Far from the Tree(7)

Joaquin leaned his body to the left as he careered down the hill toward the arts center. The wheels on his board were new, a “just because” gift from his eighteenth set of foster parents.

Mark and Linda were good people, had been his fosters for almost two years, and Joaquin liked them. Linda had taught him how to drive on their ancient minivan, ignoring the small dent that Joaquin had put in the back passenger-side door; Mark had taken him to six baseball games last summer, where they sat next to each other and watched the games in silence, nodding in agreement whenever the ump made the right call. “Nice to see a dad and son at the game together,” one older man had said to them at the end of one game, and when Mark had grinned and hooked his arm around Joaquin’s shoulders, Joaquin had flushed so deeply that he felt almost feverish.

He knew some basics about his early life, but not too many things. He had gone into foster care when he was one, put there by his mother. He knew from seeing his birth certificate once that her name was Melissa Taylor, and that his father’s last name was Gutierrez, but that had been about ten social workers ago, and Melissa’s parental rights had long been severed. She had never shown up for any visitations when he was a baby. Sometimes Joaquin wondered if he had been the worst baby in the world if his own mother didn’t even want to come to see him.

He didn’t know anything about his bio dad, other than his last name and the fact that Joaquin only had to look in the mirror to know that his mysterious father hadn’t been white. “You look Mexican,” one foster brother had told him after Joaquin had to explain that he didn’t know where he was from. No one had ever said anything to argue against it, so that was that. Joaquin was Mexican.

As far as foster parents and foster homes went, they had been good and bad. There had been the foster mom who once lost her temper and whacked Joaquin in the back of the head with a wooden hairbrush, making him feel like one of those cartoon characters who literally saw stars; the elderly couple who, for reasons that Joaquin never understood, would tape his left hand shut, forcing him to use his right (it didn’t work, Joaquin was still a lefty); a foster dad who liked to squeeze Joaquin by the back of the neck, literally grinding his vertebrae together in a way that Joaquin could never fully forget; the parents who kept the fosters’ food on a separate pantry shelf, the generic store brands lined up right below the brand-name cereals for the biological kids.

But then there had also been Juanita, the foster mom who stroked his hair and called him cari?o when he had the stomach flu one winter; Evelyn, who organized water balloon fights in the backyard and used to sing Joaquin a song at night about three little chicks who curled up under their mother’s wing and fell asleep; and Rick, the foster dad who once bought Joaquin an entire set of oil pastels because he thought that he was “pretty goddamn talented.” (Six months later, after Rick had too much to drink and got into a fistfight with the next-door neighbor, Joaquin had been forced to leave that foster home and his pastels behind. He still wasn’t quite over losing them.)

Mark and Linda were the latest foster parents, and they wanted to adopt Joaquin.

They had asked him last night, when he was sitting at the kitchen table putting his new wheels on his board. They sat down across from him, holding hands, and Joaquin knew immediately that they were asking him to leave. It had happened seventeen times before, so he knew the signs well. There would be excuses, apologies, maybe even tears (never Joaquin’s), but it always ended the same way: Joaquin putting his few things in a trash bag and waiting for his social worker to pick him up and take him somewhere new. (Once, a social worker had brought him an actual suitcase, but that had gotten ruined at the next home when two of the other kids got into a fight. Joaquin preferred the trash bags. That way, he had nothing to lose.)

“Joaquin,” Linda started to say, but Joaquin interrupted her. He liked Linda and he didn’t want one of his last memories of her to be full of quivering excuses and weak reassurances.

“No, it’s okay,” he said. “I get it, it’s okay. Just—is it because of the car door? Because I could fix it.” Joaquin wasn’t sure how he could do that—his job at the arts center wasn’t exactly making him into a millionaire, and he had zero idea of how to fix a car dent himself, but hey, wasn’t that what YouTube was for?

“Wait, what?” Linda said, and Mark scooted his chair closer to Joaquin’s, which made Joaquin sit back a bit. “Don’t worry about the car, sweetheart, that’s not what we want to talk to you about.”

Joaquin rarely felt off-kilter. He had gotten good at predicting what people would do, how they would react, and when he couldn’t predict their behavior, he knew how to provoke it instead. The therapist Mark and Linda made him see had called it a defense mechanism, and Joaquin thought that sounded exactly like something that someone who never needed a defense mechanism would say.

But Linda wasn’t saying the lines in the script that Joaquin had come to know by heart.

Mark leaned forward then, putting his hand on Joaquin’s forearm and squeezing a little. That didn’t bother Joaquin—he knew Mark would never hurt him, and even if he tried, Joaquin had three inches and about thirty pounds on him, so it would be a fast fight. Instead, he couldn’t help but feel like Mark was trying to keep him steady. “Buddy,” Mark said. “Your m— Linda and I wanted to talk to you about something important. If it’s all right with you, and you’re okay with it, we’d like to adopt you.”