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"I do. But this is getting a little nuts. You're starting to look like a hippie."
My eyes pop open, and I give her a fake glare that makes her giggle before I turn on the accent I know she secretly loves. "Let's shave it off, then. I'm from Dorchester, honey. We don't do no hippie shit."
She laughs, then tips her head up for another kiss. This time I take a little more, tasting her wine-soaked mouth fully. Damn. And I'm ready to go all over again.
But I step back, much to her obvious disappointment. I want to savor the night, not charge through it like a racehorse. "How was the day? Did you find a new office space yet?"
That's really all it takes to distract her. Red really can't ignore a question. She starts talking about the day spent with realtors, which clearly drove her crazy since she'd rather be seeing clients. But the firm is growing. They took on five new associates this year and just landed a huge client (alongside Sterling Petersen Labs), one that's big enough to allow them to dedicate a full thirty percent of their time to pro-bono cases. It's a lot of work, but I can tell she loves it. Red struggled for so long to figure out what she wanted to do with her career, but in the end, it became clear: she just wanted to be her own boss. The space to soar on her own terms.
"Also," I said as I reach around her to the stack of mail on the counter. "This came today. The kids both got into Billings."
At that, Skylar's face lights up. It's been rough with her siblings over the last five years. They settled into Andover pretty quickly, but it's always been clear that they needed a better home than a boarding school. We take them on weekends and over their vacations, when Janette will visit us at the Cape during the summer, but it's not enough. Those kids need a family. They always have.
When Maurice was put on the equivalent of house arrest for the French version of the Bernie Madoff scandal, we thought we saw an in. Janette had promised Skylar and me guardianship rights in exchange for paying their way for school. But Janette's just as wily as her husband––maybe more. She figured out that the kids were a way into Skylar's life and that we weren't going to abandon them no matter what. So guardianship went out the window, and we just didn't have the bandwidth to fight it during the years after Jenny was born.
Until this year, when we finally took it to court. And won.
Skylar takes the letter from me and scans over the acceptance. She looks up with a grin that makes her freckles scrunch over her nose. It's so wicked cute, I can't handle it.
"So it's settled?" she asks. "They're coming here to live with us?"
I grin back. Christoph still hasn't totally lost his French accent, and even at eleven, he still hangs on every word I say. Annabelle isn't so attached––at thirteen, she's starting to want to do her own thing more and more. I know it will be a big change for them, going from essentially being on their own most of their life to living in a house with structure. But they both adore their little niece, and they never seem to want to go back to school when they visit.
"Oh God," Skylar says with a sudden hand at her chest. "I just realized something. We're going to have a teenage girl in our house. And she's cute." She looks up at me with wide, mischievous eyes. "It's going to be good practice for when Jenny starts bringing home boys."
At that thought, the smile drops from my face, and I feel like my hands just lost their feeling. Red immediately starts laughing.
"Oh God!" she crows as she bends over on the counter. "Your face! Oh shit, poor Jenny!"
"You mean poor Jenny's boyfriends," I say as I push a hand through my hair. "Christ. I do not want to think about that right now."
Skylar just keeps laughing even harder after I shoot her a dirty look. She takes another sip of her wine. "Oh, I almost forgot to tell you. I got a call today from Maria Frazier."
At that, I perk up. Maria is the social worker we've been working with. At first I was pretty reticent about working with the state again––not after the experiences I had as a kid. But Maria has single-handedly won me over to the hard work that so many of them do. The woman is a saint.
"What did she say?"
Red grins and puts her hand on my chest, right over my heart. "It's official, babe. We're going to meet him next Wednesday."
We thought about having another kid. Jenny was a surprise––one that came along in spite of the IUD. A good one, one that we were both over the moon about, but a surprise nonetheless, who came almost a year to the day that we were married at the hospital. But when we talked about another, Skylar was always more hesitant. I don't blame her––you would be too if you spent nine whole months tossing up every meal you had. But we didn't want Jenny to be an only child, so the conversation always came back to another idea: adoption.
There were so many kids out there, kids like me. Kids who didn't have loving families, or who came from ones so fucked up they couldn't get what they needed from their parents. And when we both talked about it, the idea of giving at least one of those kids a real home started to sound better and better. A place where they could get that thing Skylar and I had both always wanted––real, unconditional love.
"Grab my purse," she says gesturing toward the hall where she dropped her bag.
I smirk at her. I know her game––she just wants to stare at my ass when I walk away. When I return, she quickly opens her email.
"Nine o'clock on Monday morning," she said. "We'll have another interview, and if that goes well, we'll meet him then." She swipes again, and looks up at me, green eyes glittering. "Here he is."
In the email, there's a picture of a little boy who's maybe two. He's got dark hair and dark eyes, a round face that should be rounder, which makes me wonder if he's had enough to eat. His hair is cut awkwardly, like it was done too fast with a pair of kitchen scissors. But I can tell he's smart. There's a brightness in his eyes that makes it clear he's the kind of kid who notices things all the time.
"What's his name?" I whisper as I brush a thumb lightly over the picture. I'm almost afraid it might disappear.
Skylar kisses my shoulder and leans her head on my shoulder. "Luis. His mother was a single mom. Venezuelan refugee. I guess she got wrapped up into drugs when she got here––she overdosed a few weeks ago. He's..."
She drifts off, and I know she's thinking of my mother, of the way she abandoned me in the same way, over and over again. But it doesn't bother me to think about right now. All I can see is Luis.
And in that moment, I only feel one thing. There's that swelling in my chest, the same one I had the second I saw Skylar sitting in my windowsill, the moment I watched my baby girl come into the world. For all this kid is a stranger, I know he's my son. And no matter what he's been through, what he needs to live a healthy life, how hard that might be for him to accept, I'll always be there for him. I'll always love him. Because that's what fathers do.
"He's perfect," I whisper.
"He is," Skylar agrees as she looks down at him with me. "There will be some things to sign, and we'll need to appear in court. But soon, he'll be really and truly, legally ours."
"Ours," I repeat, and my voice is full of awe and wonder. How could he be anything else?
~
The End
