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Authors: Donna VanLiere

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BOOK: The Christmas Hope
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“Can I come back to stay?”
“We love you, Justin, but your mom loves you very much and she needs you.”
She opened the door of the car and Justin slunk into the passenger seat.
“Oh, wait!” Claire said, running into the house. She ran back to the car carrying a package wrapped in bright Christmas paper. “You can’t open this until Christmas,” she said, placing the gift on the boy’s lap. “It’s for you and your mom.” She looked at me and smiled, and I got behind the wheel, waving at her. I had worked with Claire and her husband for several years now. They were foster parents I could always depend on and were willing to open their home to any child. I backed out of the driveway and noticed Claire waving at Justin. He wouldn’t look up.
“Claire’s waving, Justin.” I stopped at the end of the driveway for a moment to give him time to respond. He didn’t. She continued to wave. I pulled onto the road. “Justin, Claire’s waving at you.” He pressed his hands into his thighs. As I drove past their mailbox and front of the house Justin spun in his seat to catch the last glimpse of Claire. He threw his hand in the back window and waved till we rounded the corner. He clutched the gift and slumped back in the seat. At twelve, Justin had been in and out of foster homes since he was eight years old. It was always hard to leave the ones where he felt he was loved. In the past nine months he had been in two separate foster homes as his mother went through rehab. I knew he didn’t want to go back and live with his mother again.
“Your mom sure is excited to see you,” I said, turning my head to catch a glimpse of him.
He looked out the window and didn’t say anything.
“She said she’s going to wait for you to get home and then you both can go pick out a Christmas tree this weekend.”
He remained content to look out the window. I knew what he was thinking but I also knew he was wrong … at least I hoped he was wrong.
I pulled into a grocery store parking lot and turned toward him. I’d seen lots of parents come out of rehab and many times I knew that they’d fall back into the traps they weren’t strong enough to resist. But other times I knew when they were genuinely clean and wanted to get their life back in order. They no longer said things they knew I wanted to hear but talked to me from a broken heart. I knew Justin’s mom wanted her son and her life back. “She’s met every goal set by the state and she’s clean, Justin. And she’s going to stay clean.”
“Yeah, right,” he said, mumbling, turning toward the window again.
“Your mom has changed, Justin.”
He didn’t say anything but watched a man load groceries into the back of his SUV.
I pulled his face toward me. “Your mom is not the same person that you remember.”
His eyes welled up with tears. “She always says she’s going to change but she never does.” He slung the tears from his face, embarrassed. “She always promises that she’ll be different but she never is. She just lies to get people to think she’s different!” He ran his coat sleeve under his nose.
I reached for a tissue out of the glove compartment and handed it to him, pulling him onto my shoulder. “She has changed,” I whispered. “I know it’s hard for you to believe but I’ve seen her and talked with her and she’s a different person now.”
He shook his head. He couldn’t believe it.
“She found a job.”
“She won’t be able to keep it.”
I squeezed him closer to me. “She’ll be cutting hair again and she loves to do that. She was working in a factory before and she didn’t like that.”
“She couldn’t cut hair before because everybody always fired her.”
I turned his face toward me. “I know this is hard.” A single tear ran down his cheek. “But your mom loves you so much. She’s worked hard to get clean, Justin, and she wants you back to stay. I know it’ll be easy to act angry toward her but that’s not going to help her or you.”
He nodded.
“I’ve worked with a lot of people over the years and I know that your mom loves you very much.”
He fumbled with the package in his hands. “Will you come to our apartment a lot?”
“I’ll have to make my appointed visits, yes.”
“Will you come over even if you don’t have an appointed visit?”
I smiled. “Will you be able to provide some sort of liquid refreshment? Perhaps a soda or iced tea?”
“Okay.”
“How about a confection of some sort?”
“I guess so but I don’t know what a confection is.”
I laughed and put on my seat belt. “Well, you better find out, because I will need a confection of the chocolate persuasion!”
When we arrived at the apartment complex I put my hand on Justin’s shoulder and walked him up the two flights of stairs. Rita Ramirez opened the door before I could knock, and pulled her son to her, burying her face in the top of his head. She was only thirty but looked ten years older. She spoke in rapid-fire Spanish and I put up my hands.
“No fair,” I said. “English only. For all I know you’re criticizing my outfit or my hair and that would just ruin the rest of my day.”
Rita stood back and looked at Justin. “You’re so handsome,” she said, holding his face. “Are you hungry?”
He shook his head.
“Miss Patricia, are you hungry?” She held on to Justin’s hand and led us into the small kitchen. “Would you like some coffee?” She poured me a cup and we sat down together at the table. I had looked through Rita’s apartment and gone over the expectations of the Department of Family Services with her on an earlier date so there was nothing left to do except wish them well.
I finished my coffee and stood to leave. “I’ll let you know when I’ll be back,” I said, opening the door.
“You can come by anytime for a confection, though,” Justin said, reminding me to come visit.
“I just might do that,” I said, looking in his eyes that held so much doubt.
Rita grabbed my arm before I walked out the door. “Thank you, Miss Patricia. Thank you for bringing my Justin back to me.”
I smiled at them, another one of my fragile families trying to start over again. Rita wrapped her arms around me. “I hope you have a beautiful Christmas!” I couldn’t say anything but waved as I walked toward the stairs and whispered a prayer that this time Rita would make it.
The day before I had typed Rita’s address onto the front of an envelope and used it as the return address as well. Enclosed were two gift certificates: one for a hardware store where she and Justin could find Christmas decorations and one for a nearby grocery store. They’d receive it in the mail by tomorrow at the latest. It wasn’t as much as what my mother had received in the envelope so many years ago but I hoped it was enough to help Rita and Justin have an extraordinary Christmas together.
I drove through Knight’s Auto Wash before heading to the office. I didn’t want salt buildup underneath, and Justin had left a trail of mud and dirt from his boots. I instructed the employees to move the seats back in order to clean well under them. They hadn’t done that last week. Once the car was clean, I drove to the office, turned on the computer at my desk, and rummaged through the Ramirez file, making sure it was updated. Weeks earlier many of the office staff had taken the last two hours of the day to decorate a small Christmas tree and hang ivy throughout the office. I made sure I had an appointment at that time so I could avoid the Christmas cheer and banter. Christmas was no longer a time of joy for me and I didn’t want to put a damper on the staff’s festivities.
I closed a drawer in my desk and the sound made a toy fish on Roy Braeden’s desk move to the tune of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” I shook my head. For the last few weeks that fish had been driving me crazy. Thankfully, the dancing Santa was broken this year, although Roy picked him up every day trying to diagnose the problem. Roy had worked for family services longer than I had. His first wife died after twenty-eight years of marriage, leaving Roy lonely and depressed. Thinking he was in love, Roy married Ella a year after his wife’s funeral. It was a mistake. Roy realized he wasn’t in love but just desperate for companionship. The marriage lasted less than two years. Now he’d been dating Barbara for four years but was gun-shy about marriage although I often told him that he was going to lose Barbara if he didn’t marry her. She was a good woman and Roy was a good man. “You’re good for each other,” I said time and again to him. Roy was a father of four, grandfather of five and counting, and a good friend. I noticed a doughnut sitting on his desk across the aisle from me and I rolled over in my chair and swiped it, taking a bite. I didn’t think of it as stealing. I thought of it as doing him a favor. His cholesterol was up and he had no business eating a greasy doughnut. I heard his voice and pushed the last of the doughnut into my mouth. He walked to his desk and stopped.
“Patti, did you see a doughnut on my desk?”
I leaned over to look toward his desk. “No, I don’t see anything.”
He opened a drawer and looked inside. “I could swear I put a doughnut right here.” He started toward the lounge. “I’ll just go get another one.”
“There’s none back there,” I said, typing.
He threw up his hands. “All a man wants is a lousy doughnut to help him get through the day. Is that too much to ask?”
“From my view it looks like the man has had too many doughnuts over the years.”
He stopped and looked at me. “I guess you went into social work so you could encourage and uplift.”
I laughed as my phone rang.
“Do people say I’m heavy?” he asked, pulling his shirt across his belly.
I waved my hand to get him to be quiet and picked up the receiver. It was Lynn McSwain, our supervisor. He was calling from his cell phone.
“I may be beefy but beefy’s good,” Roy said. “Beefy’s not heavy.”
I turned my back to him and pressed the phone closer to my ear. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll take care of her.” I hung up the phone. “Bridget Sloane was taken to County a few minutes ago,” I said, pulling a file from my cabinet.
“What for?”
“Selling to an undercover cop. I have to place Mia.” I shook my head, shoving files into my briefcase. “She left Mia in her crib at seven o’clock last night and never went back home.” Roy looked down at his watch. “Fifteen and a half hours,” I said, helping him do the math. “The police are at the apartment now.” Bridget Sloane was eighteen years old and the mother of a beautiful ten-month-old daughter who was an albatross around Bridget’s neck. Bridget had been on the move since she ran away from home at sixteen. If she had any idea who the father was she would have fought him for child support so she could use the money for drugs. But she didn’t even know she was pregnant until she was three months along and by then she couldn’t remember where she had been, who she had lived with, or what she had smoked. We had placed Mia in a foster home for three months when she was born so Bridget could finish a jail term for bad checks. I called that foster family again to see if they were available to take Mia this time. The message on their machine said they were out of town. I called Sandra and Guy Michaels, a new family I had worked with and liked.
“Bring her anytime,” Sandra said. I hung up the phone and grabbed my purse. “You up for tagging along?” I asked Roy. He took his jacket off the coat rack and followed me to the elevator.
We entered Bridget’s apartment and found a police officer bouncing Mia up and down. She was screaming. It was cold inside the tiny three-room apartment. “We’re with DFS,” I said to the officer. Reaching for Mia, I gave the officer my business card. “Doesn’t the electricity work?” I asked.
“Nothing works,” the officer said. “Guess the electric company turned it off.”
I wrapped Mia’s blanket around her and held her close. Her hands were freezing.
“She’s been screaming since we got here,” he said. “She’s screamed so much that she threw up. We couldn’t find any diapers so I made one out of paper towels.”
I put my hand on Mia’s bottom and felt the massive “diaper” the officer had created.
“Shh, shh, shh,” I whispered into Mia’s ear. “It’s okay, Mia. It’s okay.” She straightened her legs and screamed louder. I rummaged through the kitchen cabinets looking for formula.
“There’s nothing here,” the officer told me. “We’ve already looked.”
“I’ll pack her clothes,” Roy said, walking toward Mia’s bedroom.
The officer handed him a plastic grocery bag filled with clothes. “I knew you’d want them. They were the only clothes I could find.”
Roy took them and looked in Mia’s room at the mess that was in the portable crib. I walked behind him holding Mia.
“Looks like Bridget ran out of diapers a few days ago,” Roy said. I shook my head and tried to quiet Mia’s screams. She was starving and I had to find her something to eat. I headed for the door.
“What will happen to her?” the officer asked.
“She’ll go into a foster home,” I said.
“Will her mother get her back?”
“I don’t know.”
“No baby should ever have to go through what she did.”
BOOK: The Christmas Hope
2.58Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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