Far from the Tree(32)

Joaquin knew all that, of course. One of his older foster brothers had actually gotten a tattoo that said “I’m Fine” across his shoulder blades. Joaquin knew all the tricky ways the phrase worked. “Well, it’s accurate,” he told Ana, who smiled.

Joaquin hadn’t wanted to see her, even if she was nice and didn’t tell Linda when he drank three Cokes in a row. (Refills were free.) But then he had figured out that Mark and Linda were paying for Ana out of their own pockets, and Joaquin guessed that he owed it to them to at least go. Foster parents weren’t always crazy about spending their own money on things. Joaquin didn’t want to push his luck.

Eighteen months later, Ana and Joaquin were still meeting in the diner every Friday after school. They always got the same thing—Cobb salad and lemonade for Ana; veggie burger, fries, and a Coke for Joaquin—and sat in the same booth at the back of the restaurant, where the acoustics made the restaurant sound way busier than it actually was.

“So,” Ana said as she slipped into the booth across from him the Friday after he first met Maya and Grace. “How did it go?”

It had taken Joaquin a while to appreciate Ana’s no-bullshit approach to therapy. She also dropped a lot of f-bombs, which he liked. Most therapists treated him like he was his own bomb, about to explode, which, to be fair, was how he had felt for most of his life.

But still.

“It was fine,” Joaquin said, then grinned when she glared at him. “Just kidding. It was nice.” If fine was Ana’s gold-medal word, then nice definitely took the silver.

“They’re white,” Joaquin added, tearing the paper off his straw as the waitress brought their drinks. She knew their orders by heart now; Ana and Joaquin hadn’t seen a menu in three months.

“You thought that might be the case,” Ana said. “What about them? Were they nice?”

Joaquin smiled to himself. “They’re funny. They get along really well already. And that made me feel,” he said, beating Ana to the question, “fine. I’m glad they like each other.”

“And did they like you?”

Joaquin shrugged and took a sip of his Coke. “Guess so. We have a group text now. We’re meeting on Sunday again.”

“That’s good,” Ana said. Good, nice, fine. Ana was trying to pave a very rocky road, Joaquin could tell.

“It’s just—” he started to say, then reached for his Coke.

Ana raised an eyebrow. “It’s just . . . ?” she prodded.

Joaquin ran his thumb down the glass, leaving a dry stripe down the center of condensation. “They were both adopted, you know? Their parents paid a lot of money to get them.”

Ana nodded. “Probably so, yes.”

When Joaquin didn’t respond, she added, “Does that bother you?”

“It doesn’t bother me for them,” he said, then made another stripe on the glass. “It’s just . . . people got paid to keep me, and that still wasn’t enough.”

Ana looked at him across the table. “How does that make you feel?”

Joaquin shrugged. He didn’t want to talk about his sisters anymore. He was still finding the words to describe how he felt about them, and he knew that Ana would wait for him to discover the right ones.

“I broke up with Birdie,” he said instead. He hadn’t brought it up at their last meeting because of the Maya and Grace decision. And also because he hadn’t wanted to talk about Birdie. Discovering two new sisters had been really helpful when it came to avoiding difficult subjects.

Ana blinked at him. It took a lot to surprise her. Joaquin had seen her composed face many times over the past year and a half; surprising her felt like a weird sort of victory, a Pyrrhic one. “Wow,” she said after almost a full ten seconds, during nine of which Joaquin questioned his decision to bring Birdie up at all.

“Want to tell me why?” The surprise was gone and Ana’s face had smoothed back into its normal therapist mode. “I thought you really liked her.”

“I do,” Joaquin said. “That’s why I broke up with her.”

Ana cocked her head at him. “You know, that sounds like something the Joaquin I met eighteen months ago would have said.”

“I’m the same person,” Joaquin told her. He hated when Ana tried to sort his past from his present. Joaquin knew that that was impossible, that he would always be intertwined with the things he had done, the families he had had. He knew this because he had spent years trying to outrun them. “I just realized that it was a bad idea, that’s all.”

“You told me last month that Birdie made you happier than any other person in your entire life.”

Joaquin sometimes wished that Ana didn’t have such a good memory.

“She does—she did,” he corrected himself. “I just . . . She has all these baby pictures.”

Ana sank back against the booth and reached for her lemonade. “And you don’t.”

Joaquin shifted a little in his seat and wondered where their food was. He was starving. He was always starving. Mark and Linda used to joke about how much food he ate, so he took the hint and scaled back on eating. When they realized what he was doing, they were horrified. No one joked about food anymore. They even kept extra bread in the freezer just for him.