The College Fund at the Pasture Fence

The drive home

We left before the fireworks. Mom came out to the yard as we were leaving and caught my arm. She was sixty-eight and had been widowed for four years, and she smelled like sunscreen and onions.

“He didn’t mean anything by it,” she said. “That boy doesn’t think.”

“I know he didn’t, Mom,” I said. “Hunter’s sixteen. He says what he hears.”

She knew who he heard it from. She did not say so, and neither did I. She hugged me hard and went back to her lawn chair.

On the drive home down the county blacktop, the sun was going down orange over the bean fields and somebody was already shooting off bottle rockets behind a machine shed.

Neil drove with one hand on the wheel and one on my knee. He did not try to fix anything. After a while he said, “You want me to go talk to him?”

“No,” I said. “You did what needed doing. I don’t need you fighting my brother at the farm.”

That night we sat out on our porch steps with two glasses of iced tea and listened to the fireworks from town pop and fade. Lightning bugs were coming up out of the side yard.

“It’s your money, Liz,” Neil said. “Always was. Whatever you want to do with it, I’m behind you.”

“I’m not doing anything with it tonight,” I said. “Not mad. I won’t do one thing with that money while I’m mad.”

And I meant that. I want to be honest about it. I did not move that money out of spite. I moved it because of a nine-year-old boy I had not met yet.

The training

That spring, Neil and I had done something we had not told anybody but Mom. We had signed up to become foster parents.

It started with a flyer on the bulletin board at the lab. The county needed homes. Kids were sleeping in the Children’s Division office some nights because there was nowhere to put them.

I read that flyer every day for three weeks on my way to the break room. Then I took it down and brought it home and put it on the counter in front of Neil.

He read it twice. Then he said, “Tuesday nights. I can make Tuesday nights work.”

The training was nine Tuesday nights in a church fellowship hall in Fulton, three hours each.

We learned about trauma, and about how a child who has been moved five times will test you to see if you will be the sixth.

We did the fingerprints and the background checks. A licensing worker came and walked every room of our house and measured the spare bedroom and checked that we had a working smoke detector and a fire extinguisher.

She also walked our yard. She looked at the old shed, the clothesline, the ditch along the road. She asked if we had a pond. We did not. She wrote that down and smiled.

Our license came through the second week of August. We bought a twin bed at a farm auction outside Mexico and Neil painted the spare room a pale blue, and then we waited.

The call

It came on a Tuesday night in September at 9:40. I was standing in the side yard taking sheets off the line in the dark, because I had forgotten them, and my phone buzzed in my back pocket.

The caseworker’s name was Karen. She sounded tired. She said there was a nine-year-old boy named Brody who needed a home that night, and could we take him for at least a few months, maybe longer.

“Yes,” I said, before she had finished. Then I looked across the yard at Neil, who had come out on the porch, and he nodded before I asked.

Karen brought him at 11:15. He had one backpack and a plastic grocery sack with a pair of sneakers in it. He had been in three homes since the spring.

He was small for nine, with a cowlick at the back of his head that would not lie down no matter what you did to it. He looked at our house like he was memorizing the doors.

He did not cry. That was the thing that got me. He was very polite. He said “yes ma’am” and “no sir” and asked where the bathroom was, and then he went to bed in the pale blue room with his shoes on.

I sat on the porch steps until two in the morning. Neil came out and sat with me. Neither of us said much. Every so often we heard the bed creak, and we both held our breath.