Chapter One #2
I was thirteen the third and final time I went into foster care.
When the announcement came over the school PA calling me to the office, I knew what I’d find there.
Another case worker with bags under her eyes and a practiced kindly smile on her face.
I didn’t need her to explain why she was there; I’d been expecting her.
I don’t remember this case worker’s name.
She took me back to Mom’s apartment to pack a bag, and then she drove me to a care home, where I waited for somewhere to go.
The care home is a blurry still life in my memory: a bunk bed and the smell of cheap laundry detergent.
I was so sick with guilt I couldn’t sleep.
I knew this time it was my fault I was there.
There was a kid with a Pokémon pillowcase she used on her plasticky care home pillow, and she cried all through my sleepless nights.
I don’t think I cried. I think I was past crying by then.
When I left the care home a week later, I was driven to a ranch house in Bradford Woods, in the far north of Pittsburgh.
I remember it was May, and the driveway we turned into was lined with lilacs in full bloom.
There were shade trees and a lawn so green and perfect it didn’t seem real.
Later I learned that Wayne Overbeck, my new foster parent, was obsessed with his lawn.
His year was scheduled according to scarifying and seeding, mowing and fertilizing.
His favorite summer pastime was pacing the lawn with his hose, beer in hand, listening to baseball on his headphones.
Life was simple for Wayne. All he needed was his home, his family, and his lawn.
His wife Suni was a little more complicated, but not by much.
She worked in student admissions at one of the colleges in town, and she never sat still.
Suni always had some new hobby to keep her busy; sometimes she was scrapbooking, sometimes making mosaics out of little glass stones, sometimes foraging for wild foods, sometimes bird watching.
The Overbecks had two kids of their own—Lance and Alison—but they also took in foster kids, because, as Suni said, “There was no reason to let two perfectly good bedrooms go to waste.” Their house was balanced between order and chaos, full of people and noise: the sound of Wayne’s baseball games on the TV; Lance’s guitar and punk pop music; Alison and her friends practicing for glee club; and their corgi Arthur’s excited barking as he skidded back and forth between people’s rooms. During my time there, which was all of my high school years, I occupied the eggshell-blue bedroom while a series of other foster kids were given the mauve bedroom: Thad, who was seven and stayed only a few months; Leanne, who was a year older than me and stayed for a year and a half; and finally Bethany, who was so shy she couldn’t look people in the eye when she spoke to them.
Suni and Wayne treated us all the same, like part of the family.
I liked life at the Overbecks’. But I still wished for Tina to get out of Muncy State Correctional, where she was locked up on possession charges.
I wanted her to come get me, to feel her hug enveloping me in sunshine.
Nothing is as good as your own mother, even when your own mother is a junkie.
When I showed Flo The Wizard of Oz for the first time and Dorothy said, “There’s no place like home,” it was still Tina that I thought of.
My feeling of home was a person, not a place.
And it still is, only now that person is Flo.
As I ate my salad on that prosaic Thursday at work, I thought about all the places I had lived after the Overbecks’. Dorm rooms at college, a series of rented rooms in share houses. And then, after I got pregnant, there was a brief window of time when I’d lived with Tim…
“Forget the billionaires in Florida,” Eva said, disgusted. “Find us a house we can actually believe in.” She pushed my phone toward me.
“I believe in the mansion,” Caitlin said fervently.
Eva threw her balled-up napkin at her. “Well, I don’t. I want a dream that might come true.”
I tried to think of the most normal place I could, somewhere school buses stopped on suburban streets and kids rode their bikes through long summer afternoons.
Ohio maybe? I scrolled through bungalows and split-levels in Cleveland, looking for lawns and a bedroom Flo would love.
She’d spent her whole life sharing a room with me—wouldn’t it be something to give her a room of her own?
Florence hadn’t been planned. I’d been a na?ve (dumb) twenty-one-year-old who was primed to fall in love the moment someone showed her a speck of affection.
I was a mess of attachment and abandonment issues when I met Tim, and I fell hard and fast. I found myself knocked up in my junior year of college, to a guy I thought I loved, who was just as na?ve (dumb) as I was.
He wanted me to keep the baby, and I was young enough to believe him when he said he’d always be there.
I wanted to believe him so bad, and, as we assembled a flat-pack cot in the studio apartment we’d found, I really thought we might make it.
Tim now lives with his fiancée, Alyssa, in Seattle, where he moved after graduate school.
He calls Flo on Mondays, Thursdays, and Sundays, and sends her packages by courier.
He pays child support. Mostly. It doesn’t seem to bother him too much, living on the other side of the country from her.
I, meanwhile, can hardly stand being away from her for a weekend when she goes to visit Tim.
I would hike barefoot across the Rocky Mountains in the depths of winter to get to her. I would fight bears for that kid.
Or give up my education and work eight hours a day doing credit checks for a medical center.
I opened a listing for a pretty shiplap cottage, with a treehouse in a spreading oak out back, and a child’s bedroom painted to resemble a fairy bower.
I pretended we lived there and that I put Flo to bed each night in that candy-pink bunk bed, even though she was way too old for pink now.
Or so she kept telling me. The unsettled feeling in my belly started to recede.
“How about this?” I turned the phone around to show them what I’d found.
Eva, who had kids of her own, sighed approvingly. “You think I could squeeze a third bed in there?”
Caitlin, who didn’t have kids, wrinkled her nose. “That’s not a fantasy house. It’s too real.”
I shook my head. “It’s perfect.”
No one tells you how hard parenting will be—the closest that seasoned parents ever get to spilling the secret to the uninitiated is a kind of wry look.
Because how can you tell the untested that mother-love is a big blood-dark tumor of a feeling?
It’s nothing like a soft-focus Johnson & Johnson ad for baby powder.
It’s more like Titanic. You know the ship is going down, no matter what you do, but by God you’re going to get that kid on a floating door (or in a candy-pink bunk bed) before you die.
Loving Florence scares me.
Until Florence, I never realized how sad I was, how alone.
I didn’t see how emotionally neglected I’d been.
But when I looked at her, my life snapped into focus, and it was the opposite of pretty.
The thought of her living my childhood, alone in a cold apartment, reheating packet mac and cheese to the soundtrack of reruns, and constantly jumping to check the door was locked when the neighbors argued too loud? It just about broke me.
But how much better was I doing than Tina? Sure, I wasn’t getting high or leaving Flo alone while I worked the streets, and I wasn’t doing jail time, but we lived in a shabby rental with dodgy heating. A rental I wouldn’t even be able to afford much longer.
“I will get a ticket for the Mega Millions,” I blurted, as I stared down at the fairy bedroom that I couldn’t afford.
And that was when Caitlin said something that changed my life forever.
“Forget the Mega Millions,” she said as she rose to tip her uneaten leftovers into the trash. “You just need one of those treasure houses.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. “Treasure houses?”
“You know, the ones on TikTok. The hoarder houses.” Caitlin lit up as she pulled out her own phone. “Oh my God, you’re going to love this. Here.” And then she handed me my future.