Jason walks to the door and opens it for her. Chloe pulls the edges of her jacket close, gives a wave to the room.
“Happy Thanksgiving,” she says with cheer she doesn’t feel. Penny waves back—she is picking turkey right off the carcass with her fingers, a piece of brown skin dangling between them.
CROSSING THE LITTERED COURTYARD, Chloe glances across to the apartment where another birth mother, Heather, and her toddler son live. Chloe has six birth mothers right now, and eighteen sets of adoptive families in her pool. She can’t bring them all dinner, has to be choosy about the ones she needs to woo. Still, it would have been nice to stop by and surprise Heather with the turkey and sides. The lights are off; they are probably having a proper Thanksgiving dinner with Heather’s grandmother. Heather’s adoption plan is rock solid, the adoptive parents perfect, all the important meetings completed and checked off on the dry-erase board in Chloe’s office. Heather doesn’t need Chloe’s turkey or drop-ins; everyone is simply waiting for the baby now.
In the parking lot, she hears footsteps behind her, disturbing the rotting leaves that have collected by the Dumpster. Chloe reaches in her pocket, wishing she had put the pepper spray on her key chain instead of clipping it to her gym bag. She fingers her keys, adrenaline flooding as the steps speed up behind her, along with the jingling, a sound like loose change in the pockets of whoever is following her.
At the side of her Jeep Cherokee, Chloe unlocks the door, hands shaking.
“Hey!”
She glances at the empty parking lot in front of her, spins around—it is Jason, his face barely visible, harshly shadowed in the epileptic flickering of the lone fluorescent light by the Dumpster. Rain is falling on his shaved head, his scalp skin a sickly green.
“Scared ya, huh?” He laughs. He has the cardboard tube in his hand, tosses it from one to the other. “Didn’t know it was me, huh? Gotta be careful out here in Felony Flats, Chloe Pinter.”
He takes a step closer to Chloe, so that she has to tip her head back slightly to see his two-tone eyes. Down by her side, Chloe sticks her ignition key out between the knuckles of her second and third fingers, the way she learned in her college Rape/Aggression/Defense class.
“About the crib and shit. My brother don’t know about the baby, that we’re giving it up.”
Making an adoption plan for, or choosing a family for, Chloe should correct him, but she doesn’t. Pretending she is shifting her weight, she puts another four inches between them.
“Okay,” she says evenly.
“He and Brandi are staying with us awhile.”
If Judith, the director of the agency, knew this, she would insist on reducing their rental assistance. Chloe won’t mention it to her boss.
“Oh, and these?” Jason holds up the poster tube, inches from her jaw. “The walls aren’t really the problem here.”
“This is the best I can do. You’ve been incarcerated before; you know how hard it is to get a place with that on the application.”
“This place is a shit hole, full of dealers and shit. It’s no good for a baby.”
Chloe’s stomach lurches—great, another one going sour. She takes a stab—“But the baby’s not going to be living here, right?”
She swears Jason flushes. He shuffles from one heavy black motorcycle boot to the other.
“It’s no good for Penny.” He juts his chin out.
“It’s the best I can do.”
“Anyway,” he says, chucking the poster tube into the Dumpster behind her car, “we don’t need your art.”
“Okay.” Chloe opens the door. She would have kept the posters; he didn’t have to throw them out. She gets in the car, one hand hovering discreetly over the automatic lock on the door panel.
“Sometimes,” Jason says as he turns to go back in, hunching his black leather jacket onto his shoulders against the rain, “something isn’t better than nothing.”
2
Thanksgiving
PAUL
Paul Nova checks his reflection in the leaded floor-to-ceiling windows across the well-laid Thanksgiving table of their hosts’ formal dining room and takes stock of his life. Thirty-one years old, moderately attractive, full head of hair, reasonably fit—not as regular to the gym as he’d like to be, but the physical demands of Paul’s line of work keep him in decent shape. He is the owner of an inherited, steadily growing electrical contracting business, transitioning somewhat smoothly from the middle to the upper middle class. He recently purchased a carriage house, albeit a fixer-upper, in one