine voice confirmed that it was Christopher whose open hands came down and grasped his mother by both buttocks while she went up against him the way he’d seen in the movies.

  He felt a blush cover his body and backed off into the hallway, standing motionless and undetected. He listened to their quiet murmurs and the long silences in between, then the more novel sound of slurpy kisses and humming sounds like he himself made when eating something he liked. He peeked around the corner again and saw Christopher’s hand leave his mother’s back and slide up under her sweater. The edge of the archway cut off his view, but he knew perfectly well Christopher was feeling up her breasts. Jeez! His mother? She still did stuff like that at her age? Wow, then they probably went all the way, too. Joey got all jacked-up, feeling all strange and tight and hard everyplace, and his breathing got windy. He took one last peek, then slipped silently into his mother’s bedroom where the house’s second telephone sat on her nightstand. He closed the door noiselessly, picked up the receiver and dialed by feel in the dark, then flopped on his back in the middle of her bed and said, “Hey, Denny, this is Joey. I gotta talk to you about the weirdest thing that just happened . . .”

  16

  THE judge ruled in favor of leaving Judd in foster care until a formal court hearing, which was scheduled for late February, though he denied Christopher the appointment as Judd’s guardian, stating that the boy already had a county attorney and a social worker looking out for his welfare. Christopher returned Judd to Mrs. Billings’s house and left him there with the promise that the two of them would work out together in the police weight room every Tuesday that Chris’s schedule permitted. Joey Reston decided he wouldn’t tell anyone but Denny Whitman what he’d seen in the front hall at home. If he told Janice, she’d break up Christopher and their mother, and that would be the end of the rather sexually stimulating scenarios such as the one that had so fascinated him he’d decided to try a little of that stuff with Sandy Parker. Of course, he’d have to talk it all over with Denny first and make sure that when he finally put the move on his girlfriend, he did it right and didn’t scare her off.

  Janice had returned to college, and Lee made plans for an unabashed sexual reprise with Christopher on the first night it was possible.

  She called him and said, “Joey has signed up for a class to get his driver’s permit. He’ll be gone for two hours tomorrow night, starting at seven o’clock. What are you doing?”

  “I’m off. Can you come over?”r />
  “Yes.” She released a pent breath. “Just try to stop me.”

  “And I’ve got Friday off, too. What are you doing Friday night?”

  “Nothing. And Joey’s going to a basketball game.”

  “Two nights in a row. Shazam.”

  “Oh, Christopher, I haven’t felt like this in years.”

  “Like what?”

  “You know.”

  “Maybe I do, but tell me anyway.”

  “Sexy. Turned on. Thinking about it all the time. I suspect I should feel guilty, but I don’t.”

  “Why should you feel guilty?”

  “I’m lying to the kids.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re just reserving some of your private time for me and not telling them about it.”

  “A slanted view if I ever heard one.”

  “I’ve told you, anytime you want to tell them, straight to their faces, ‘I’m dating Christopher,’ just let me know. I’ll come and tell them with you.”

  “Not yet,” she said, a hoarder savoring her booty, “not just yet. I want you to myself for a while.”

  A silence fell while they pictured each other, and felt lucky and happy and yearny, as all new lovers feel when they must be apart.

  “I wish I was with you now,” he said.

  “So do I.”

  “Are you in bed?” he asked.

  “Yes.” She called him every night at eleven, after lights out. “Are you?”

  “Yes, in the dark. What are you wearing?”

  “A really ugly old faded flannel nightgown. It must be ten years old.”

  “Are you lying on your back?”

  “No, on my side, curled up with the phone on the pillow.”

  “Is the nightgown caught between your legs?”

  His question did unbelievable things to her libido. “Is this one of those kinky telephone conversations I’ve heard about?”

  “Yes, I suppose it is, but I’ve never had one like it before either, so don’t go thinking I make a habit of this. Only with you. Is the nightgown caught between your legs?”