“Why should I, Lou Ann? Why should I think Turtle’s better off with me than in a state home? At least there they know how to take care of kids. They won’t let anything happen to her.”
“Well, that’s sure a chickenshit thing to say.”
“Maybe it is.”
She stared at me. “I cannot believe you’re just ready to roll over and play dead about this, Taylor. I thought I knew you. I thought we were best friends, but now I don’t hardly know who in the heck you are.”
I told her that I didn’t know either, but that didn’t satisfy Lou Ann in the slightest.
“Do you know,” she told me, “in high school there was this girl, Bonita Jankenhorn, that I thought was the smartest and the gutsiest person that ever walked. In English when we had to work these special crossword puzzles about Silas Marner and I don’t know what all, the rest of us would start to try out different words and then erase everything over and over again, but Bonita worked hers with an ink pen. She was that sure of herself, she’d just screw off the cap and start going. The first time it happened, the teacher started to tell her off and Bonita said, ‘Miss Myers, if I turn in a poor assignment then you’ll have every right to punish me, but not until then.’ Can you even imagine? We all thought that girl was made out of gristle.
“But when I met you, that day you first came over here, I thought to myself, ‘Bonita Jankenhorn, roll over. This one is worth half a dozen of you, packed up in a box and gift-wrapped.’ ”
“I guess you were wrong,” I said.
“I was not wrong! You really were like that. Where in the world did it all go to?”
“Same place as your meteor shower,” I said. I hadn’t intended to hurt Lou Ann’s feelings, but I did. She let me be for a while after that.
But only for a while. Then she started up again. Really, I don’t think the argument stopped for weeks, it would just take a breather from time to time. Although it wasn’t an argument, strictly speaking. I couldn’t really disagree with Lou Ann-what Cynthia and the so-called Child Protectors wanted to do was wrong. But I didn’t know what was right. I just kept saying how this world was a terrible place to try and bring up a child in. And Lou Ann kept saying, For God’s sake, what other world have we got?
Mattie had her own kettle of fish to worry about. She hadn’t been able to work out a way to get Esperanza and Estevan out of Tucson, much less all the way to a sanctuary church in some other state. Apparently several people had offered, but each time it didn’t work out. Terry the doctor had made plans to drive them to San Francisco, where they would meet up with another group going to Seattle. But because of his new job on the Indian reservation the government liked to keep track of his comings and goings. Mattie always said she trusted her nose. “If I don’t like the smell of something,” she said, “then it’s not worth the risk.”
Even with this on her mind, she spent a lot of time talking with me about Turtle. She told me some things I didn’t know. Obviously Mattie knew what there was to know about loopholes. She was pretty sure that there were ways a person could adopt a child without going through the state.
But I confessed to Mattie that even if I could find a way I wasn’t sure it would be the best thing for Turtle.
“Remember when I first drove up here that day in January?” I asked her one morning. We were sitting in the back in the same two chairs, drinking coffee out of the same two mugs, though this time I had the copulating rabbits. “Tell me the honest truth. Did you think I seemed like any kind of a decent parent?”
“I thought you seemed like a bewildered parent. Which is perfectly ordinary. Usually the bewilderment wears off by the time the kid gets big enough to eat peanut butter and crackers, but knowing what I do now, I can see you were still in the stage most mothers are in when they first bring them home from the hospital.”
I was embarrassed to think of how Mattie must have seen straight through my act. Driving up here like the original tough cookie in jeans and a red sweater, with my noncommittal answers and smart remarks, acting like two flat tires were all in a day’s work and I just happened to have been born with this kid growing out of my hip, that’s how cool I was. I hadn’t felt all that tough on the inside. The difference was, now I felt twice that old, and too tired to put on the show.
“You knew, didn’t you? I didn’t know the first thing about how to take care of her. When you told me that about babies getting dehydrated it scared the living daylights out of me. I realized I had no business just assuming I could take the responsibility for a child’s life.”
“There’s not a decent mother in the world that hasn’t realized that.”
“I’m serious, Mattie.”
She smiled and sipped her coffee. “So am I.”
“So how does a person make a decision that important? Whether or not they’re going to do it?”
“Most people don’t decide. They just don’t have any choice. I’ve
