Thanksgiving without turkey!”
Chloe’s face burns. She didn’t think he cared, thought he liked being frugal more than traditional. Whenever she makes an effort to cook, he has already eaten, or isn’t hungry. He’s lost twenty pounds since they left Tarifa. “I have a chicken in the freezer.” Chloe gets it out, and it thunks on the counter like a brick. “I can thaw it out, I think.”
“Forget it,” Dan says gently, taking her plate to heat in the microwave. “This is fine.” He picks up the freezer-burned chicken. “Good to know we have this. I could use it if we need to prop a door open, maybe, or if it gets windy, it’d be great to hold some papers down.” He smiles when she laughs at his joke, kissing her head before sliding into the seat across from her. Her stomach unfurls for the first time since seeing the bassinet at the apartment. The candlelight dances its reflection on the rain-smattered window by the breakfast nook, and their plates of side dishes send up steam. His feet brush against hers under the table.
“Poor McAdoos. I was just at their birth mother’s, remember Penny and Jason?”
“The ex-cons?”
“Yes, who I finally got set up in the apartment complex in Southeast. I went to take them Thanksgiving dinner—”
“So they have our turkey?”
“Or we have half their sides, however you want to think of it. When I got there, Jason’s brother and girlfriend had moved in, and they had filled the place with baby stuff.”
“Oh. Uh-oh.”
“Yeah. The birth father said they just hadn’t told the brother about the adoption yet, but it seems like—”
“A red flag?” Dan offers, serving himself more stuffing. It tickles her when he uses adoption lingo. She rubs the arch of her foot over the top of his fleecy sock.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Who’re the adoptive parents?” Dan does this sometimes, acts like he is listening, then carelessly reveals he wasn’t.
“The McAdoos.”
“Ah, Francie Much Ado About Nothing. Serves her right, calling here twenty times a day.”
Dan is exaggerating; Francie calls several times a week, Chloe’s mistake for giving her their home number. In the boss’s eyes, though, keeping the McAdoos happy is critical. Francie is a Boarder, a client who frequents the adoption message boards and has the capacity to make or break the agency reputation with a handful of posts. Francie’s entries have been more positive than negative since they got a placement, bringing in a dozen new referrals, over twenty thousand dollars in nonrefundable application fees. It is a wonderful thing, except that Chloe is solely responsible for getting and then keeping the birth mothers for all these high-profile, edgy Boarders. Sometimes it is all Chloe can do to stop herself from approaching young pregnant women on the street, business card in hand. Her most recent stroke of genius was to put flyers up in Portland Heights, at the swanky grocery store and the gym—not for potential birth mothers, but to hook adoptive parents who want to believe that there are birth mothers up here in the Heights, nice college-bound white girls who “got in trouble.”
Her boss Judith had actually kissed her forehead when Chloe told her what she was doing. “Brilliant! And then once we get them in here, we’ll direct them toward China, something more stable. Nonrefundable application fees! Put some flyers up in Lake Oswego too—see if we can get them into Starbucks!”
“HOW WAS YOUR DAY?” Chloe asks Dan as she carries their dishes to the sink. He is behind her, putting the leftovers in the fridge. Their elbows and shoulders bump comfortably in the narrow galley kitchen.
“Shitty. I need a new job. I need a car.”
Chloe nods; this is an old conversation. In the four years they have been together, two in Tarifa, two here in Portland, Dan has never had his own car. “What kind of job were you thinking, for the winter?”
“One of the guys does mountain bikes in the summer, then teaches snowboarding up at Mount Hood.”
“But it’s practically winter now. Don’t you think those jobs are snatched up early on?”
“God, why are you always so negative?”
They never argued in Spain; here it seems like every week.
CHLOE HAD STUMBLED ON Dan in a wind-whipped town in southern Spain at the end of her backpacking tour around Europe after college graduation. Sipping sangria at an adjacent table in the Intercontinental Café, in sun-bleached Birdwells and a hulking Bull jacket made of windsurfing sails, he was the most edible thing she’d ever seen. When he opened his