about it now? I want to do something more with my life. Something that matters.” I heard the throb of feeling in my voice and it surprised me a little, because I hadn’t realized just how much I felt that way. This might have started as an idea to run away with, but now it felt real.
“What?” The single word was gently scoffing. “You’re, like, PTA queen. You volunteer for everything…”
“That’s different.” I had done my time on a variety of PTAs, from elementary school class parties and gift-wrap fundraisers, where you’re fending off all the overeager parents, to the barren tundra of the middle and high school PTA, where no parent is interested in joining, and you have to do everything yourself. “I want to do something more,” I told Nick. “Something that isn’t just ameliorating our lives.”
“Ameliorating?” He raised his eyebrows, giving me that lopsided, rakish grin I loved. “Now you’re using fancy words.”
I folded my arms and tried to give him a stern look, but I ended up laughing, as I always did, and Nick held up his hands in surrender.
“Fine, fine. I’ll look into it. What should I watch? The Facebook ad that got you going?”
“Nick.” I shook my head, but I was still laughing. He knew me so well. “Look up some statistics on foster care in the US, or even just in Connecticut.” After seeing the clip, I’d done that much, at least. I’d gone on several websites that had given faces and voices to those soulless stats—photos of children, interviews with them.
It had been both heart-breaking and horrible, to scroll through photos of these kids with their bite-sized captions—There is nothing Jenny wants more than a family. Juan would do better in a home without any other children. Drew needs a patient family who can help guide his choices.
It reminded me of when we’d been looking for a dog on the SPCA website—we never got one—only this was so much worse. These were people, children, and they wanted families. Safe homes where people loved them and tucked them in at night. Where they didn’t need to cringe or cower or feel afraid.
My heart ached for every single one of those kids, and I was sure if Nick went on that page, or any page like it, he’d feel the same.
“I know it’s out of the blue,” I said, “but give it a chance. Give a child a chance.”
“I’ll put that on a T-shirt, or maybe a mug.” I knew Nick was making light of it on purpose, because it was his default setting when it came to talking about anything emotionally serious. It occurred to me for the first time then, although it should have earlier, that this might have been all a bit too close to home for Nick.
I didn’t actually know that much about his upbringing, because he didn’t like to talk about it, except in broad strokes, and even then with great reluctance. What I knew was that he’d grown up poor in upstate New York, and that his father had disappeared when he was still a child and his mother had, more or less, been a semi-functioning drunk.
I met her once, when we got engaged at the end of our last year at Cornell, two optimistic math majors who felt we had the whole world shimmering before us. We’d been dating for two years but I’d never met his family; he’d always shrugged them off, said I wouldn’t want to meet them, and I hadn’t minded much because we’d spent time with my family—my mom and dad and sister in New Jersey. I’d been quietly proud to return to my hometown as the new and improved version of myself—the math geek of Moorestown High coming back with a new haircut, a new style, and best of all, a new boyfriend.
When Nick had proposed to me in New York City, spring of our senior year, he decided it was time for me to meet his mom. That one visit had been deeply uncomfortable for both of us—a snapshot into Nick’s childhood that made me pity him, and of course he hated that.
Nick’s mother Arlene had been living in a squalid little apartment in Albany that reeked of cigarette smoke and despair. She’d had a smoker’s voice, low and throaty, and the hacking cough to go along with it. She’d wished us well, but we might have been acquaintances whose names she’d forgotten for all the interest and care she’d shown.