Crash Into You

Chapter 76

Isaiah

May

I SPENT A GOOD PORTION of my life trying to figure out where I would get my next meal or how to avoid physical pain. In other words—how to survive. I never had a reason to contemplate death—too busy worrying about living.

Standing in this cemetery, it’s hard not to think about the end of life. Noah told me that his parents are buried in the section across from here. Echo’s brother’s final resting place is on the other side of the massive graveyard. No one is immune to mortality.

A light misty rain makes the warm spring day humid, causing my shirt to stick to my skin. I stay motionless, staring at the plot. There’s a heaviness inside of me that could produce tears. But I push it away. I’ve got too many emotions running rampant.

“Are you sure?” I ask.

My mother squats and touches the tombstone. “Yes. I knew he was your father the moment you walked into that visitation room. You look exactly like him, Isaiah.” She glances at me with a weak smile and glassy eyes. “He was handsome, too.”

My father. Unable to stand anymore, I sit on the wet grass. James McKinley. “I’m Irish?”

She laughs. “I guess. We never discussed family trees. He was a good guy. Decent. He died before I knew I was pregnant. So I crossed him off the list of possible fathers. Once again, a stupid mistake on my part.”

We’re not close—me and Mom. She wants to bond. I’m okay with knowing she’s alive. She pressures me for more, but I tell her she should be happy that the anger I feel for her is receding. Too much time passed between six and seventeen. Too many hurts. Sometimes it’s best to forgive someone and keep them at arm’s length.

“James had a big family. A little odd, but great people. I wish I had known then that you belonged to him. They would have taken us both in.” She goes silent. “Or at least you. You should find them.”

I scratch the back of my head. Somewhere in Kentucky, I have a big family. “I’m not sure I’d want to go through a paternity test.” And be proved wrong.

“I can’t say they wouldn’t ask for one, but one look at you and they’d know. You’re all him. Right down to the earrings and tattoos.”

The thought makes me smile. “No shit?”

She laughs again. “He would have said that, too. James was good to me. We were friends, and I got stupid and took advantage of him. I never forgave myself for hurting him, and I feel awful that he never knew you existed.”

“How’d he die?”

“Car accident.” She stares at the tombstone as if he’d appear if she focused hard enough.

“Will you tell me about him?”

Mom relaxes back on her bottom. The rain mats her dark hair against her face. “I don’t know much, but I’ll tell you everything I do know. James loved motorcycles...”

* * *

At the McDonald’s across the street from the cemetery, I wait in a corner booth. Courtney slips me a container of vanilla ice cream before sitting across from me with her own. She opens her purse and produces a bottle of multicolored sprinkles. She shakes some on hers and pours a whole shitload on mine.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Buying you ice cream.” Courtney drops the bottle into her purse and digs into her soft serve. “Don’t tell me that at eight you didn’t wish someone would have bought you ice cream with sprinkles.”

Courtney can do this now. Extract a memory buried within me with scary ease. There are times I think she’s a mind reader, then I remember she’s not. She was a foster kid, raised by the system, just like me. A pang in my chest makes me think of being eight and watching families buy ice cream. Courtney smiles when I take a bite.

“Do you feel like you ratted by becoming a social worker?” I ask.

She’s silent as her forehead furrows. “I choose to think about how I can help other kids in ways no one helped me.”

Fair enough.

“You and your mom talked a lot today.” Courtney observed us from her dry car.

“Met my dad.” So to speak.

“Sort of figured. How are things going with her?”

I shovel the ice cream in my mouth so I don’t have to answer. My eyes narrow at the way the sweet sprinkles roll on my tongue. Courtney giggles. “By the way, gummy worms on ice cream are way overrated.”

“Noted.” I mix the ice cream. “I can’t give her what she wants.”

“You don’t have to,” she says. “I never said a relationship with her is healthy, just that you should talk to her. From experience, you eventually would have had an ache to see your mom. I thought it would be better to deal with her while you’ve got me to buy you ice cream afterward.”

“You should have told me when we first met you were system-produced.”

She squishes her lips together. “I was once pissed-off-seventeen. You weren’t ready to listen.”

True.

“Congrats, by the way. Heard you aced the exam.”

“Thanks.” I passed my ASE...again. My internship and job secured. I nudge the ice cream away and relax back in my seat. Lately, I feel like I’ve been drifting. I’m back in foster care at Shirley and Dale’s. Noah lives in the dorms. We still talk, but not nearly as often. There are times I feel...alone.

“I know people who have families,” I say. “They graduate from high school and they get a job or go to college and if they fuck it all up they go back home.” I pause, tapping my finger on the table. “What do I do if...” I fuck it all up. I clear my throat and my eyebrows move closer together. “Where do I go?”

Courtney shoves her ice cream away, too. “Foster care sucks, but so does aging out. It’s weird. You spend the entire first part of your life fighting to get out and then one day...you are out. Then you want to scream at the closed door that you’re still a kid, but everyone is pretty damned insistent you’re an adult. I cried a lot when I first aged out.”

My lips quirk. “I don’t think I’ll be crying.”

Courtney snorts. “Or whatever boys do.”

I swallow and find the courage to say the words. “I don’t want to be homeless.”

“You won’t be.” She waggles her eyebrows and pulls a folder out of her bag. “I have a plan. You don’t turn eighteen until this summer, so we have a couple more months before you age out. I can teach you how to budget and help you find a place to live and all sorts of fun adult things. And here’s the cool part. I’ll still be around when you turn eighteen. I may not be mandatory, but I don’t disappear.”

The alarm on my phone rings, and Courtney smiles, knowing why I’m ready to bolt. “We’ll start this next week.”

I stand. “Thanks. For everything.”

“No problem. And next week we’re getting hot fudge.”