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“Yeah, like when I was six.” Josh stands in the kitchen doorway, looking more uncertain than I’ve ever seen him as he aims a smile in Dylan’s direction. My heart expands with love.
“I think it was more like seven,” I say. “Dylan’s age!” I look between them both, but as some sort of bonding moment, it passes them right by. “Josh, can you get Dad from his office?”
By the time Nick arrives in the kitchen, we’ve all sat down and, as he joins us, I say grace. I always said grace as a child, and when the kids were little, we did every night, a family ritual, a cozy encircling of hands, a reminder of gratitude.
In the last five years or so, with kids coming in late from sports practice, our family life hectic and disparate, it has fallen by the wayside, except at Thanksgiving and Christmas. Yet for some reason tonight, with a child in the house again, I revert to it automatically.
“Thank you for the food we eat. Thank you for the friends we meet. Thank you for the birds that sing, thank you, God, for everything! Amen.” I sound like a kindergarten Sunday School teacher.
Josh looks bored, Nick baffled.
“We haven’t done that in a while,” he says as helps himself to some chicken.
“Well, no reason not to,” I say brightly. I’m heading into manic mode again, and I check myself. “Dylan, would you like some chicken? How about some chips?”
Wordlessly he takes a single chip from the bowl and puts it on his plate.
Dinner passes uneventfully enough, although Dylan doesn’t eat very much and says even less. In fact, he says nothing, and as Josh helps me scrape plates into the garbage disposal, he asks in a loud whisper, “Does he even speak? Is he, like, mute?”
“Selectively mute,” I say a bit stiffly, trying to keep my voice pitched low. “He can talk, but he chooses not to.”
“Weird,” Josh mutters as he shakes his head, and while I can’t blame him for thinking that, I wish he hadn’t said it out loud. Dylan might be selectively mute, but he’s not selectively deaf. He can hear everything we say, and I have the distinct impression he is taking in every single word.
After dinner, Nick tries to slip back to work, but I won’t let him.
“You don’t really need to work now, surely,” I insist. “Why don’t you spend a few moments with Dylan? You could give him a bath.”
“A bath?” Nick looks almost appalled by the suggestion, but then he quickly masks it with a smile. “I mean, yeah, sure. We’re allowed…?”
“Of course we’re allowed. He’s only seven.” But as I say the words, I realize I don’t actually know. There were so many rules, and they are now all jumbled up in my head. Were we allowed to give foster kids baths, or was it just you couldn’t give unrelated children baths together? “Anyway, I’m sure he’ll enjoy it.” Although who knows? Maybe Dylan has issues with baths or water or something. Maybe his mother tried to drown him, or left him in too long, or maybe she was obsessive about baths and washed him till his skin was chafed bright red. I have no idea.
“Dylan, would you like a bath?” I ask, and his whole face lights up. It’s the first time I’ve seen him smile. He nods, and I glance pointedly at Nick.
“Great, buddy,” Nick says, doing his best to sound jolly. “We’ve got an awesome tub. It even has jets. Come on up and see.”
As Dylan follows Nick upstairs, I let out a pent-up breath I didn’t even realize I was holding. My shoulders are knotted with tension and I feel exhausted just by routine living.
It almost feels like a luxury, to clean the kitchen by myself, the downstairs blissfully quiet as twilight descends softly outside, a violet blanket draped over the yards and houses, shadows pooling on the ground. From upstairs, I can hear Nick’s voice and a few splashing sounds, and I’m relieved that it all seems to be going okay, despite that one awful episode earlier.
When the kitchen is clean, since Nick and Dylan still seem to be enjoying themselves, I pour myself a sneaky glass of wine and take it to my study, which is a boxy little room off the kitchen.
It occurred to me as we were eating that there had be tons of support for foster parents online. Monica gave us a printout of groups and websites at the end of our course, but I filed the paper away somewhere and didn’t give it any more thought, because at that point it wasn’t needed or relevant.
Now, however, I type foster care support in the search bar and breathe a sigh of relief as link after link comes up, websites and message boards and Facebook groups, all for people like me. I spend a few minutes clicking through, and find all sorts of advice. I even discover a thread about the whole bath issue, and discover that I was right—baths are allowed, just not with unrelated children.
More importantly, I discover how relatively relaxed it all seems. The system is overburdened, the caseworkers stretched to the max, and foster parents do what they have to do to get by, without informing anyone of anything that doesn’t seem important. Maybe I don’t have to tiptoe around so much, after all. The rules can be relaxed, if not actually broken.
I am still feeling relieved from this discovery, and mellow from the glass of wine, when my cell phone rings. It’s Monica.
“Just checking that everything’s going all right,” she says after I answer. “Sorry we had to leave so abruptly—we had another situation. Anyway, how is Dylan?”
“He’s great,” I practically chirp. “Really great.”
“That’s wonderful,” Monica says after what feels like a slightly startled pause. “Susan will be so pleased. She was worried, but she also wondered if he might do better away from his mother. Anyway. So there are no problems?”
I think of the screaming, but decide it’s not worth mentioning. We got over it, after all. “No, no problems. Like you said, he’s very quiet, but he’s fine. We’re figuring out what he needs, and he listens really well. We’ve had dinner and he’s having a bath now and it’s all good.” I sound as if I am brimming with benevolence, and right now I feel as if I am. What on earth was I so scared about? This is easy. This is fun.
“That’s terrific, Ally,” Monica says. “That will be a big relief to Susan especially, and of course to Beth. I’ll be in touch in a day or two about Beth’s visit. Is that okay?”
