“You’ve never had any faith in this, have you, Joe? So why’d you go along with it?”

“Because. You. Want. A. Baby. The one damn thing I can’t build for you with my own two hands. If I could, I’d go turn one out on a lathe for you right this very minute. I can’t buy a baby. I can’t borrow it. I can’t make it. Do you know how that makes me feel? To see you crying and to know that I can’t fix it? Me? The guy who goes in behind crappy contractors and cleans up their messes for half the price?”

“We’re fixing it!” Hearing Joe say the things I’d suspected he’d been thinking ripped into me like a chain saw. “If you’ll just believe…”

Dear Reader,

Every year hundreds of babies from China find loving homes in the U.S. Each one of those stories has a happy ending where baby and parent are united at last. One of those happy endings is my own—my husband and I brought our daughter Kate home from China in 2002, when she was just eight months old.

Our wait, though long, was nothing like Sara and Joe’s, and my childhood was nothing like Sara’s. But I kept thinking, what if? What if something had happened? What sort of woman would hang on? Why? What would her husband, hiding his own broken heart, do?

I thoroughly enjoyed creating all the characters who people Joe and Sara’s world. Dublin, Georgia, is real—though I’ve taken small liberties with south Georgia geography and created the town of Campbell—which doesn’t exist. Also, for dramatic reasons I chose a shorter initial Wait; the current wait, which fluctuates, is now about a year. Joe and Sara’s story isn’t my story—it’s theirs…and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

If you’re interested in adopting from China, see links from my Web site, www.cynthiareese.net, which will point you in the right direction. I look forward to hearing from readers!

Cynthia Reese

The Baby Wait
Cynthia Reese

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Kate,

My sweetie-pie, my miracle baby, the gift

God gave me…I love you!

This book would not exist without the help of

so many people: my editor, Laura Shin, who took

a chance on me, and other Harlequin editors—

Jennifer Green, who listened to me stammer

out this idea, and Ann Leslie Tuttle, who called

it the book of my heart. Thanks, too, go to

my agent, Miriam Kriss; to my critique partners:

Cindy Miles, Steph B., Tawna Fenske, Nelsa, R,

and Babette D.; to my husband, who thinks

I’m welded to my laptop; to Tessa Hill for an

inside look at how adoption agencies work

(any errors are my own); to my sister and

my mom for believing in me; to the 2005 BIAYers

and to the entire staff at Bellevue Avenue Post

Office—thanks for getting my work to my editors

on time, every time!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Cynthia Reese lives with her husband and their daughter in south Georgia, along with two dogs, three cats and however many strays show up for morning muster on their back deck. She has been scribbling since she was knee-high to a grasshopper and reading even before that. A former journalist, teacher and English professor, she also enjoys cooking, traveling and photography when she gets the chance. The Baby Wait is her first book.

An invisible red thread connects those who are

destined to meet, regardless of time, place or

circumstance. The thread may stretch or tangle,

but will never break.

—An ancient Chinese belief

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER ONE

I STOOD in an airport, not an English printed word or a Caucasian face in sight. Old Chinese women swarmed me like an angry colony of bees. They shook their fingers in my face. They looked me up and down, jerking their heads in disdain. I could not understand a single word they said. Finally, one tiny, shrunken lady shoved her face close to mine and in broken English shouted, “Missy, you forgot baby! No lucky baby for you!”

Another Chinese lady whipped a black telephone that looked straight out of the 1940s from behind her back. The force of the phone’s rings made the handset vibrate.

And, then, consciousness seeped in. The phone’s ringing was a digital buzz, not the t-ling t-ling of the old heavy clunkers. My phone. My cordless. In my bedroom, not a Chinese airport.

It had to be Ma, probably drunk again, maybe even in jail. I groped for the phone, dropped it and retrieved it from the jumbled-up covers.

“Hello?” I squinted at the clock.

“Sara? It’s Joe.”

I sat up, pushed a hand through my mussed hair. “What is it? And what happened to the alarm? It’s eight o’clock.”

“I turned it off. You said you weren’t going in this morning. I thought you could do with the extra sleep.”

He sounded a little wounded at my lack of appreciation. “Um, thanks. Did you need something? Forget your lunch? I’ll take it by.”

“No, I just wanted to let you know I could meet you at the doctor’s office. Things here are under control, and the trusses are going up faster—”

“Joe, it’s just a routine Pap smear, okay?” I interrupted him. “Relax.”

Joe sucked in a breath, apparently not believing what I said. “You always used to get so down when you had to go to the ob-gyn…what with the pregnant women. And I’m worried, anyway. Damn, Sara. With all you’ve been through, nothing’s routine about a visit to your ob-gyn.”

“Joe.” I thought for a moment about how to proceed. My stomach had already tensed from being reminded about today’s appointment, but I ordered my nerves to calm down. “I’m a big girl, and I want to go by myself. We talked about how important it is for me to do this on my own.”

“I know. I know.” He sighed. “Well, call me when you get through. I may be on the roof of this house, trying to get trusses in, so if I don’t hear the phone ring, just leave me a message, okay?”

“Sure. The minute I get out. I’ll see you tonight. And, hey…thanks for offering. I love you.”

“Back atcha,” he said before hanging up.

I replaced the handset and swung my feet to the floor, my heart still racing from the unpleasant task ahead and the dream. Stress. Good old-fashioned stress. I’d had this nightmare before, and I knew stress had woven it.

Of course I wouldn’t forget my baby in some airport. I’d waited too long for her. I’d stumbled through a dozen years of dashed hopes and dreams before discovering China, before knowing Meredith Alicia whatever-her-Chinese-name-was Tennyson could be my daughter. I’d know her second middle name when they finally told me the name they’d given her. When I could finally see my daughter’s face.

As I fumbled for my bedroom slippers, my toe stubbed a stack of books: Toddler Adoption, Lost Daughters of China, A Passage to the Heart, What to Expect the Toddler Years. The ache in my heart replaced the ache in my toe. What was Meredith doing today? Was she getting enough to eat? Did she have adequate clothes? And, the famous question, what on earth did she look like?

I rubbed my eyes and stacked the books on my nightstand. Reconsidering, I shoved them on the shelf. No point in hearing Joe grouse about me staying up all night reading again.

In the shower, after scrubbing all the nooks and crannies with an extra dose of elbow grease, I let my finger run over the thin scar on my belly. You had to look hard this many years afterward to see the surgeon’s neat handiwork, a souvenir from when I’d lost my ovary. At the time, he had saved my life but ripped out my heart.

Joe had left a note on the fridge and azalea blooms stuck in a mason jar on the kitchen island. I smiled and went to read the note. He’d scrawled, “Good luck! If you change your mind, I’ll go with you,” and signed it with his customary X’s and O’s. On the end he’d written, “PS, I put Cocoa out. She was on the couch again.”

The missive made me stick out my tongue at the paper it was scrawled on. Sure enough, Cocoa, our chocolate Lab, had heard me moving around in the kitchen. She gazed through the French door with soulful brown eyes.

I let in our wayward girl, scolding her. “You know he doesn’t like you on the couch.”

She answered with a couple of cheerful thumps of her tail.

“Oh, all right, I forgive you.” The couch didn’t seem like such a biggie to me. After all, it was leather, and Cocoa had been treated for fleas and ticks. But Joe was adamant about that rule. I shook my finger at her, trying to recapture some of my will to discipline. “But be smart. Make sure you get off the couch before he gets out of the shower.”

Cocoa had a way of easing the tension in me. I headed for the fridge again, this time to get started on breakfast. When I caught sight of my Wait Calendar, it caused a badly needed smile and restored some of my usual optimism. I grabbed a marker and X’d out another day. Maybe by Father’s Day we’d get The Call from our adoption agency telling us the CCAA had matched us with our baby girl.

CCAA. DTC. APC. That’s the alphabet soup I lived in these days. Joe and I had sent paperwork off to our adoption agency in late November. Our agency had forwarded the thick dossier to the CCAA, the Chinese government agency in charge of foreign adoptions, in the middle of December. That meant our Dossier to China date—our DTC date—was December. It was April now, four months into the wait. With wait times hovering at around six months, we could have our baby home in time for the Fourth of July.

With breakfast in me, I drove through Dublin’s light morning traffic to Dr. Kaska’s office. I said a little prayer for luck as I parked, switched off the engine and tried to settle my nerves.

Six years. You’re cured. They’ve looked. You’re cured. It had been my mantra all morning long, all week long, actually. I hated to admit it, but I was shaking in my boots. Gynecologists had found few good things to say about my body over the years.

You could have had Joe or Maggie come with you. You turned down your husband and your best friend, so this is self-inflicted agony.

My scolding had its intended effect, moving me out of the car and across to the front door. Here, I took a deep breath again.

The only vacant seat was between two abundantly pregnant women who had struck up a conversation about babies. They moved their magazines and purses, and I took the seat. I listened to their debate over natural versus epidural, breastfeeding over formula, cloth over disposable.

Amazing, I thought. A year ago, I would have run crying to the restroom.

A year ago, I’d thought I’d lost all chance of having my own child. A year ago, I hadn’t known about Meredith.

Okay, so it still hurts a little. A lot even. But I’ll get my baby. I’ll get Meredith.

“Oh, my gracious,” said the woman on my left, dressed in a pink-flowered shirt stretched tautly over her rounded belly. “Here we are, jabbering all around you.”

“Would you like me to switch places with you?” I offered. “Sounds like you two have a lot of notes to compare. Is it your first baby?”

“Oh, yeah,” the lady on my right said, “and it’s not gonna come a moment too soon. I want to see my feet again. I’m wondering now if I have feet.”

I couldn’t help but glance down at her lime-green flip-flops and her very swollen feet and ankles. She definitely possessed feet, but whether she would like them if she saw them was another story.

“I know what you mean. Nobody ever warned me being pregnant could be so miserable. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” the pink-flowered-shirt lady said. “You have kids?”

The question didn’t contain the power to knife me like it had. I hesitated for a moment, worrying the inquiry like a loose tooth, just to check. A little twinge. But not the big one. “No kids yet,” I said.

“Oh, but you’re not that old. You still have time. You’re what? Thirty-two? Thirty-three?” the flip-flop-shod woman asked.

“Thanks. I’m actually thirty-six. And my husband and I are adopting.” Just saying the words banished the ache inside me.

“Oh, wow…. That’s such a great thing to do. Wow! I’m impressed. A boy or a girl or do you know?”

“A little girl. We’re adopting a baby from China.”

Pink Flowers’ eyes went round. “Don’t they kill off all their girls over there? They want boys, right?”

In a delicate, split-second assessment, I decided she wasn’t ready for a lecture on China’s population explosion or why girls were more frequently adopted than boys. “Oh, they love their little girls. We just requested a baby girl.”

The other woman smoothed a hand over her rounded abdomen. “Well, that baby’s gonna be a lucky little girl, what with you and your husband rescuing her. She’s gonna be so blessed.”

I’d encountered this remark before, too. You don’t negotiate five months of the Paperchase From Hell and four months of The Wait without hearing some variation of the “You’re such a hero” speech. I offered up another smile and said, “We’ll be the lucky ones.”

“So why’d you decide to adopt from China? I mean, couldn’t you have any real kids?” Pink Flowers asked.

That question, which would have tormented me a year ago, still possessed a sharp edge. I considered her use of the word, real, as if I’d get a beautiful China doll instead of a flesh-and-blood baby. “No. We couldn’t have biological children.”

She gasped, popping a hand over her mouth. Her eyes welled up with tears, and she laid a hand on my arm. “Oh, I just…that’s awful. How long have you guys been trying? I just can’t imagine not being able to have a baby.”

The redhead in the flip-flops joined in, her eyes pained as well. “Was it endometriosis? I have endometriosis. I had to have surgery, and that fixed me right up. Did you try the surgery?”

Ann Landers would have recommended responding with, “Why do you need to know?” But I found I couldn’t do this to these ladies. They meant well in their clumsy way. I shook my head. “No. I had cancer.”

“Cancer!” both of them breathed in unison. I could see them busily counting their blessings: they were cancer-free and could conceive…and would hold their babies within a few weeks.

“Yes. Ovarian cancer.”

The mention of the big C had a way of killing conversation. The two women fell as silent as a pair of bookends. I swung shut mental gates to hem in the memories. The day the biopsy had come back positive, the surgery, the chemo. I’d made it through. And here I was, in my sixth cancer-free year, hoping for a routine ob-gyn exam. Just let it be normal.

To distract myself, I let my eyes wander over the waiting room.

On this Thursday morning, Dr. Kaska’s Queen Anne armchairs were crammed with expectant mothers. The only other flat-bellied women in the room were a sullen mother-daughter pair, the girl dressed in tight blue jeans and a barely-there crop top that showed off her belly button ring. Her over-mascaraed eyes brimmed with suppressed rage at being with her mother in an ob-gyn’s office.

Another Cherie, I thought to myself. I know how the mom feels. I caught the woman’s eye and gave her an encouraging smile. She smiled back, her face lighter and not so drawn.

I did know how she felt. I’d raised my husband’s baby sister from the time he and I had returned from our honeymoon sixteen years ago. The truculent eleven-year-old, who regarded her new sister-in-law as something just short of a horned she-devil, had been waiting for us on our front-porch steps. Not exactly the welcome a blushing bride wanted, but I’d known Cherie came with Joe like a piece of Samsonite luggage. After all, it was just the two of them.

Cherie had not improved with age. Just last night, she’d called, mooching money because her funds had run short.

The door opened, and another pregnant woman came in, a toddler clinging to her skirts. For a moment, as she stood eyeing the packed waiting room, my heart froze in my chest. The boy’s wheat-straw head, buried into her billowy maternity dress, could have been Matthew’s.

The mother in the mother-daughter team jabbed her daughter and stood up. “Here, ma’am. You can take our chairs. You and your little boy.”

The boy turned then, looked me straight in the face. My heartbeat returned to normal. He was nothing like my Matthew.

Matthew had come into our lives like a sudden summer thunderstorm. One minute we were a couple, the next we were parents. Well, foster parents. He’d been eighteen months old, scrawny and small, with big blue eyes that stared in terror when the Division of Family and Children Services had brought him to us.

And we’d just got him into big boy pants and had enrolled him in preschool when DFCS had come to take him away.

Eighteen months, give or take. That’s all we’d had. Eighteen months to drift into the idea that Matthew was forever. Eighteen months for Joe to slip into the habit of introducing Matthew as “my son.” Eighteen months to lose our hearts completely, to forget the foster in foster parents.

The optimism in my heart flickered and dimmed. Consciously, I replaced the memory of the loss with a stern reminder: Once you get on that plane for home, Meredith is yours forever, and nobody can take her away.

IN THE EXAM ROOM, I stared at the ceiling while Dr. Kaska did her business below the belt. No matter how often this had been done, it never got any easier for me. In fact, the idea a ticking time bomb lay in my gut made me all the more tense. Six years. You’re cured. They’ve looked. You’re cured.

“Relax, Sara. It’s not like you’re a stranger to Mr. Speculum here.”

The nurse behind Dr. Kaska laughed, and all I could think about was, Gee, they’re looking at my privates. Doesn’t that get old pretty quick?

Latex gloves came off with a snap. “Okay, all done. Get those clothes back on and we’ll talk in my office.”

Dr. Kaska, neat and pretty with a heart-shaped face, seemed dwarfed by the huge desk dominating her office. I’d asked her about it some years before, and she’d explained that her father had built it for her. Now I sat across from the graduation present a proud dad had crafted with his own two hands, and I thought about Joe.

Would he be excited enough to do something like that? Would he take time away from his construction business to labor over a chunk of wood large enough to float his grown daughter down a river?

Dr. Kaska grinned. “Everything looks fine. I mainly wanted to catch up with you about the baby. I’m so jealous! I want to go to China, always have. And you get to bring back your very own life-size souvenir.”

I looked heavenward. “You sound like Joe. He tells everybody we’re going for Chinese takeout in a big way.”

“So he’s excited? I’ll bet he can’t wait to hold that baby girl.”

My stomach tensed. Joe excited? Not exactly the right word for it. “Um, you know Joe. Cautiously optimistic.”

“Just like a guy. Got to have that empirical evidence. No faith whatsoever.”

“He worries.”

“About the cancer?” Dr. Kaska bit her lip. “I can’t tell you it won’t come back, Sara. And neither can your oncologist at Emory. But we were lucky—you were lucky. We caught it early, and you’ve had no recurrences for five years, nearly six.”

“I know. I tell that to Joe all the time.”

“You’ve got something left to do on this earth, that’s for sure. Ovarian cancer is a sneaky, sneaky cancer. And, based on what I see from your oncologist, you beat it. Now look at you. You and Joe are going to have this beautiful bambino…and a trip to China to boot. How long do you have to stay again? I forget.”

“A week and a half to two weeks, something like that. We’ll be in her province—the province where her orphanage is—for most of it, then in Guangzhou for the last bit.”

“Guangzhou? That’s Canton, right?” At my nod, Dr. Kaska looked off dreamily. She came back to the present. “Enough gossiping. I’ll get your test results back to you double-quick so Mr. Worrywart won’t have a heart attack. Last year, I thought he was going to come back in the exam room with you.”

“I think he feels like if he ever gives up his vigil, it will come back. He thinks he can single-handedly scare it away,” I said.

“He must have done something right. Now you and Joe call me the minute, the absolute minute you get the call. I’m just so tickled for you. You’ve been through a lot, but you’re coming through just fine.”

I got up from my chair, relieved to have the appointment over. I had done it. All by myself, nobody holding my hand. I had done it.

“Sara?” Dr. Kaska’s concern stopped me. “Is—is something bothering you? You don’t seem like your usual chipper self.”

I hesitated. For a moment, I just stood there, not sure what to say. I couldn’t find the words to explain how recalcitrant Joe was being, how he grumbled about even assembling Meredith’s crib until “we know for sure.”

Maybe I didn’t want to admit it to myself.

But his superstition all these months—from the start of the adoption, really—had tainted even my hardy optimism.

How could I tell Dr. Kaska that sometimes, especially late at night as I lay sleepless next to Joe, I worried that maybe Joe hoped things wouldn’t work out.

That maybe he hoped we wouldn’t get a baby at all.

CHAPTER TWO

IN THE PARKING LOT, my mood lightened under the bright April sunshine. I shook off my doubts and headed for the car. If I hurried, I could get back in time to make my half day at work, though I could probably forget my lunchtime walking session.

Walking was Habit Number Two I’d planned on implementing during The Wait for Meredith. Cursing—or actually, not cursing—had been at the top of my list. I’d given myself four months on that one. It still hadn’t taken.

My cell phone chirped, conjuring up Habit Number Six, the final step in my transformation to a mom: Actually getting along with my own mother.

“Sara? Is that you?”

No mistaking the querulous voice greeting me. “Ma, it’s me.”

My mother sniffed audibly. “Well, finally. I’ve been trying to get you for ages.”

A beep interrupted our conversation, letting me know that I’d missed at least one call—and knowing Ma, probably more. “I’m heading for work, Ma. I’ve just left the doctor’s office.”

“You have time to take a morning off, but not any time to look in on me.” The petulance of a four-year-old ruled her words.

I clenched my teeth until I remembered to relax my jaw. Breathe. It’s just your mother. You can do this. Breathe. “I checked on you yesterday afternoon, remember? When I got off work?”

“Right. For twenty minutes, and I should be grateful for that.”

Knowing this song had about thirty verses to go, I decided to cut today’s performance short. “What do you need, Ma?”

“Need? Can’t I call you just to talk?”

I didn’t bother arguing. In response to my waiting silence, she grunted. “I do need something. I need you to take me grocery shopping. Oh, and something for a headache. I think I’m getting another migraine.”

The stifled groan inside me rattled my innards in a frantic bid to escape. Yesterday when I’d stopped by, my mother had been her usual belligerent self, with the exception of being mostly sober, and there’d been no mention of a bare cupboard. Today’s headache was probably part of her customary morning hangover.

My jaw was tight again. I sucked in a lungful of air in an attempt to relax and not lose my patience with her. “What are you out of? Can’t you pick it up in Campbell?”

“You know I don’t, er, have a license.” She pointed out the fact delicately, leaving out the reason: She’d kept her license after her first DUI, but had a snowball’s chance of getting it back after the second one. I’d sold her car and banked the money, doling it out monthly to supplement her Social Security. Then she added, “You have sick days. You could get off. You’re off already because you went to the doctor this morning.”

“What. Did. I. Tell. You. About. That.” She’d shot my patience to hell, but at least it hadn’t been in record time.

“That you were saving your sick days for the baby.” She dragged the words out, clearly unhappy with the boundaries I’d set. Then, in a rushed, all-in-one breath, “But I need you, too, Sara, and that damn baby’s not even here yet. They’re probably taking your money and telling you that you’ll get a baby. Just like they did with all those infertility treatments.”

The reins on my temper broke, letting it run away like a wild horse. “Goodbye, Ma. I’m hanging up now before I say something I regret. And I am not answering this phone if you call back, not until I cool off.”

But as I was about to click the phone off, Ma played her trump card. “Well…I guess I could pick it up at the IGA. I have a little cash on me. And the store is just across the street.”

I held on, wondering when the other shoe would drop. And it would—with the pain of a stiletto to the instep.

Sure enough, she interrupted my, “Okay,” to interject, “Yep, I’m kinda thirsty anyway. I might pick up a six-pack while I’m there.”

I sank my teeth into my cheek to hold back the slew of cuss words I wanted to shower her with. “Okay, fine, Ma. You win. What is it you need? I’ll pick it up.”

It was only when I was slinging a gallon of milk in the grocery cart ten minutes later that I remembered I hadn’t called Joe the way I’d promised. A glance at my watch told me he was probably taking his lunch break, but I couldn’t get my cell phone to work in the store.

What the heck. I’d just stop by his job site and skip any pretense of lunch.

Joe’s current job was off Highway 80, so I hustled down Bellevue Avenue. I drove through downtown Dublin with an eye out for red lights and cops, slaloming the curve around the courthouse and cursing the idiot driver in front of me who couldn’t get the hang of using a turn signal.

The drive from Joe’s job site would take twenty minutes once I hit the open road to Campbell, where I worked as the absenteeism prevention coordinator for Bryce County schools. Make it in time to get in my half a day? Maybe, if the old guy in the rusty El Camino in front of me would make a hole and make it wide.

JOE CLAMBERED DOWN from the roof when he saw me pull up. I admired my husband’s denim-clad backside as he came down the ladder. Nearly thirty-seven years old, and he was in better shape than he’d been in high school. Manual labor had kept him hard and muscled.

I couldn’t say the same for me. At thirty-six, I had a stubborn ten—okay, make it an even dozen—extra pounds that wouldn’t come off for love or money. I had to admit it was better than when I was on the fertility treadmill. Then I’d blimped up like Mr. Big Boy.

The fear in his face abated when I sketched a wave and called, “Forgot to call. Sorry.”

“I thought—” He broke off as he neared me.

“Everything’s fine. I just thought I’d stop by and see how things are going here.”

He shrugged. “Going pretty good. We’ll get the framing done today. You going back to work?”

“On my way. Thanks for the flowers.”

A pleased expression filled his eyes. “Yeah. The azaleas were blooming this morning, did you notice? Saw it when I put Cocoa out. Damn dog was on the couch.”

“Hey, at least she wasn’t in our bed,” I pointed out.

He growled in the back of his throat. “How on earth do you think you’re going to discipline a kid if you can’t discipline a dog?”

His words struck a sensitive spot in the soft underbelly of my self-doubt. I tried to ignore them, tried to tell myself Joe was just frustrated by Cherie’s mooching call and didn’t mean any malice. It didn’t work. Just because I’d convinced the social worker who’d done our home study that I was grade-A, blue-ribbon mom-material didn’t make it so.

While I busily failed at propping up my ego, I changed the subject. “So, you’re going to get home early, then?”

“I don’t think so. I have that final inspection for the Walker house. Ought not to be too bad, but the Walkers can’t do it until after they get off. It’ll be seven before I get done, most likely. What? You got plans?”

“No, I just had crab legs in the freezer. Thought I might cook those.”

We stood there, a little awkward, neither one of us knowing what to say to fill up the silence. I loved Joe, had since high school, but sometimes his uncommunicative ways drove me crazy.

“Uh, don’t be surprised if Ma calls you looking for me,” I told him. “She’s already hit me up to bring her groceries.”

“Not unusual. Just like Cherie begging money. I told her if she wanted money, she could work for it, same as me. I’m not a finance company, and one day my little sister will realize that.”

I’d heard the angry conversation the night before, heard Joe slam down the phone. I knew the score. They wouldn’t speak to each other for two, maybe three weeks.

Not having to deal with Cherie might be a relief for me, but Joe would worry and sulk and not talk about it until the two of them finally got past that famous Tennyson pride to mumble sorry to one another. And then, out of sheer guilt, Joe would give her whatever it was she’d wanted in the first place.

Cherie brought out the absolute worst in Joe. True, Cherie brought out the worst in almost everybody. Right now, though, with the adoption making Joe so tense and with his obvious discontent at work, he didn’t need Cherie to worry about. Couldn’t she just grow up and stop her female version of the Peter Pan syndrome? Or did she think being twenty-eight too much of a drag? Couldn’t she, for once, pretend to be her real age?

Right. That had about as much chance happening as Ma becoming a teetotaler.

I put out a tentative feeler, a figurative finger in the wind to see which way Joe’s feelings were going. “So…Cherie’s in a tight spot? A little short?” Again.

The corners of Joe’s mouth tugged down and he looked back at the construction in progress.

No, Joe. Don’t bury yourself in work. Talk to me. Talk to me like you used to. Share things. Share—

But I didn’t say that aloud. No point in it. I’d been saying it for months, and every time he just shrugged it off.

“What else is new with Cherie?”

“Have you tried…talking to her? I mean, about college or tech school or—”

“Right, Sara. She’s a high school dropout. What school’s going to want her?”

I stepped back, startled by the ferocity of his tone. “I was just thinking—”

“How about you leave Cherie to me, and you worry about Ma? Huh? That a fair trade?”

Now it was me who looked away. I tried to get my emotions under control so that I wouldn’t say anything I’d regret.

“I’m sorry, Joe. I didn’t mean to— I didn’t mean anything by it.”

Something softened in his face, and he shook his head. “No, I’m sorry. I’m just…I’ve just been worried out of my head about you, and you wouldn’t let me go with you this morning, and I didn’t sleep too good last night, what with Cherie and…you. And then you didn’t call. I was sure…”

I reached up and touched his cheek. “I’m okay, Joe.”

He cleared his throat, his not-so-subtle signal that I was straying toward the mushy subjects he’d rather avoid. Sure enough, he ignored my reply. Instead, he asked, “I wondered what you were doing about lunch. Did you go by the house and get something?”

“No. What with Ma, I didn’t have time.”

“She doesn’t give a damn about you.”

The bald observation was laced with a considerable amount of bitterness.

“It’s not like she’s up for Mother of the Year,” I said. “She’s just Ma. That’s all there is to it. Can’t expect anything more than she can give.”

Joe pulled out a tape measure from his tool belt and fiddled with it, his features darkened by a frown. “How can you do it, Sara? How can you say, ‘Sure, Ma, I’ll go get groceries at the last minute, do without lunch,’ when she doesn’t care enough about you to think about what today’s doctor appointment means?”

I worked my mouth around a variety of answers, all of them some variation of, The same reason you keep extending Cherie second and third and fourth chances. Certain Joe wouldn’t find that a satisfactory answer, I just shook my head. “It’s okay. Really. It doesn’t bother me.”

Much.

“It damn well ought to bother her. She could have lost you. We all could have lost you. Bet she never thought about that.”

“Joe…” He’d been descending into these moods more and more lately. I tried hard to keep the Ma problem as separate as I could. Most times Joe dealt with her and her escapades with wry humor, but others, he was just angry. Sometimes he seemed angry that I wasn’t angry enough.

That you don’t show how angry you really are.

I ignored that inner whisper. “You haven’t lost me. You’re stuck with me for a long, long time, Joe. I promise. Really, truly. We’re going to be fine.”

But as I walked toward the car a few minutes later, I could feel his eyes on me. I could feel his doubt, as heavy as a hand on my back.

For all my cheerful optimistic reassurances to Joe, I wasn’t at all sure we’d be fine. I wouldn’t feel that way until Joe told me we’d be fine.

And for that to happen, he’d have to start talking about whatever was going on behind that carefully controlled mask of his.

MY CELL PHONE rang again as I zipped along the two-lane road to Campbell, which was replete with hand-painted signs that exhorted, Repent: The End Is Nigh.

Sure feels that way to me, I thought, as I flipped the phone open and ground out a, “Ma, I’m—”

“Whoa, girl. You sound like you’ve been on twenty miles of bad road.”

Warmth flooded me. Maggie, my best friend, my partner-in-crime.

“I have at that. The boss looking for me?”

“Not yet. How did the doctor’s appointment go?”

Leave it to Maggie to ask and Ma to completely forget the significance of today. “Fine,” I told her. “I’ll fill you in on everything when I get there, but first I’ve got to make a milk run by Ma’s. Can you cover for me at work?”

“You’re in luck. Mr. Eeyore’s gone to a meeting over at the elementary school, and he’s having lunch over there.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. Mr. Eeyore—Daryl Morris, the Bryce County school superintendent—could never be mistaken for a happy camper. Maggie worked as his assistant superintendent, so she caught the brunt of all his delegating and gloomy predictions. I, a truancy officer with a fancy title, mostly had to deal with him when we met at the coffee machine.

“Maybe that means I can get a bite to eat after all.”

“Not with Ma on your case,” Maggie told me in an all-knowing voice. “I’ll handle lunch. You handle Ma.”

With that, she rang off, and I pressed the accelerator on the car a little bit harder.

“HEY, SARA!”

I turned from the open door of my Jetta in the direction of the call. I’d recognize that bellow anywhere.

Maggie stepped away from her SUV, closing the distance between us, white paper bags in her hands. “You best be glad you got here when you did,” she said with a swirl of her wild African-print dress. “I’d be one mad black woman if I’d had to go in that doctor’s office after you. You know I don’t do ob-gyns. But I would have if I’d had to.”

Maggie didn’t “do” doctors at all. Strong, brave, tell-it-like-it-was as Maggie might be, the only way she’d be caught with a doctor was if he were writing out her death certificate. I’d given up trying to convince her to go.

I opened my arms for a soul-fortifying hug, which she gave without hesitation. Hiding my face in the cotton of her dress offered me a chance to squelch a few tears and regain my tough act. When I stepped back, I said, “Okay. So you see I survived. I told you I would.”

She blew a raspberry. “Just for that, you don’t get your treat.”

“Treat?”

“I picked up salads at Ida’s Buffet. I thought we could eat by the track then get our walking in before we headed back. Grab your shoes.”

Now Maggie really deserved the hug—lunch and conversation. What more could a girl want? As we headed to the track near the county board office, some of the tension uncoiled from my shoulders. Maggie made talking easy; she didn’t require endless explanations and footnotes.

I’d known Maggie since the first day of kindergarten—when I pulled one of the dozens of pigtails she had caught up in pastel-colored plastic barrettes. She’d backhanded me, I’d stomped her foot, and the teacher had sent us to time-out together. Once the tears had stopped, we’d bonded against a common enemy, friends forever.

Under the shade of a willow tree, the two of us munched on our lunch in silence for a few minutes before she asked, “What took so long at the doctor’s office, anyway?”

“Oh, they just had every pregnant woman in Laurens County in there.”

A look of concern flashed across Maggie’s face, but I forestalled it with, “And a Cherie look-alike. Down to the belly button ring. A few years and she’ll have the tattoo, too.”

Maggie wrinkled her nose in disgust. “LaTisha wants a belly button ring. Ewww! See what you’ve got to look forward to with Meredith? They don’t stay cute little babies for long. Their souls get sucked out of them, and they turn into teenagers.”

“You have a good, levelheaded daughter,” I reminded her. “Even if she is fourteen years old. She’s on the honor roll, she’s not dating and she unloads your dishwasher. What do you have to complain about?”

“You’re obviously forgetting that mouthy attitude she’s got these days.” Maggie crossed her eyes in apparent memory.

“Oh, yeah, where on earth did she get that? It couldn’t have possibly been from her mother.”

Maggie rewarded my sarcasm with a dig in the ribs. “Not me, girl. She got it from that low-down sorry skunk of a man who donated his sperm for the occasion. What I ever saw in him…”

I left her to ponder her ex-husband in silence while I chased down the last baby-spinach leaf in my carryout bowl. A moment later the two of us made our way to the track.

As we walked, I gave her a thumbnail sketch of Ma, and her phone call, plus the trip to her apartment. Still, not even with Maggie could I confess my real worries—my worries about Joe.

“That mother of yours,” Maggie sympathized. “No doubt about it, Nora O’Rourke is a piece of work. It’s a wonder you even want kids after a childhood like yours.”

“Your parents.” I glanced down at the pedometer snugged up to the cell phone on my belt. “Hey, we’ve done a half mile. Want to quit?”

“Hell, yes. I wanted to quit even before I started. Damn crazy idea of yours. I haven’t lost a pound yet,” she grumbled. “What about my parents?”

We trudged toward the car, the grass swishing against our shoes. “Your parents are the reason I want kids. They made it work. Your dad—he saved my life. He was the daddy I never had. Where would I be if it hadn’t been for your parents? Some kind of trailer trash strung out on meth, probably.”

It was true. The bright spots in my childhood had been at the Boatwrights’ house. Their house had reverberated with laughter and squabbles and gospel spirituals…and love.

Maggie’s mom had provided more than her share of impetuous genes to her youngest daughter. Excitable, a little overprotective and paranoid when it came to her baby girl, Cecilia Boatwright was still a generous woman, generous enough to know a little dishwater-blond waif needed all the loving she could get.

I sat in the open door of my car as I switched back to my street shoes. “Thanks, Maggie. I really appreciate you doing this for me. It was just what I needed.”

“What we need is a girl’s day out, and maybe we’ll get it soon.” She paused a moment. “Joe called me.”

“What?”

“When you didn’t call him, he called me. Thought maybe something was wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“You’d tell me, right? You’d tell me if…something was wrong? And…I don’t mean just about the cancer.”

I looked down at the white tennis shoe in my hand. I couldn’t lie to her, but I wasn’t ready for a tell-all confession. “I’d tell you. When I knew. If I knew.”

But did I know anything? Or were my worries about Joe just me chasing phantoms?

CHAPTER THREE

I’D JUST CLICKED MY Internet icon when the phone rang. I had five minutes before I left for work, and I’d intended to check if the current DTCers had finally got their babies. All of us on the adoption message boards had been gnawing our fingernails. This crop of DTCers should have received their referrals already. The delay in referrals had stretched from one week, to two and now to three, with no real explanation.

For a moment I thought about letting the machine get the phone. When I answered it, I wished I hadn’t.

“Sara? I gotta talk to Joe!”

Uh-oh. Cherie. And what’s more, Cherie awake before noon. It didn’t bode well.

“Cherie, Joe’s already headed out to the job site. You might catch him there.” I suppressed the urge to remind her some of us had to work for a living.

“He’s not answering his cell phone. And I’ve left, like, fifty-dozen messages. I gotta have that money, Sara! I really need it.”

I gave up on the computer and hit the shutdown button, trying to figure out what exactly to say. The azalea blooms outside the living-room window had withered enough to look tired and weary as April came to a close. That’s how I felt, too, talking with Cherie.

In the silence, she jumped first. “Hey, you’ll do. Can you lend me a hundred? That’ll help.”

For a moment, her offer tempted me as strongly as if it were the map to Blackbeard’s treasure chest. The idea that a hundred bucks could make Cherie disappear for a while was a siren song. But I knew, from all my dealings with Ma, it would only lead me to crash into rocky shoals. Cherie would keep coming back.

Not only that, but it would break mine and Joe’s cardinal rule: I didn’t give money to Cherie, and he didn’t give money to Ma.

“I don’t keep that kind of cash on me, Cherie,” I told her, honest enough, as my wallet was down to its last twenty. And I damn sure wasn’t going to go hit the ATM machine for her. “Talk to Joe. Or maybe you could ask your boss for an advance.”

“I quit.”

Now my temper started to boil in earnest. “You what?”

“Didn’t Joe tell you? That’s why I need the money.”

Joe had not filled me in on this little detail. I gripped my forehead with my free hand and pressed my thumb and middle finger to my temples. “What happened this time, Cherie?”

“That new shift manager made a pass at me. Not even Saint Sara would put up with sexual harassment, would you?”

I gritted my teeth in hopes steam—or worse, foul invectives—wouldn’t spew forth.

I was no saint. That was for sure. I wasn’t even a candidate. But Cherie liked to rattle my cage by telling me I was a Miss Goody Two-shoes. She somehow thought women who actually put on panty hose for work and drove a Volkswagen felt they were superior to the rest of the working-class world.

“No, but…did you talk to your restaurant manager?”

I knew the answer before she gave me a surly, “No. What good would that do? Besides, I told Dave I didn’t think it was a good idea for us to keep seeing each other.”

“Dave?” That would be the shift manager. Apparently, Cherie had left some large, highly incriminating pieces out of her version of the story. “Were you…seeing him before he made this pass at you?”

“Not exactly. I mean, yeah, we’d slept with each other a couple of times, but he’s got no call to—”

The rest of Cherie’s words escaped me. I worried about her enduring single motherhood, STDs, HIV. Cherie floated through life aimlessly, with the mating habits—and standards—of a guppy.

“Are you looking for something else, Cherie? Have you thought about going back to school, getting your GED?”

How was it possible my serious, responsible, dependable Joe had actually come out of the same womb as Cherie? I tempered my frustration with her by reminding myself of her very real losses in life.

She’d been almost nine when she and Joe had lost their parents in a freak auto accident. She’d lived with their aunt and uncle while Joe was in college. Once we got married, she’d begged Joe to let her stay with us—and I’d agreed. In all the years since, she’d never bothered with the tedious task of growing up, at least not emotionally.

“I’m doing the best I can!” she hollered. “Just because I’m not a nine-to-fiver like you, you look down your nose at me. Forget it! Just forget it! I’ll figure something out! You never listen, Sara! You never take my side of anything!” With that, she banged down the phone, leaving me listening to silence and then the beep beep beep of the disconnect.

I left for work thinking I’d made things worse, not better. When would I learn? Damn, what defect possessed me to insert myself into their no-man’s-land?

In our front office, Lucy, the board secretary, greeted me with a panicked look on her face and Mr. Eeyore by her side. “Uh, Sara. Mrs….South is holding on line one for you.”

I stifled another groan. Mrs. South was Lucy’s code name for my mother. I chickened out.

“Uh, take a message and tell her I’m returning calls in just a few minutes,” I suggested brightly.

Lucy crooked her eyes at dour Daryl, who stood hunched over with a thick sheaf of papers in his hand. The one thing sure to make Daryl glower even more were personal calls during business hours.

“Uh, no, don’t think that will work,” she said just as brightly. “You remember the last time you tried that, she parked herself on my couch until you had a free moment.”

I folded. It was unconscionable to let Lucy take the brunt of my mother on a tirade. “Okay, okay, I’m going.”

“Sara, you think you can wrap that up pretty quickly? Don’t mean to take all of your morning, but you and I need to go over strategies to up attendance during the upcoming CRCT. Not that any of it will do any good,” Daryl said in his best Eeyore impersonation, referring to the standardized test the elementary schools gave.

“Right, right. Be with you in a sec,” I told him.

I wasn’t, of course. It took me fifteen minutes to get Ma settled down, and another five to part on good terms. My workday was toast in a blender from then on.

I met Maggie in the deserted office an hour after we could have gone home had we not been swamped with work.

“Well.” Maggie brimmed over with mock cheer. “This day was a total waste of makeup.”

“Amen, sister. Daryl’s war-room meeting about CRCT attendance chewed up my entire morning.”

“Heard anything about the referrals?” Maggie asked.

I shook my head. “Haven’t had a chance to check out the APC board. Maybe there’s good news. I could use it after today.”

I felt for the poor couples down to the last nail-biting days, only to have The Wait’s chasm yawn wide once again. Mostly, though, I’d absorbed myself with my own anxious thoughts.

Chinese adoptions were subject to the winds of bureaucratic fortune. Any number of things could cause a slowdown. It had happened before. Actually, we current adoptive parents could consider ourselves lucky. The Wait had crept up to more than a year just four or five years before, not including the paperwork. Now all we had to do was wade through The Paperchase—four to six months—and endure another six months of the official Wait.

But the CCAA’s dormant state had awakened all sorts of bad memories on the APC about how once before Chinese adoptions had been temporarily suspended. This was the true fear of all the people in the midst of the process: that the Chinese government would suddenly take offense to some event that took place either in our government or our media and turn off the spigot of adoptions.

The delay was because of the increasing strife with Taiwan, one school of thought went. Another opined it was the worrisome increase in numbers of children adopted by foreigners. Still another said, no, none of these. The Chinese government was actively rethinking their one-child policy, since demographics were dooming the country to a population heavily tilted toward males.

In truth, none of us knew anything beyond the fact that we wanted our babies. Or an explanation. Or preferably both. Give us our babies, please, then tack on the whys and the wherefores.

I’d tried to downplay all this to Joe. The last thing I wanted to do was give him any reason to doubt the outcome of the adoption.

WHAT I SAW when I logged onto the APC at home that afternoon left me reeling. Instead of finding the much-coveted referrals, I found the postings of mothers wearing sackcloth and ashes.

It was a reorganization of the CCAA, unexpected, unplanned, unheralded. A moratorium had been placed on all foreign adoptions until the new head of the CCAA could get up to speed. Sorry for all the trouble, we’ll get back on it as soon as possible, nothing to worry about.

Oh, but we did worry. Our worst fear had been realized. It didn’t help that all the major adoption agencies had been caught flat-footed by the news. This was a middle of the night head-rolling no one could have predicted. No one dared speculate when referrals would start flowing again.

It took all the guts I had to tell Joe. He stood on the back porch and just sagged with the news. The only other time I’d seen him go boneless was when I’d told him I had ovarian cancer.

He looked down at the work boots he hadn’t had a chance to pull off. “Do they…do they know how long?”

I blinked back tears and shook my head. “No. I called the agency, and they don’t really know any more than we do. They’re trying their best to be optimistic, but I could tell they were at their wit’s end. I just don’t know, Joe.”

“Anything like this ever happened before?”

“Yeah, a couple of times. One big time before, but usually it’s just a slowdown, you know, something that just gradually creeps up. This, this is kind of odd for the CCAA to do. And it came out of nowhere. No political incidents, no bad-mouthing in the media about Chinese adoptions…nothing.”

“Sounds like some head-honcho over there got in trouble with his higher-ups,” Joe mused.

“Maybe that’s all it is.”

Joe toed the rough boards of the porch. “I’m sorry, Sara. I wish…I wish…”

We ate our supper in silence, my throat closing up with so much grief I could barely swallow. Joe pushed his food around on his plate. He looked as though he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the words.

I needed space, time, to process it, to think. The supper dishes in the dishwasher, I climbed the stairs to the nursery.

I sat on the floor, the bifold closet doors wide open. Around me I spread the contents of a box I’d been collecting: vacuum packing bags, a soft yellow baby blanket, tiny packable baby toys and the one and only outfit I’d been able to bring myself to buy for Meredith.

In the solitude, I let tears course unashamedly down my face.

I hated this feeling, this awful, sick envy that gripped me whenever the door on the possibility of children seemed to slam shut. The feeling slept within me like an alien creature. Awakened, it devoured me at its leisure until I could finally loose myself from its grasp.

Joe and I had carefully avoided unprotected sex after we got married. After all, we were both twenty, I was still in college, and Joe had dropped out to work construction on his uncle’s crew. Too young to have a baby on the way.

Plus, Cherie’s presence threw a major monkey wrench in any plans we might have had. I didn’t want to upset the delicate balancing act I’d accomplished; bringing another child into the picture might well have done that.

At twenty-four, though, I was ready to start a family, and Joe had no objections, either. I went off the Pill, bought some frilly little baby clothes and eyed maternity wear.

Two years later, the baby clothes gathered dust in a closet. I hadn’t really worried until I heard a midday radio talk show about infertility. When the expert defined infertility as a year of unprotected sex with no resulting pregnancies, my heart seized in my chest.

I was infertile.

In that moment, I went from being a whole woman to damaged goods. Crazy, I know, but nonetheless true.

That’s when the two of us jumped on the infertility treadmill. I’d go into fertility specialists’ offices and gaze at the wall of baby photos with the awe of someone on sacred ground. These experts would fix me. I knew it.

Only, they hadn’t fixed me.

In their search for an explanation as to why I couldn’t conceive, they’d found a tumor growing in my left ovary—a freak misfiring of genetic chromosomes. Just the way life happened, the way the ball bounced, the way the cookie—and my hopes—crumbled.

Joe told me I was lucky. I was lucky. I was alive. I was a cancer survivor. But I was still damaged goods. Barren. The word is empty and meaningless to anybody who hasn’t ached for a baby.

Being barren made me cry at Mother’s Day services at church.

Being barren made Easter and Christmas and Thanksgiving and even Halloween torture.

Being barren made graduations unbearable, knowing I might never see my baby toss a cap in the air.

Being barren made baby showers unending agony. Picking out the tiny layettes or rattles was only half the battle. No, actually standing in the glow of an expectant, hopeful mom-to-be was far worse, because then I had to endure everyone’s pity. I’d smile and smile and smile at the women who would bend down and whisper, “Are you all right? This must be so tough on you.”

Back home from my surgery, I’d looked in the mirror and seen a thirty-year-old woman. I gathered up my fertility drugs, tossed out the so-called experts’ business cards and gave the dusty baby clothes to Goodwill.

The day after that, Joe brought home Cocoa. We’d decided by silent assent we’d remain childless.

And we’d stuck to that decision—until Joe had seen an ad in the paper about becoming foster parents. Which led us to Matthew.

Now the blue walls of the nursery, with the airplane I’d painted for Matthew, mocked me. No furniture graced the carpet here, and only a set of dusty mini-blinds shut out the night sky. Superstition had kept me from breaking out the pink paint and the cutesy alphabet-block border I’d found. My preparations focused on the trip to China. I didn’t dare let myself picture life with a little one of my own.

The image of a round face with blue eyes, freckles across the nose and a cowlick of wheat-straw hair swam before my tear-filled eyes. I would not think of Matthew. I would not.

Now Joe thumped up the creaky old stairs, and I hastily scrubbed my tears away with the baby blanket.

“I figured I’d find you in here.” Joe’s voice echoed in the bare room. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I’m getting there.” With the heel of my hand, I caught a stray tear. “How about you?”

He slid down along the doorjamb until he collapsed onto the carpet, his long legs stretched out in front of him. “Hell if I know. Just numb, I guess.”

“Oh, Joe…” His vulnerability, his pain, shone through loud and clear for the first time. I got up and crossed to his side, touching his face. “We’ll get through this. It’s just a setback. It’s hard, but it’s happened before. We’ll get our baby.”

An expression I couldn’t translate—didn’t want to translate—flickered over Joe’s face.

“What?” I asked. “Go ahead. Say it.”

“You. The eternal optimist. Haven’t seen a whisper of a referral in weeks, even the agency can’t tell you when they might start coming again, and yet you keep holding out hope the phone’s gonna ring and they’re going to say, ‘Come to China, we’ve got your baby.’”

I snatched my hand back as if his cheek had suddenly turned scalding. Folding my arms across my chest, I lifted my chin. “And who’s to say it’s still not going to happen?”

Joe shook his head. “Incredible. You are just the most incredible woman I know. Don’t you see the writing on the wall, Sara? What’s it gonna take? Our agency finally calling you up and saying, ‘Oops, guess we made a mistake?’ Don’t you know they’re not going to do that for as long as they can get away with it? They don’t want to let loose the money everybody’s been sending them.”

“You’re incredible. Incredibly cynical! These agencies are not in it for the money, Joe. They want to see these babies have homes.”

“They’re not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, either. They’re making money. I’m a businessman. I know how business operates. I just don’t want to see you get hurt. It’s happened before. You just pour so much faith that this next idea, this next trick, will get you a baby. All that fertility hogwash, doctor after doctor…and even after you had cancer you still couldn’t be satisfied with just making it out alive.”

I held my breath, prayed he wouldn’t say what I thought he was going to say. “Joe—”

But he plowed on, like a crazed bull in the narrow streets of Spain chasing a legion of white-shirted men. “I thought after they took Matthew you’d finally get it.”

I closed my eyes to ward off the pain, wrapped my arms around my knees and rocked back and forth.

“Sara, isn’t it obvious? Don’t you think we ought to be listening? It’s like God is shouting at us, ‘You idiots! I don’t want you to have a baby!’”

Shaking my head, I forced myself to look at Joe. “No, no. You just have to have faith. You just have to hang on.”

“Hell, maybe God’s right. It’s not like I’ve done a stellar job with Cherie. Remember how you told the social worker that I’d raised my little sister? That I’d make a brilliant father? Right. Brilliant. I did such a brilliant job of it that my little sister is a high school dropout who can’t even keep a minimum-wage job.”

“Joe, Cherie’s failures are not your fault—”

“And you. Your mother wasn’t exactly a great role model. She always cared more about where her next drink was coming from than you. Still does. It’s a miracle you weren’t molested or abused or God knows what else. We’re crazy to think we can raise a child to be something besides a juvenile delinquent.”

I sucked in my breath. How dare he? How dare he throw my own miserable childhood in my face?

“You’ve never had any faith in this, have you? So why’d you go along with it if you thought it was a boondoggle?”

“Because. You. Want. A. Baby. The one damn thing I can’t build for you with my own two hands. If I could, I’d go turn one out on the lathe for you right this very minute. I can’t buy a baby, I can’t borrow it, I can’t make it. Do you know how that makes me feel? To see you crying and to know that I can’t fix it? Me? The guy who goes in behind crappy contractors and cleans up their messes for half the price?”

“We’re fixing it, dammit!” Hearing him say the things I’d suspected he’d been thinking ripped into me like a chain saw. “If you’ll just believe—”

“Right. That’s what you said about Matthew. Believe and the judge will never give him back to that crackhead of a mother. Believe and Matthew will be ours forever. Believe.” Joe’s mouth twisted, and he gave me a curt shake of his head. “Well, I’m all out of faith, Sara. And I can’t find any place to order a fresh supply. I’m through. Done. Finito. I’m just not able to pick up the pieces when the next disappointment shatters you.”

“What do you mean, you’re through?” I put my fingers to my mouth as I whispered the words.

“Admit it, Sara. It’s over. Pull the dossier. Call the agency and tell them we’re quitting. Let’s end this.”

Every cell in my body screamed a visceral no! at his words, but I couldn’t force the words from my throat. All I could do was get away from him. Rubbery legs barely held me up as I stood. My hand steadied me against the door frame as I made for the stairs.

“Where are you going? We haven’t finished!”

Joe had twisted around the door frame so that he faced me. I looked at him, not recognizing anything at all familiar or dear or lovable in his grim, rock-stubborn countenance. “I have. This conversation is done, Joe. I mean it. I’m not stopping the adoption. My baby, my Meredith, is in China. So I’m going to China. With you or without you.”

Nothing more to say, I stumbled down the stairs, my sobs breaking loose in hard heaves.

CHAPTER FOUR

MORNING FOUND US civil, stiff and using the fewest possible words to communicate. It was like Name that Tune had taken over our kitchen.

The night before, I’d bawled my eyes out in our bedroom amid soft, comforting three-hundred-count Egyptian-cotton sheets and the white matelasse coverlet that Joe always called impractical. Part of me had fully expected Joe to tap me on the shoulder, tell me he was crazy, take me in his arms and make sweet apologetic love to me.

The other part, the part that knew love wasn’t all happily-ever-after, wasn’t surprised when he didn’t.

By the time he’d come slinking into our bedroom, my humming anger had overtaken me. I waited until he’d slid tentatively under the covers, careful not to touch me. Then I headed for the computer and the refuge the Chinese adoption boards Yahoo! offered.

With nearly fifteen-thousand members, someone was always awake on the APC. It was the big board, the board where rumors about referral slowdowns and speedups bloomed, cheek by jowl with urban legends about how the CCAA really matched you with your baby.

I logged onto my DTC group first, that small intimate gathering of everyone who had the same DTC date as I did. There, typing furiously, mindless of typos or grammar or anything but relief, I poured out my story.

To my amazement, someone in the group replied almost as quickly as I’d hit the send button.

Oh, you poor dear. (((MerryMom))) Boys are stupid, aren’t they? my electronic angel, KidReady, had given me a big virtual hug. Let me go back and read your post more carefully and I’ll give you MHO. Hey, I saw a ladybug today, that’s got to mean good luck and referrals soon, right?

I sat back and waited for her to give me that humble opinion. We APCers were a superstitious bunch, no doubt about it. We saw portents and signs in almost everything. But with The Wait so long, and without a burgeoning belly to remind us our “pregnancy” was indeed real, we all went a little stir-crazy sometimes. Ladybugs and red threads and a million other nutty but harmless myths kept us occupied.

And who’s to say ladybugs were a myth, anyway?

KidReady’s reply came back in that strange garbled shorthand that had sprung up to save our tired fingers keystrokes.

MerryMom, I say your dh is just as wounded and hurt as you are—as all of us are. He just wants to run like hell before China has a chance to quit on him. If he keeps it up, just apply iron-frying-pan therapy to that hard head of his, that ought to soften him up. He’ll be okay once the referrals come, OK? JMHO.

Tears choked my laughter. I felt a deep kinship with the women on this board—and I didn’t even know what they looked like or how their voices sounded. But they were the only ones who really got what it meant to endure The Wait. Not even Maggie could totally understand. With these women I’d shared deep, dark secrets, given them the speech about our babies being worth The Wait, had cyber baby showers, cyber birthday parties, dried tears, belly-laughed, given out Heinous Husband awards.

Heinous Husband awards. In our sunny kitchen the next morning, staring at Joe’s rigid back, I was ready to paint one in the shape of a bull’s-eye on his blue T-shirt and then loan him out as target practice.

My chin up, my back just as stiff as his, I marched past him and X’d out another day on The Wait calendar with a defiant screech of the marker. Joe looked at me wordlessly, his eyes flat over his coffee mug.

Joe and I hardly ever had serious fights, not like some couples. A couple we were friends with had regular knockdown drag-out rows about every six months or so. They’d send the kids to their grandmother’s and throw down. I could never understand a woman’s complacent acceptance of such a marriage. I didn’t know how your love stayed intact after you’d screamed obscenities at each other.

The one fight we’d had that came close to this one was when I’d had my ovary removed. Joe had lobbied hard for me to have a total hysterectomy, which he thought would eradicate any future chance of cancer. I’d been horrified. Give up any chance at all of having a child? Never.

We’d sulked and pouted and yelled at each other for days. The morning of the surgery, I’d packed my overnight bag and headed to the car by myself. I was two miles down the road when I’d turned the car around and floored it back home.

Joe had been sitting on the front porch of the bungalow we’d lived in then, tears streaming down his face. We’d grabbed onto each other as though we were sliding off a sinking ship. “Don’t ever do that again,” he’d whispered fiercely, burying his face in my hair. “I love you, can’t live without you. Don’t ever, ever do that.”

In the end, he’d decided it was my body and my decision. The hands-off approach had been a tough one for Joe, but he’d gritted his teeth and white-knuckled his way through it.

I wished desperately today was a weekday, not a Saturday. We’d always made it a practice to keep Saturday mornings for just the two of us. This morning, though, I wanted to be anywhere but here.

The telephone’s ring gave me an excuse to escape the silent table. I leapt like a trout to answer it.

“Hey, girl, got any plans today?” Maggie asked me. “How about some serious shopping therapy if you don’t have anything else to do?”

I smiled. Maggie had impeccable timing. I’d called her before Joe got in the night before, just so she could give me a plateful of moral support. Now she was giving me a second helping. “Not really, other than pick up some groceries for Ma. Why? What do you have in mind?”

“I’m heading up to Macon to make a Sam’s run. Wanna come along for the ride?”

Ah, Sam’s, the call of the warehouse store. I shot a guilty look over my shoulder at Joe, who resolutely forked up bites of scrambled eggs and grits and pretended not to listen.

“Sounds tempting. What else do you have planned?”

“Maybe an Olive Garden lunch? And we could go by Bed Bath & Beyond.”

“Ooh, Maggie, you know how to tempt a gal.”

“So we’re on? You can get loose from His Royal Highness?”

“I don’t think that will be a problem in the slightest.”

“Oh,” Maggie said in a knowing tone. “He’s giving you grief?”

“You couldn’t possibly imagine just how much.” I kept my voice cheerful and upbeat so Joe wouldn’t realize I was talking about him.

“Aha, he’s sitting there and you can’t give me the dirt. Gotcha, girl. Sounds like you need to be busted outta there. What do you say I pick you up in about an hour?”

“Sure! I’ll look for you around ten.”

I came back to my breakfast, where the morning’s gloom settled back on us. The pile of eggs on my plate seemed to grow, no matter how much I ate. Joe, too, seemed to have little appetite.

The tension made me sick, but I was on the side of might and right, and I didn’t intend to give even one tiny inch.

An insidious voice in my head whispered just as it had during the night: Maybe he never wanted to adopt. Maybe he’s just been going along to keep the peace. Maybe he’ll never love Meredith. What will you do then?

I pushed my chair back and the thought out of my head. Joe’d come around. Once he saw the referrals start coming in, he’d be okay. That was my Joe.

Over the sound of the running water in the sink, Joe asked, “So, uh, what are your plans for the day?”

I looked at him as he sat at our big dining table. “Nothing special. Have to get groceries. Thought I’d see if Ma needed anything. Maggie just asked if I wanted to go to Macon with her, for a Sam’s run.”

“Oh,” he replied. Another awkward silence stretched between us.

If he could try, so could I. “What about you?”

“Don’t know, really. It’s a beautiful day.”

“Yep.” I nodded, turning the plate in my hand to rinse it before I put it in the dishwasher. I switched off the faucet. “Thinking about doing something outside?”

The house we lived in was a big, low, metal-roofed home Joe’s uncle had built years before. Then, like many contractors, Uncle Bob let it slide into passive neglect while he stayed busy improving other people’s homes. When Joe and I had bought it, we’d replaced the leaky tin roof with a steel one, painted the exterior, gutted the kitchen and sacrificed the tiny formal dining room to make a huge, modern master bath next to our downstairs bedroom.

The big things got done quickly, and I enjoyed my gleaming maple cabinets and the soapstone countertops, as well as the elbow room in the master bath.

Other parts of the house told a different story, though. The carpet in the living room and throughout the tiny upstairs was the same awful shag Uncle Bob had picked up at a close-out sale. The upstairs bathroom looked straight out of the seventies and the yards were still in the throes of an evolution from looking thrown-away to well-tended. Joe’s honey-do jar was overflowing all the time.

“Well, maybe outside would be a good thing.” Joe stood now and stretched, his lean frame reaching up to the ceiling. He yawned.

Maybe he didn’t get any more sleep than I did. My heart thawed a bit. Obviously, his volunteering to work outside and do some of the heavy work was his quiet way of apologizing.

“What are you thinking of doing? I have some day-lilies that need dividing—”

Joe’s frown stopped me. “Nah,” he said. “I don’t really feel like working with the flowers today.”

“Oh. I noticed some of the spindles were loose on the bedroom side of the porch. Maybe you could look at that?”

“Maybe.” The way he dragged out the word so grudgingly made it apparent Joe didn’t feel like home repairs, either. “If I have time.”

Suddenly the man who didn’t have any plans was so pressed for hours in the day that he couldn’t check out wobbly porch spindles? A suspicion grew in my head, bloomed and spread.

“So what exactly will you be doing outside?”

“I think…” he stretched again, popped his knuckles over his head “…think it’s a good day to work on the boat.”

Not an apology after all. Just the boat.

I hated that boat. It was an old rickety wooden boat Uncle Bob had left in the workshop when he and Joe’s aunt had sold the house to us. Uncle Bob had sprung for a fancy aluminum bass boat, so he didn’t have anymore need of something so labor intensive.

The problem with the boat was that a guy couldn’t ever do any work on it by himself. He had to have a buddy for moral support, and Joe’s boat buddy was his best friend, Rick. If they’d actually done anything on the boat, it might be different. But a day spent working on that boat got sucked down into a black hole that devoured any real signs of productivity.

Oh, they sanded the blasted thing and varnished it and patched it and painted it. My credit card bills told me Joe and Rick had bought tons of supplies. But mostly the guys just talked about the boat. To my knowledge, that boat had never been tested for seaworthiness—or lake-worthiness, if that was the proper term—and probably never would. That boat was an excuse for two guys to huddle up and dream up reasons to dash off to buy some tool or gadget or supplies that Joe probably already had.

My tongue very nearly spewed out hot words. It was just the spark I needed to let loose the keg of dynamite I felt I was sitting on.

I didn’t have the chance. Joe knew me well enough, and knew well enough my feelings about the boat, to make a hasty escape out the back door, Cocoa dogging his heels. He pulled out his cell phone and stuck it to his ear on the way to his backyard workshop. I knew without a doubt that Rick’s wife was about to get boat-attacked herself.

Maggie found me still blowing steam an hour later. She cocked an attentive ear sideways. “Man, am I glad to hear you’re still fluent in good ol’ South Georgia cussin’. I was beginning to think you’d been cured.”

Maggie’s empty vehicle awaited us in the drive. “Where’s LaTisha?”

“She’s at her friend’s house, supposed to be studying, but I know better than that. Still, I know her friend’s mama, and she’s a worse tyrant than me. She’ll keep ’em straight.”

I thought about all the times Maggie and I had giggled over our books as we lay on her powder-blue chenille bedspread, our feet crossed at the ankles. If we got too loud, Mr. or Mrs. Boatwright would poke a head in and yank us back in line. Nothing like having a best friend to make tough times easier to bear.

Maggie backed her gas-guzzling SUV carefully around my pine trees and the azaleas that still had a fuchsia-colored flower or two clinging to them. “So spill it, girl. What did bad ol’ Joe say about the adoption?”

“He wants us to pull our dossier.” Just saying it to a real, live person and seeing her astonished reaction served as validation for me.

“He what?”

The story gushed out of me in all its gritty, painful details as Maggie made her way up Bellevue Avenue, past Dublin’s pretty historic homes. She took a quick left, not bothering to use a signal, so she could scoot up Academy by Cordell Lumber Company.

“You mean, after you guys have come through this much hell and you’re this close, he wants to yank the plug?”

“Something like that.” I nodded my head in agreement.

“That boy beats all I ever saw. What was it like this morning? Don’t reckon he was man enough to apologize?”

“Oh, no. He’s too busy.”

“With what?” Maggie lowered her brows in suspicion.

“The boat.”

Maggie closed her eyes, shook her head and said, “Thank you, Lord, for seeing fit not to burden me with a husband. That boat.”

Her mention of being single pulled me away from my own miseries. “I was too busy last night crying on your shoulder to ask you about whether your new fellow had called back.”

“No…but his girlfriend did.”

A pang shot through me at her words. I took in the grim set of her face and knew the discovery had stung her worse than her casual tone let on.

“Oh, Maggie.” Not sure exactly what to say, I patted her arm. “That’s awful.”

“Worse than awful. It was his live-in girlfriend.”

I cringed. “Mags, he ought to be hung from his thumbnails.”

“I heartily agree. As bad as Shelton was—both times—at least he never cheated on me. He may have stolen my money and had a gambling habit so bad he would have bet on how long a stinkbug would smell, but I never had to call up an unsuspecting woman and ask if she’d been with my man.”

“What did you say to her?” I looked up to see we were racing toward a yellow light. “Uh, Maggie, that’s Kellam up there and there’s a traffic light and it’s red.”

She stood on the brakes, squealing to a stop at the intersection. “Thank you. Didn’t see it. I told that fool girl, yes, indeedy, I had been with him. That he’d failed to mention pertinent details like he was supposed to be collared and leashed, and that even before I knew he was a yellow-bellied cheater, I hadn’t been too impressed with him.”

Even though Maggie was in obvious pain, I couldn’t help but chuckle at the way she recapped the conversation. “You didn’t! You didn’t call him a yellow-bellied cheater.”

“I sure did.” She let off the brake and headed through the intersection at a more sedate pace. “I wanted to call him worse, but LaTisha was standing right there. It’s true, you know. I think the reason men wind up running around on you is they can’t scrounge up enough courage to just be honest and tell you, ‘Hey, babe, lately somebody else has been moving the earth for me, so it’s quits for us, okay?’ Pure, lily-livered cowardice.”

In the beat of silence that followed, I told her, “I’m sorry. Sorry that you had something like this happen on your first guy since Shelton. Sorry that I was too wrapped up in myself to be there for you.”

Maggie lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “It’s okay. Just caught me flat-footed, you know?” She glanced my way. “I knew he wasn’t anything special when he asked me for cash to leave a tip. Besides, I’m better off finding out now.”

“You’ll find the one you’re supposed to be with, Maggie.”

“Of course. Somebody’s gotta be brave enough to take me on. And I’m a whole heap older and wiser now. Hell, I was my own worst enemy with Shelton. I just kept lying to myself, telling myself he’d change.”

Is that what I’m doing with Joe? I asked myself. Just fooling myself into thinking once he holds Meredith for the first time, everything will be okay?

Maggie must have picked up on my sour thoughts. “I know I’ll find somebody. After all, look at you and Joe. He may be a definite member of the husbandus irritatus species, but he doesn’t lie, he doesn’t cheat and, most importantly, he won’t gamble away your life savings.” She took the opportunity at the Industrial Boulevard intersection to reach over and squeeze my hand. “I know it’s rough now. But he’s just scared. He’s afraid to hope. I’ve been there. It’s hard to get back up on that horse after it’s thrown you.”

I smiled. “Husbandus irritatus, huh? Maybe I’ll get him a T-shirt with that printed on it. He is a good guy, isn’t he?”

“Sure. Look how much he cares. He never forgets your birthday or your anniversary, he puts up with all the crap from your mother and I know more than one man who would have bailed on a woman once she wound up with cancer. Not Joe, though. He stuck by you. Shelton wouldn’t have done that, not in a million years. The only ding Joe has is Cherie.”

Her mention of Cherie reminded me about the early morning phone call I’d had the day before. When I gave Maggie the high notes on it, she shook her head.

“Now that is scary, Cherie using her pea-brain to figure anything out. See? That’s probably what Joe’s so wigged out about. He and Cherie probably got into it again yesterday before he got home, and now he’s thinking it’s all his fault how she turned out. But you and I know that young’un’s always been a spoilt brat.”

That was true. The first time I’d met Cherie was when Maggie and I had spied on Joe during football practice our senior year. Cherie, an immature eight, had barreled up the stands where we sat and grabbed my soft drink out of my hands.

“I’m thirsty! I wanna drink!” she’d shrieked as I told her no out of pure reflex.

The resulting altercation had attracted the attention of Joe’s football-coach dad, who’d been glowering on the sidelines. He came up to where we tussled over a fifty-cent soft-drink can.

“Baby girl, you know you don’t want somebody else’s germs,” he’d said, swooping her up and totally missing the part about respect for personal property. “Here’s some money. You go get your own drink. But don’t tell your mama, okay? Just our little secret, got it?”

Then he’d turned, looked out on the field at his son. “Joe!” he’d bellowed in a harsh voice. “You knuckle-head! That’s not how I wanted you to run that play! Give me twenty and then sit your backside on the bench so you can let a real quarterback show you how it’s done.”

The bump of Maggie’s SUV as it hit the access ramp to I-16 brought me back to the present. Maybe Joe feared he’d be the father his dad had been to him—or to Cherie.

But Joe’d proven an excellent father to Matthew. I just had to remind him to have faith in himself—and pray China would soon fling wide the adoption floodgates.

CHAPTER FIVE

MAGGIE AND I blew Saturday. We poked along like two little blue-haired old ladies. I had no inclination to head back to the demilitarized zone I called home, so for once I wasn’t rushing her.

We pulled up in my drive at about six. I saw no sign of Joe, but Rick’s truck was parked in front of the workshop. I figured they’d wandered off somewhere.

After Maggie had headed home to Campbell, I sorted out my groceries from the ones I’d bought for Ma. I dreaded facing her, but she was right: Grocery shopping with no means of transportation was difficult.

Like Maggie, Ma lived in Campbell. It was where I grew up, where I’d gone to school. Ma had raised me in a series of tar-paper shacks and rundown mobile homes, always moving one step ahead of the eviction notice. I remembered too many times when we’d go for a day or so without lights or propane because Ma had drunk up all her paycheck.

I never knew my dad. Ma had gotten pregnant when she was sixteen, followed by a shotgun wedding at the behest of Ma’s own drunk of a father. I suspected Granddaddy was more concerned with ridding himself of responsibility than with his only daughter’s virtue.

The marriage vows dissolved before I was even born, and my dad took off to parts unknown. Ma said he’d gone out to get a fifth of liquor and never came back. She always seemed more ticked about him diddling her out of that last bottle than him abandoning us.

She waitressed at a series of local cafés and beer joints, chronically disenchanted with whatever her current employment situation was. My ma was made to be a rich, idle woman with a richer man to take care of tedious details like paying bills on time. She was not made for hard-scrabble survival.

Our penury, though aggravated by her love of liquor, humiliated her. She’d send me in the grocery store to buy food so I would be the one to present food stamps to pay for it.

It bothered me, too. I still remember the burning shame that coursed over me when a careless lunchroom worker shouted to the new cashier, “Honey, don’t mind her. She’s one of them that gets a free lunch.”

The Boatwrights’ clean, well-run home told me I didn’t have to live in squalor. To this day, the smell of laundry-fresh sheets will take me back to the day Cecilia Boatwright showed me how to fold a fitted sheet. It boggled the mind of a kid whose mother was content to sleep on sheets gray with filth.

Maggie’s mom taught me everything about running a house. She made a big production out of including Maggie in her tutelage, but even as a little kid, I knew what she was doing. I loved her even more fiercely for it.

I pulled into the housing project Ma unwillingly called home these days. She hadn’t liked it, but after I’d sold her car, she didn’t have much choice. She needed to live in town where she could at least walk to the small selection of stores Campbell had to offer, and public housing was about all she could afford on her monthly disability check.

The sight that greeted me in the growing twilight filled me with dismay. Ma was busy having herself a dustup with her neighbors and the police. I groaned and got out of my Volkswagen.

“—don’t want nobody botherin’ my stuff!” she shrieked. “’s my stuff, and don’t want none of youse botherin’ it. I know you took it, you theivin’, no-good—”

Here, her language deteriorated into a string of racial slurs, sure to go over well with the young black patrolman who looked like he’d rather be anywhere but dealing with Nora O’Rourke.

I crossed the threadbare grass, worn down to the South Georgia sand where kids had played tag and baseball. “Ma! Ma! Calm down. What’s wrong?”

But asking Ma to calm down produced as much result as telling a hurricane to go back to the middle of the Atlantic. I turned to the patrolman. I recognized him. Cedric had graduated from Bryce County High School only the year before.

“Hey, Cedric. What’s the deal here?”

“This your mama, Mrs. Tennyson? Gosh, I wouldn’t have thought it. She sure ain’t like you.” Cedric looked momentarily abashed at his unsolicited candor. “Uh, sorry. Didn’t mean anything by it.”

“No, Cedric, you’re right. She’s not like me. But she is my mother. So what have we got here?”

Cedric scratched his head. “Mrs. O’Rourke here seems to think—”

“That’s Miss, thank you very much! I took back my maiden name when that sorry piece o’ white trash took off on me. Sara? Sara, is that you?” She weaved unsteadily in my direction, and I realized she was drunker than I thought.

“Yeah, Ma. It’s me.” Weariness settled over me, down to my toes. It wasn’t the separate incidents that did me in. It was the unending frequency of them, the feeling it would never get any better.

“Uh, Miss O’Rourke seems to think someone has stolen some money from her and some family heirlooms.”

I couldn’t bite back the laughter that pealed from my lips. Cedric looked astonished at my reaction.

“Cedric, trust me. We don’t have any family heirlooms. I think what’s happened is my mother is a little drunk, and she’s forgotten where she put something. If you’ll help me get her back in her apartment, I’ll take it from here.”

The apartment was a pigsty. I’d cleaned it up the week before, but she’d totaled it since. Dishes rose high on every horizontal surface. Clothes lay strung out over the soiled sofa and chairs. The stench of collected garbage and vomit mingled together in the airless room, making me want to heave.

Cedric held on to Ma’s arm as he guided her over a tangled knot of panty hose and a gray-as-plaster bra. He wrinkled his nose at the smell and looked embarrassed at having to wade through a woman’s dirty underclothes. He settled her on her couch atop yet another pile of clothes, backing up carefully. Just as he turned around, he upset a bowl of sour milk and Cheerios on the battered coffee table. Cedric’s lightening quick response saved it from landing on the stained beige carpet.

“Oops, nearly made a mess there,” Cedric said.

I gave a wry chuckle. “Think the mess was already here. What’s a little spilled milk in a disaster zone like this?”

Ma sat quietly, docilely, on the couch, blinking in confusion. The drama that had energized her now gone, she yawned without bothering to cover her mouth. “Y’know, I’m kinda tired. Think I’ll go to sleep.” With that, she keeled over, her head smashing down on the hard arm of the sofa.

“She gonna be okay?” Cedric asked. “Should I—should I get her a pillow or something, Mrs. Tennyson?”

I shook my head. “This your first day or so on the job, Cedric?”

He puffed his chest out with pride. “No, ma’am. I’ve been on the force for a week now.”

“Good for you!” I nodded my approval. “Let me tell you a secret about my mother. She’s a drunk. Always has been. Always will be. You’ll be called out here more times than you can count. She’s like a bad ol’ country song, somebody’s always done her wrong. But if you just steer her back into the apartment, she’ll usually sleep it off and not be much of a bother to anybody. And I wouldn’t worry too much about niceties like pillows. She’s managed to survive this long. I expect she’ll keep right on.”

Understanding began to dawn in Cedric’s eyes. He gave me a long, considering look. “I appreciate the advice, Mrs. Tennyson. I’ll sure keep it in mind.”

“Oh, and Cedric, she’s racist as the day is long, but don’t be offended by that. She hates everybody.”

He nodded slowly, comprehension moving him backward to the open apartment door. “Guess I’ll be going then, if I can’t be of any more service to you, Mrs. Tennyson.”

“Thanks, Cedric. I appreciate you looking out for her.”

My mother interrupted our goodbyes with a loud and lusty snore.

I tackled the bedroom first, stripping off sheets and gathering up clothes and liquor bottles. From all appearances, Ma had come into an unexpected windfall and celebrated with cheap booze. Once I had the bedroom presentable, I walked a sleepy, protesting Ma back into her bathroom and washed her up as well as I could. Then I guided her to the bed, pulled the covers up under her chin and gazed down at her.

Daughters were supposed to love their mothers, and I suppose I did love Ma. She couldn’t manage to stomp out that basic feeling.

Love might be a given, but respect wasn’t. She’d never managed to earn my respect.

Fear nagged at me. Would Meredith one day look at me in this way? Could I be a good enough mom to earn Meredith’s respect? Or did I possess some faulty O’Rourke gene that rendered its women incapable of mothering? Was it latent, just waiting to switch on and prove all my attempts to better myself were nothing but a farce?

The cheap clock in the living room chirped eight o’clock with the tinny warble of an electronic chickadee, reminding me the rest of the apartment waited.

I scrubbed and mopped and tossed liquor bottles until the smell of alcohol and bleach burnt the tender skin in my nostrils. By eleven o’clock that night, I had the place righted. It took me two trips to haul the three heavy trash bags of detritus I’d collected to the trash can. The loud slam of the cart lid startled a feral cat that had wandered up to take a sniff.

After a check on Ma, still snoring noisily under a Tweety comforter I’d never seen before, I gathered up the dirty clothes and headed for my car.

Tomorrow, Ma would wake with a fierce hangover and be mad as hell that I’d poured all her booze down the drain. She’d never believe she’d drunk the last of it herself. I was always the bad guy with her. She was always the recalcitrant child who pouted and sulked and screamed to get her way.

We’d tried detox and A.A. and even hypnosis, plus a goodly portion of prayer. But like that old saw about how many psychiatrists it takes to change a light bulb, nothing would help until Ma herself wanted to change.

I drove on up the interstate, the soft syrupy sounds of late-night country music no help for my mood. Despite my best efforts, tears slipped down my face. Between the fight with Joe and my latest skirmish in the never-ending battle to keep Ma safe from herself, I was one sad puppy.

The clock on the dash read eleven-forty-five when I got home. I humped the overflowing basket of Ma’s dirty clothes up the porch steps and into the dark house. Cocoa lay sprawled out on the living-room sofa. She cracked open one eye and thumped her tail in a sleepy greeting.

“Hey, girl. I’ve missed you, too. You go on back to sleep, but get off that couch before Joe wakes up in the morning, you hear?”

The light above the stove gave me a dim view of the kitchen. Two glasses sat on the counters, a plate by the sink. The memory of Ma’s catastrophe of an apartment made me drop the basket of clothes and put the handful of offending items in the dishwasher.

Joe’s long frame took up three-quarters of the bed. I didn’t bother turning on the light, just guided myself by the one he’d left on in the bathroom. Peeling off my wretched clothes, I dropped them to the floor. I considered briefly the idea of simply tossing them and not bothering to salvage the white T-shirt I’d worn. My ingrained frugality won out, though.

In the shower, I switched on the hottest water I could stand and let the cleansing stream of water pour over me. The grime from the awful day sluiced into the drain at my feet. I propped against the ceramic tiles, tears mingling with the hot water.

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