Educational Experience

Chapter Nine

 9.

 I think I kind of scared Kelli running up to her and the babies the way I did. I hadn’t seen them for a week and I was totally jonesing—nuts about my kids. Yes, I have kids. Two little tow heads--sorry about the shock. I just thought it would be better to bring ‘em on and let them blend into the story naturally. There’s so much to tell that it’s hard to know when to do what.

Anyway, I grabbed Taylor first—the girl is Taylor and the boy is Tyler—and she let out this little squeal as I raised her way up in the air. And when she pointed a chubby little finger at me, I “bit” it to make her giggle.

“Daddy’s girl,” Kelli said. She’s not the mother, she’s an au pair who helps their grandmother, Bonnie, care for them. They’re twins, born ‘way premature nine months ago. CPS gave them to Bonnie because I was too young, they thought. And of course, I do have a pretty unorthodox lifestyle. Though they give kids to some pretty unsavory people sometimes—the “young” thing was the deciding factor in the end, though. I was 17 when they were born. And they’d already decided their mother shouldn’t be allowed to keep them or go anywhere near them, actually. I never knew they could do that. Take kids away from their natural mothers. But it was good they did. And that Bonnie stepped up. I’ll always love her for that.

“She knows a good man when she sees one,” I teased back. And I put Taylor back in the stroller and went for my little man. I love to snuggle in the crook of his neck because he kicks his legs all crazy when you tickle him.

“You’re a loon, you know that?” I told him. And he gave me that gummy grin that always cracks me up.

“So when’s her spa thing over with?” I asked Kelli. I meant Bonnie.  

“I set up a facial and this ridiculous massage they do that takes, like…hours.”

“You think she suspected anything weird was goin’ on?”

“After two weeks with these two coughing and wheezing all over the place, she’d never tell me even if she did. How did school go?”

“That’s a long story for sure. But the Cliff Notes version’s pretty simple. It sucked.”

“CPS will be watching, though. And the court, too—this is really risky, what you’re doing today.”

“Oh, for sure. I know.”

“Do you think that stupid judge will try to stop you from getting them?”

“We’re checkin’ into all that. The legalities’n’ all,” I told her.

I tried to make it sound really easy or like we had it all covered, but we were still on thin ice. Stuff could go down behind the scenes that we didn’t know anything about—it’s frightening being in “The System.” Even for me. Shit just happens. I watched it, when we were in court a few times. You agree to one thing and something comes along and unravels the whole deal. Or you get information from one clerk, and then another person asks you, “Who told you that?” and you find out nothing you were told was right. A lot depends on luck. A lot depends on being really relentless and not just taking anything you hear at face value—your average person who gets into some kind of trouble isn’t used to questioning authority. They’re scared, they’re usually poor, and they don’t have the skills, social or otherwise, to dig through the big piles of shit the truth is hiding in. So even with all the resources I had, we were forever having to regroup.

But she bought my act, and said, “They don’t know who they’re dealing with, do they?”

“Oh, I think they do.”