by Ruth Lehrer
Molly looked like she was going to ask me to stop, but then she didn’t.
“Are you related to Ms. Farina and her daughter?” the cop asked me. He held the phone to his chest like we were sharing a secret or something.
I wanted to say, “Yes, she’s my aunt,” but I didn’t.
“No,” said Molly. “We are not blood relations. Just very close friends. She and my daughter are in school together.”
The cop went back to talking on the phone, and then he hung up.
“A caseworker is coming to pick her up. The kid can’t stay with you, since there’s no kinship bond. You could apply to be a foster parent and, after six months or so, maybe the Department would place the kid with you.”
He kept calling me the kid. Maybe because I didn’t answer him about the blood relations. I realized I hadn’t spoken since they asked what my mother looked like. Maybe he thought I had lost the ability to speak. I started to say I could talk and I didn’t want to leave Molly’s house, but the young cop had already walked away and now we were waiting for the caseworker.
“You might have to go for a night or two,” said Molly. “But only if I can’t convince them otherwise.”
In the beginning, she had said, “Don’t worry,” and “Everything will work out.” Now a caseworker was coming to take me away. If Molly didn’t think she could convince them, I was screwed.
I didn’t have any money with me. I had spent Molly’s quarters on soda. I didn’t have my backpack or even one Yodel. I went back to the bathroom.
When I came out, Officer Greg saw me.
“Hey,” he said, walking over to the bathroom door.
“Umm,” I said.
“I knew your grandpa,” he said.
“Lucky you.” I was immediately sorry I had opened my mouth. Duck-Duck would have known never to say something that could label her a behavior problem. Especially to someone with a gun.
Officer Greg laughed. “Yeah, that’s about right.” He looked me over like he was trying to see if I had washed my hair that morning. “You want to stay with Ms. Farina?”
“Yes!” I said, trying to look decisive and trustworthy.
“I’ll try to put in a good word for you. Sometimes they’ll do what the kid really wants, especially if you’re older.” Then he gave me a fake little salute and went off with his gun.
I went back into the bathroom to rest. I didn’t know why, but my heart was going bang-bang up and down in my chest, and my stomach had started to hurt.
At noon, Molly opened her purse and gave me a peanut-butter sandwich. I hadn’t even seen her put it in there that morning. Where I was going I probably would never get another peanut-butter sandwich ever again.
It took a long time for the caseworker to show up. When she finally arrived, she was just another Social Service lady like the ones who used to visit me and Keely after my grandfather died. She had a gray suit and a gray briefcase. She didn’t want to be here. I could tell by the way she kept stretching her neck side to side and cracking her knuckles. “I’m Mrs. Jones, the caseworker on call.”
She put a pile of papers on the table. Molly pulled out a bunch of papers from her purse. They both started talking at once.
I kept walking around the station, around each desk, around each chair. I found a dime on the floor. I pretended I had to tie my shoe and picked it up.
“Older kids are harder to place. Especially when there are special needs involved,” said the caseworker lady to Molly.
I kept walking, and I hummed a little so I couldn’t hear words, but out of the side of my eye I watched them. It was like one of Duck-Duck’s crime shows without the sound. Then I listened a little before my stomach made me stop.
Molly: What family are you going to place Fishkill with?
Mrs. Jones: Well, I’m working on that.
Molly: So, where are you taking her tonight?
Mrs. Jones: She’ll be in the Department’s custody.
Custody sounded like jail. There was no way I should get in a car with this woman. Who knew where she would take me?
Molly: Taking into account the trauma she has already experienced, I don’t believe it would be a good idea to disrupt her again. She’s been going to the same school as my daughter. Enrolling her somewhere else seems unproductive.
Mrs. Jones: Hmmmmph.
The lady looked pissy. At the word disrupt, she kind of twitched. “You aren’t an approved foster home, and I doubt there’s any exceptions in this case, but I’ll call my supervisor. Maybe she will give you an emergency twenty-four-hour stay, since it will be hard to find an appropriate placement that quickly. I’m promising nothing,” she said, like she was doing Molly a huge favor.
Foster home. You didn’t need to read many books to know this was bad. I decided I would act like the cheerful, plucky orphans who kept up a good front even though the food was horrible. I would have to smile a lot. This would make them think I was going cheerfully along with their plans, and then I would run.
The caseworker’s boss called back. Molly gave me some raisins she took out of her purse. She seemed to have everything in there.
“Okay, fine, fine.”
The lady talked to the boss for a while, and then Molly got on the phone and said something magical that made the lady smile and pull more papers out of her bag.
“Okay, sounds good,” she said to the phone, and hung up.
“Okay what?” I said.
“You can stay with Ms. Farina for now. We are considering your existing relationship with her and the fact that she has some basic training. Although”— she turned to Molly —“your certification has expired, and you’ll have to take the training again. We’re making a special exception for you. It is a temporary placement, though.”
“Huh?” I said, and looked at Molly.
Molly almost looked embarrassed. “I took the foster parent training a few years ago, but I never used it.”
I wondered what Duck-Duck would have thought of a little brother or sister.
There were lots of papers to sign. Molly had to give the police her fingerprints again for another background check. I wondered if people’s fingerprints changed, the way their faces did. Duck-Duck would know.
We were also required to have home visits, starting the next day. This struck me as kind of funny. If Social Services let me stay with Keely after they saw Birge Hill, surely they would be thrilled when they saw Molly’s backyard and picnic table. When they saw a clean refrigerator with a total of at least ten meals in it, they would be overjoyed that they didn’t have to come back again and again.
Molly was signed up for the training class to learn how to be a mother, even though she had been to it before. I almost laughed at that too. Keely was the one who needed a class, and they were sending Molly, who knew how to make chicken with little carrots and had telepathic eye-talk with a daughter who was probably smarter than all of these ladies put together.
The caseworker was already packing up her bag. She was trying to get away as quickly as possible now that she had an okay from her boss.
“We’ll continue to investigate to see if there are any other blood relatives in the picture,” she said.
I thought about Keely and Grandpa. Blood relatives were a bad thing. I knew they wouldn’t find anyone else, and that was a good thing. At least I was going to get to stay with Molly and Duck-Duck.
The cops wanted to grill me more about Keely, but we had to go pick up Duck-Duck from soccer.
“We’ll come back tomorrow,” said Molly.
Duck-Duck was furious when she found out we’d gone to the police station without her.
“You answered all those questions without legal counsel?” she said. “They could have taken Fishy hostage and thrown her into solitary confinement. What were you thinking?” she said to her mother.
“If we got into any trouble, we would have called you for bail,” said Molly.
“If you got into trouble?” said Duck-Duck. “If? W
ho knows what they’re doing right this minute, now that they have all that information and no guarantee of a fair trial.”
“Uh-huh,” said Molly, and she kissed Duck-Duck on the nose.
The two of them really confused me, but I was glad Duck-Duck had my back. I was worried too.
The next day, when we went back to the police station, Duck-Duck insisted that she come along. Officers Sam and Greg listened to more of my story and wrote notes, but none of their questions really made sense to me.
“Did she come home after she fell into the water?” Officer Sam said.
“No,” I said as patiently as I could. “She fell in, and then I never saw her again.”
“Did she have any friends or family you think she could be staying with?”
Molly was watching me like she watched Duck-Duck, with those squinty blue eyes, so I had to try to say no without sounding sarcastic.
“Did she take her credit cards? Her cell phone?”
I explained that Keely had neither. She didn’t have a bank account either, which was their next question.
Molly had forbidden Duck-Duck to talk, so Duck-Duck wrote a whole list of what the cops should be doing and questions they should be asking. She made a big show of silently handing it to her mother. Molly read the list.
“Can you search the system for any unidentified bodies that may have been picked up downstream from Birge Hill?” Molly asked.
Apparently this kind of search took time, not like on television, where they rattled the computer for two seconds and out popped half a dozen lost or drowned ladies in their twenties who fit Keely’s description.
“Did she have any e-mail accounts?” they asked.
With no credit card, no e-mail account, no bank account, and no cell phone, there wasn’t much to run down in the computer. Duck-Duck rolled her eyes.
When we got back in the car, Duck-Duck had a lot to say.
“Even if the body is decomposed,” said Duck-Duck, “you can use dental records to identify it. They need dental records. Don’t they ever watch TV?”
“Where do you get this stuff?” I asked. All I could think of was teeth, separated out from their head, clacking up and down the river, looking for Keely.
“She watches crime shows when I’m not home,” said Molly. “Even though there’s a three-hours-a-week television rule.”
“You have absolutely no proof of that,” said Duck-Duck, rolling her eyes again. “You could be sued for libel.”
I started thinking about being an orphan. In books, orphan kids spent most of their time looking for families. Those story kids never seemed to realize that there were things far worse than being an orphan.
Every few days, Molly checked in with Sam and Greg. I wondered how many drowned bodies there were out there and how many didn’t have names.
One day they found a body on the highway. At first they thought it was a woman, but then they realized it wasn’t.
“Bright, aren’t they?” said Duck-Duck. “Why don’t they just let us follow up all the leads? They can take care of parking tickets.”
Molly gave her a look that said she’d better stop being so snarky. I was getting better at reading the Molly/Duck-Duck code.
“They’re spending a lot of time on this,” said Molly. “I’m sure they’re trying their best.”
“Uh-huh,” said Duck-Duck, and she tossed her apple core into the right can for apple cores.
“Stop being a pill,” said Molly.
I kept quiet. I wasn’t sure whose side I was on.
A week after we went to the police station, I had a pop quiz in math.
“We’re having the quiz today because so many people did poorly on the last one,” said Miss Treadway. She was one of those young ones who graduated from college and came straight here specially to teach poor people. Maybe she thought she could change us, but after only two months of trying to change us, we changed her. She thought we should be grateful, and when we weren’t, she wanted revenge. For Miss Treadway, revenge was often a pop quiz.
“We had a few Bs but mostly Cs,” she said. “And one F.” And I swear she looked right at Worm.
Worm thought so too, because he spit on his desk and made loud fake-puking sounds. He was sitting way in the back near the window with the view of the bus lot.
Miss Treadway passed out the quiz and placed one directly on Worm’s desk spit. “Why don’t we try a little harder this time?” she said. “We don’t want to stay back again, do we?”
I was facing the board, but my spine went into full alert. All through the quiz, I could feel Worm’s fury crackling from the back of the room. Angry and sad are very close, though.
A few minutes later she looked up from her desk. “Norman, since you’re all done with the quiz, tell us the answer to number three.”
Everyone turned to look at him. His paper was blank, with a damp patch in the middle where the spit had been. Instead of spitting some more or laughing in her face, Worm turned so red, we knew he felt like dirt. Miss Treadway didn’t seem to care. This was payback for all the times Worm had spit on her tests or talked trash during class.
“Why don’t you write the answer up on the board, Norm, where we all can see it.”
I didn’t know why she was doing that, rubbing it in. Treating mean people like dirt didn’t make them nicer; it just made them meaner. Finally Worm dragged himself up to the blackboard. Somewhere between his desk and the board, he turned from a shit-mean bully into a humiliated fat kid who wanted to cry. And then, just before he did, the bell rang and he ran out of the room, leaving his books and his backpack behind.
I made sure he didn’t see me, but when I left class, I picked up his stuff and put it in front of his locker, tucking his math papers into his textbooks so they wouldn’t fall out.
Duck-Duck was in the hard, smart math class.
“Where’d you go to school before?” I asked. Duck-Duck pulled out two Nutella sandwiches for our lunch. She said it was like peanut butter, but to me it tasted like candy.
“Mom and I homeschooled up to sixth grade, when we lived in Albany with Ellen.”
I’d heard about homeschooling. It sounded like Hell, a big Hell with barbed wire where prisoners couldn’t see one another and they were locked up for eighteen years with no contact with the outside world.
“Did you hate it?” I said.
“No,” said Duck-Duck, “it was fun. But then Ellen left, sort of like a divorce, and we had to move, and I had to go to regular school because Mom had to work.” She started rummaging around in her blue lunch box and then pulled out a tiny box of raisins. Peeling up the top piece of sandwich bread, she laid out four rows of raisins across her field of Nutella. Then she closed it up and took a bite.
I couldn’t imagine Molly married. She seemed too tough and smart for that.
“Divorced from who?” I asked.
“Divorced from Ellen,” said Duck-Duck patiently. “She left, and Mom flipped out for a while. She cried a lot. Now she says the finances are tricky, but it’s going to be all right.”
That’s when it clicked: Molly and Ellen had been “sort of” married to each other. “Who’s your father?”
“Sperm bank,” said Duck-Duck. “Donor number two-nine-five-five-six.”
That was even weirder than having Unknown on your birth certificate.
“So, you don’t even know who he was?” I said.
“I know that he was six feet tall with blue eyes and brown hair. He went to an Ivy League college, and he was a lawyer.” She finished up her raisin-Nutella lunch.
Maybe knowing your father’s donor number was enough to keep you out of the dumb math class. Maybe having two mothers kept you smart.
“So, does Ellen visit?” I’d been hanging out at Duck-Duck’s for a while, and I hadn’t seen any divorced second mothers wandering around Cherry Road.
“No, not much. We talk on the phone sometimes,” said Duck-Duck. “She wasn’t really my mother, you know. She was
Mom’s girlfriend. She moved in when I was eight. She’s nice, but I don’t have any of her genes. My genes come from Mom and number two-nine-five-five-six. His sperm gave me good lawyer genes. That’s why I’m so logical.”
“Wow,” I said. “I wish I had good genes.”
Duck-Duck stopped wiping crumbs into her hand and looked at me. “What makes you think you don’t have good genes?”
I thought of Grandpa and his hitting stick. I thought of Keely and her beer. “All the genes I know about are bad genes,” I said. “The genes I don’t know about probably suck too.” I’d bet that if you lined up a bunch of guys, starting with the town perv and ending up with the mayor, Keely would choose the perv.
“Sometimes people get a little bad luck, and it just looks like it’s bad genes,” suggested Duck-Duck.
“You never met Grandpa,” I said.
“Just because he had sucky genes doesn’t mean you’re sucky too,” she said. “It’s like making cupcakes. All the ingredients could make different things, but only one specific combo makes a cupcake. The whole is more than its parts.”
If I were in the smart math class with one and a half mothers and a sperm bank, I would have been able to come up with that too.
“Let’s hope so,” I said. If I couldn’t be a cupcake, I wouldn’t mind being at least a Yodel.
Every night before we went to bed, Molly and Duck-Duck hugged and kissed and recited some silly kids’ poem about bedbugs and peanuts. I would stay in the bathroom until they were done and then just wave good night to Molly from the stairs. Then Duck-Duck and I would go to sleep in her circus bedroom.
That night, after the bug poem, I lay in the pink bed and thought about Molly being sort of married to and sort of divorced from a woman. Grandpa had said women like that were man-hating bull dykes. I understood the man-hating part; Grandpa was a man and anyone with even reasonably good genes hated him. I’d never really thought about the bull-dyke part, though. Kids called one another fags and pansies and lesbo-queers, but that was mostly just to be stupid-mean, like calling one another freaks and nerds. I had never really thought about whether it was a bad thing to be a dyke or not. I wasn’t even sure if I had ever met a real one before. Everyone said that Miss Thompson, the middle school volleyball coach, was a lesbian, but that was probably just jealousy. Miss Thompson could spike a ball twice as far as any student, even the boys.