joy. But every morning, Judith has Beverly and Casey cull all the open adoption boards searching for mention of the agency, her own system of marketing research follow-up.
“Sooooo”—Casey scans the papers in her hand—“Angie still raves about the famous Chloe Pinter when a newbie asked about the domestic program at the Chosen Child on the Oregon Open.”
“That’s it?” Chloe asks. Judith won’t be happy.
“Yeah, one domestic newbie query today.” Casey plops down on Chloe’s couch.
“God, I just bet she and Ken come back from Marshall Islands with another kid.” She crosses her legs in worn brown corduroys, jiggles her clogs. Casey’s job is at her desk, receiving dossiers and referrals for the China program; some weeks she wears the same outfit days in a row.
“Really? I thought they were done.”
“You’d think. Nine kids is e-freaking-nough. But new program, they’ve got to bring home a souvenir. It’s so retarded. How about some attention for the ones they’ve got? Marius is at my keyboard playing Pong again. Poor kid.”
Marius is the Duvalls’ third son, eleven years old, autistic, from an orphanage in Brasov. Judith and Ken live in a sagging Victorian a few blocks from the agency. At least half of their nine adopted children are being “homeschooled,” which translates into underfoot at the agency, coloring on the walls of the conference room or using up all the cone cups at the watercooler.
“You know why they keep adopting all these kids, don’t you?” Casey leans forward, lowers her voice. “Judith had an abortion, back when they were in college. She was in law school, and Ken was getting his master’s, and he made her have one, and it wrecked her so she couldn’t get pregnant. So now they’re so riddled with guilt that they go running all over the world adopting orphans. It’s really pretty sad.”
“Wow,” Chloe says flatly. She has heard this before, from Beverly, after too many mai tais at the company picnic, only in that version, they had placed a kid of their own for adoption. Meaningless gossip.
“I guess anyone working in this business has to have some kind of issues. Look at you: Your mom dies, only child, you lost your sense of family, so you have to run around making ‘happily ever after’ for everyone else.”
“It’s really not that simple,” Chloe begins.
Casey rips open a mini bag of Funyuns. Every two weeks she brings in a jumbo case of snack packs, the kind you put in a child’s lunch-box, and parks it by her desk, tearing into bag after bag of Cheetos and Doritos. Her thighs spread the wale of her brown cords wide. She tosses a few onion crisps into her mouth and misses. She reaches down to pick them up off the carpet and spies the corner of Chloe’s bridal magazine.
“What’s this?” She pulls it out. “Naughty-naughty!” And then in the same breath, “God, what I wouldn’t give for the upstairs office! Not that I’d want your job—thank you very much.” Casey munches on Funyuns, flipping through the pages of Chloe’s Modern Bride. “They offered it to me, after they fired Marcy, and I was like, noooo! But this, this is what you do up here all day?” She waves the magazine. “Pretty freaking cushy.”
Yes, Chloe thinks, I just slept on a hospital love seat for the past two nights for eleven dollars an hour. Cushy.
Dan being her closest friend, her only Portland friend, really, Chloe feels out of practice, off balance, when Casey is around. She’s like the brash, dangerous older sister Chloe cannot trust. Casey stands up and surveys the room again, her eyes narrowed. She crumples her foil bag of Funyuns, tosses it in Chloe’s trash can. It stinks up her office; Chloe switches to breathing through her mouth.
“It’s nice up here,” Casey says thoughtfully. “Private. You have good Internet?”
Chloe’s intercom beeps again—“The McAdoos are here”—and Chloe can’t wait to get this over with.
Downstairs, John and Francie McAdoo stand at the doorway like underclassmen at the senior dance, unsure of their place.
“Hey there,” Chloe says, holding on to the banister as she swings into the entry. A crumpled ball of paper sails past her head, thrown from one of the Duvall kids in Beverly’s office. The international staff peer through the arched doorway. Judith has the phone between her ear and shoulder, sipping from a plastic cup of champagne. She makes eye contact with the McAdoos and coolly raises her glass to them. Ken is on the phone at his desk too,