Peas and Carrots (3 page)

“Dess.”

Foster Lady's voice is just a whisper, but I wake up, fast, and lean away from her. I don't fall asleep in the car, ever, but Baby's talking must have driven me to it. Funny, he's passed out in his car seat next to me, head flopped to the side and little arms hanging slack. I used to sack out like that.

Foster Lady's van has one of those electronic doors that open and close real slow without making much noise. She pushes the button, and the door next to me slides open. I gently pull my bag out from under the seat, trying to quiet its crinkling, and climb out into the dim cave of the garage.

This is the neatest garage I've ever seen—although it's not like I've been in a whole bunch of garages. There's space for another car, a tennis ball on a string hanging from the ceiling, and shelves all the way up to the top. On the shelves are boxes, and each box has a strip of tape across it, with words like “Xmas Tree Stand” and “Camping” written on it.

These people have
everything
in here. There's even a box that says “Emergency.”

“Dess?” Foster Lady is looking at me.

I look at the van. Baby's still in his seat, still strapped in. Though I was going to be quiet, and learn what I could, words blurt out before I can stop them. “What, you're just going to leave him there?” You aren't supposed to do that shit to babies. Doesn't anyone know anything?

The lady's face twists up in a funny smile. “Trust me, Dess, Mr. Austin here knows how to take off his seat belt. He will when he wakes up, and he'll come inside when he's ready. I'm not going to wake him and have him whiny all afternoon because he missed his nap. We'll leave the door open while we get you settled. Later, you can go with me to pick up Jamaira, and we'll have a little talk. Okay?”

Yeah, she says “Okay” like I have a choice, but I've heard that voice before. Rena at the group home always likes to have a “little talk” with the new residents first thing. I shrug. If Foster Lady wants to flap her yap at me, I can't stop her.

She goes ahead of me and opens the door into the house. A pocket door to the right shows a sink and a toilet with a potty chair on the floor. Across the hall, a stacked washer and dryer sit next to a long white counter with piles of clothes and towels folded on it. The washer has something yellow flopping around on the wash cycle.

“Garage bathroom, laundry room, and the linen closet. Through here is the kitchen,” the foster lady is saying.

I leave the door open behind me, giving one last look at Baby sleeping in the dim garage, and follow.

“Are you hungry? Would you like something to drink?”

I shrug. I might be hungry, but I don't know. I can't tell; my stomach is jumpy.

Foster Lady just nods. “Let me give you a tour, then. This”—she points to a pair of yellowish wooden doors under the oven—“is the snack cabinet. You're welcome to anything in it whenever you want a snack.”

They've got ice and water dispensers in the gray metal refrigerator, like at the group home. A handful of magnets hold stick pictures on the double-wide doors, pictures Baby drew, I guess. Foster Lady walks through a doorway on the other side of the kitchen, but I make a note to come back to this room and look through
all
the cabinets, not just the one for snacks, when everyone's asleep. I don't hoard food till it rots, like I did at my first foster home, but I like to know what my options are.

“This is the dining area and the living room,” Foster Lady says over her shoulder. I follow her into the room and stop. It's
huge,
and it goes on forever, and it looks like something from a decorating show on TV. Now I wish I'd been awake when we drove down the street. Houses in this neighborhood must be massive.

Closest to the kitchen is a polished wooden table with eight tall chairs scooted in. At the other end there are wide couches with cream and brown stripes in front of a big window, and a fat red chair with a footstool is next to a red brick fireplace. The room is tall, with a white ceiling, and half the wall is gray, with a piece of white wood dividing it. The bottom half of the wall has red wallpaper. The carpet on the floor is a kind of grayish white that makes me not even want to walk on it in my ballet flats. It's thick enough that I don't hear Foster Lady's steps as she walks away.

“We don't bring food into the living room,” Foster Lady says as she continues her tour, “so we can keep it nice. We mostly use the front room if we have a family meeting or when company comes.”

Company. Yeah, I'll be sure and use it when the president's girls drop by.

We cross from carpet onto tiled floor and pass by what I guess is the front door. Foster Lady goes up three stairs and motions to an open door on her left, with a baby gate across it. “This is the office. When my husband, Russell, is at home, he tends to be in here.” I barely have a moment to peep into the room with the L-shaped desk and two computer screens before she's opening a door across the hall. From the soft-blue paint on the wall and the big tree silhouette in the corner, I know where we are before she even says a word.

“This is the nursery—right now it's Austin and Jamaira's room. It's almost always a mess.” She turns to me and grins, and her whole face moves with the force of it. “You'll discover Austin loves to take things out of his toy box and books off his shelf. We're still working on putting things back.”

“Jamaira?” I ask, looking at the plain white crib in the corner across from the little bed. It smells like baby powder in here—not diapers, even though there's a baby. How many kids they got in this place? “Where is she?” What I really want to know is, How old is she? Is she white or black? Does Foster Lady treat her better than Baby?

Foster Lady's smile fades a little. “Jamaira's at the respite-care nursery right now. We'll pick her up when Austin wakes.” She pauses, and from the way she looks at me, I can tell she's saying something important. “Jamaira's a good baby, a sweet, sweet girl with some major physical challenges. Her brain is calcifying, and that gives her little seizures. That makes some people uncomfortable looking at her, or holding her. If you don't want to be around her or look at her, Dess, that's okay.”

Rich as they are, don't they have medicine for that “calcifying”? My stomach is rolling again. I don't want to be around some sick baby, but I'm not going to say so. I shrug instead and wait.

Foster Lady doesn't say anything for a moment, then nods and keeps moving down the hall. “A bathroom,” she announces, gesturing to her right. “My and Russell's bedroom,” she says, tapping a set of white double doors to her left.

The hall continues, and there's another set of double doors. “The family room,” she says, and opens the doors with a silent “Ta-da!”

It's another big room, almost as big as the living room, except this has some kind of wood tiles on the floor, and the ceiling is made out of wood. There's another fireplace, with rocks up the wall instead of bricks; there's a narrow doorway that shows another toilet; and there's a mixture of futon couches and fat brown plaid things. They're the ugliest couches I've ever seen. So are the recliner chairs, ugly and battered, but this room at least looks like a room I can get comfortable with. In the corner near the bathroom is a sliding glass door with a little deck that looks over the backyard, which has a bunch of grass and—

“You have a swimming pool?” I practically press my face against the glass.

“Go ahead and open the door, Dess,” Foster Lady says with a laugh, and I do. It's warm outside, warm enough for me to put my feet in the water. A pool! God, these people are rich—stupid rich. The group home was big, yeah, but it's a whole building for ten girls, plus an office for staff. I remember the motel me and Trish and Baby lived in. Nobody from this house ever lived like that, all jammed up in one room.

“Do you have a suit, Dess?”

I shrug. I never needed a suit. When did Trish and me ever go swimming, except in our clothes in the fountain in front of the mall?

“We keep two or three suits for guests. You can use one until we can get you a suit of your own. Our only rule about the pool is that either Russell or I need to be with you the first time you use it, and if you can't swim—”

“I know how,” I interrupt. I didn't think black people could, though. Granny Doris took me to the city pool when I was little. There was a black kid there, screaming, 'cause he was scared to go in. Granny Doris said it's because they sink.

“—if you can't swim, you absolutely
cannot
be in the water alone. One of us must be with you. That's a serious hard-and-fast rule, Dess—for your own safety.” Foster Lady waits a moment as I take in the yard, then turn and look at the room again. There are tall bookshelves stuffed with books on either side of the fireplace, and all around the edges of the room there are pictures on the walls, in frames, of people—old black people, and kids, black and white and brown. Tons of kids. There's a big table in the corner that might be for pool or something. For the first time since I got out of the van, I'm feeling something other than jumpy.

“Are you ready to see your room, Dess?”

I don't like how she says that—like it's really my room,
mine,
and not a room in
her
house. I roll my eyes and follow Foster Lady to a door on the other side of the family room. “This is it,” she says, and gestures for me to go inside.

It's middle-sized, with plain white walls. The bed has a tall frame made out of wood that looks like bleached-out telephone poles. There's a nightstand made out of the same bleached-out wood. There's a lamp on it with a lampshade that looks like it was made out of an old globe. The window has white blinds and a green-painted windowsill. There's a short white bookshelf beneath the window and, on the bed, a pale green comforter with two pillows, each with a dark green stripe. On the wall above the bed there's a wooden shelf painted the same green as the windowsill.

“I hope you like green,” the foster lady says.

I shrug. “Whatever.” Inside, my stomach is knotting. This is nice…way nicer than any room I've ever stayed in.

My first foster mother was like this—nice. At least the first day, before she started whining all the time because I pissed the bed a little. She never put me in a room this nice, though. It makes my neck tight. My plastic bag crinkles as I clutch it closer.

Foster Lady shows me the closet, which has a towel-cloth bathrobe hanging from a hook. There's a tag on it—it's brand-new. She points out the white dresser at one end of the closet, and all the hooks and hangers and places to put a lot of clothes I don't have at the other end. “And this is your bathroom, which you share with our daughter, Hope,” she says, and pushes open another sliding door I didn't notice, built into the wall. Inside the bathroom there's a plain white tile counter with two sinks and a mirrored medicine cabinet above each sink. A short wall made out of glass bricks divides a bathtub and a shower stall from the rest of the room, and on a rack next to the tub are shelves of yellow and green towels.

At the group home, our bathroom had two sinks, two shower stalls, two toilets, and no tub. I had to share with three other girls, though.

“In this house, our bedrooms are personal, private spaces.” Foster Lady is waving her arms again, her earrings jangling. “And there's a lock on this door, so you can use the bathroom in privacy. In the morning, you might be okay with brushing your teeth at the same time Hope is brushing hers—or you might not. You'll need to work that out.”

She steps back into my room. “You and Hope are responsible for keeping your separate rooms and this bathroom clean. It might work for you to make a schedule about whose turn it is to clean the toilet and the shower and the tub—or it might be easier for each of you to clean it right when you get out. You'll have to work that out, or else I will—and I'm sure you'd much rather work it out yourselves.” Foster Lady smiles, but there's a look of determination around those white teeth. Maybe it's not her husband who yells when someone makes a mess. She probably thinks I have trashy habits, like some of the girls in the group home. Rich folks always think the rest of us are nasty. How much you want to bet there are cameras up here, to make sure I don't steal anything?