The Six Who Walked Ahead of Me

Marcia Granger said it in my garden on a hot Sunday afternoon in August, with her sunglasses pushed up in her hair and a checkbook in her purse.

She had come out to the farm to go over the reception numbers, and I had walked her down past the sweet corn to show her the sunflowers.

“Becca, I’ll be honest with you, because somebody has to be,” she said. “The six kids. I think they should stay home that day. Get a sitter. They aren’t really yours, and it’s going to be a lot of explaining in the pictures.”

I was holding a hoe. I remember that because I set it down very carefully against the fence post, the way you set something down when you are afraid of what your hands might do with it.

Across the yard, my four-year-old was chasing a barn cat that wanted nothing to do with her.

“A lot of explaining,” I said.

“You know what I mean. Fifty years from now somebody pulls out the album and says, who are all these children? And nobody remembers. They’ll be gone by then, honey. That’s how it works with fostering. I’m thinking about the pictures you’ll keep.”

She said it kindly. That was the hard part. She said it the way you would tell a woman her slip was showing, as if she were doing me a favor nobody else had the nerve to do.

Then she patted my arm and asked if we could still get the tent in white instead of ivory.

I want to tell this right, so I will start with who we were that summer, and then I will tell you what I did, which was not much, and what it turned into, which was a great deal more than I planned.

My name is Becca Thorsen. I was thirty-seven years old, a dairy herdswoman, and I lived on the farm where I grew up, in west-central Minnesota, about twenty minutes out of town on a gravel road that the county grades twice a year whether it needs it or not.

My dad, Arne, milked cows on that place for forty-one years. When his knees gave out he sold the herd to a family over by Starbuck, and I went to work as a herdswoman at a three-hundred-cow dairy six miles east of us.

I do the fresh cows, the calving, the records, and whatever else needs doing before the sun comes up.

Dad still lives in the old house. I took the newer one his folks built across the yard in 1962.

And for the past four years, that house had been full of children who were not born to me.

I got my foster license through the county when I was thirty-three. I had always meant to have a big family, and the years had gone by, and one night after a calving I sat in the truck and thought, there are kids in this county right now who need a bed tonight, and I have four of them empty. That was how simple it was, and how hard.

By that summer I had six. Kayla was fifteen, quiet and sharp, and she had been with me almost two years.