She’d kept the TV on the entire time we were there, on an ear-splitting episode of Cops.
Afterwards, we drove back to Ithaca in near-silence, Nick’s hands clenched on the wheel, his expression grim. I hadn’t known what to say, so I said nothing, and after an hour or two, he simply stated, “I had to do that. We won’t see her again.”
“Ever?” I couldn’t help but be startled, despite how difficult the visit had been. “Nick, she’s your mother—”
“No,” he said flatly. “She isn’t. Hasn’t been for a long time.” I knew he’d been living with his best friend Steve and his family since he was sixteen; Steve was the best man at our wedding. But I didn’t know what had precipitated that move, and I never asked. And we never saw Arlene again. She called around the time of our wedding, tearful and tipsy, and I sent her a Christmas card every year out of duty, without telling Nick. She died of lung cancer when Emma was six months old, and in the years since then Nick has never talked about her willingly.
There, standing in our lovely kitchen, watching Nick making light of something so serious, I wondered if he was doing it because the whole concept of foster care reminded him of his own troubled childhood.
I knew I wouldn’t ask, at least not right then. Every marriage has a few no-go areas, and Nick’s upbringing was definitely one of ours. We talked about it so rarely, and it felt so impossibly distant, that I often forgot about it all and just thought of him as the man he was now, confident, genial, successful.
“Please do look it up,” I said, and he dropped the light tone to give me a warm, serious look.
“I will.”
And he did. The next afternoon, he came down from his office over the garage—as a financial analyst for one of the large insurance companies in Hartford, he was able to work from home once or twice a week—while I was just finishing my own work as part-time bookkeeper for a couple of local independent boutiques. His expression was so serious and troubled, I thought something terrible must have happened.
“What—”
“I’ll do it,” he said, and I blinked, not knowing what he was talking about.
“Do what?”
“The foster care thing. I’ll do it.” He shook his head, as if that were an end to the subject. “We have to go on some course?”
“Yes, for ten weeks. Three hours on Wednesday evenings.” I said it like a warning, because I knew it was a big time commitment for him, with his often demanding hours of work, and I was hesitant to get carried away. His about-face was so sudden, I wasn’t sure I should believe it yet.
“Okay,” Nick said, and I goggled a bit, not expecting this immediate capitulation, and yet cautiously delighted by it.
“Are you sure? Because last night—”
“I’ll do it, Ally. I said I’ll do it.” There was a slight rise to his voice that signaled irritation, and he raked a hand through his hair, agitated. I wanted to press him, or maybe comfort him, but I didn’t do either. “I’ll do it,” he said again, and then he went back up to his office, leaving me staring.
We should have talked about it more, of course, worked through the reasons why we had decided to go ahead with not just the training, but the fostering itself, but in the moment it felt like enough that we’d both said yes. Besides, the state of Connecticut was desperate for foster carers.
We started the course in the middle of June, a group of nine of us in a stale-smelling room at the community center in Elmwood, listening night after night, week after week, to a comfortable but straight-talking social worker, Monica, telling us how unbearably tough it was all going to be. Every week, I wondered why she was trying to scare us off so much; by the end of the course there were only five of us left. Nick and I didn’t talk much about what we learned in those three hours; afterwards we sometimes went out for a drink, both of us a little shell-shocked by some of the case studies we’d been told, sipping our Pinot Grigio with vacant looks, occasionally offering a vague comment about something Monica had said.
“Do all foster kids have issues around food?”
“You can’t even give them time-outs…”
Once, I broached the subject of Nick’s childhood. “Do you think all of this affects you