Before I Knew You by Charlene Carr

Author:Charlene Carr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Women's Fiction
Publisher: Coastal Lines
Published: 2016-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Only five days after Henry had brought home the idea of the little girl in the group home, Joanna and he were driving toward the Nova Scotia Children and Youth Transition Centre. Joanna sat with her hands in her lap, tightly clasped. Joe’s wife, Nancy her name was, had set things up quickly. When Joanna spoke with her on the phone she’d sounded eager, excited. Kind. She spoke with a rural Nova Scotian accent, the kind that Joanna always associated with a particularly trustworthy person. A solid person. Her nanny had had that accent.

Nancy assured Joanna a visit was no form of commitment. But it felt like commitment. She thought back to the moment she’d agreed to this visit, agreed in order to give Henry a chance at hope. In the past few days he’d let that hope grow. He stood taller, had a bounce to his step. Laughed a time or two as he told her to just imagine—a little girl running down their halls. Do you think she’ll have straight hair or curly? He asked the night before last. What if she doesn’t like pancakes?

He was definitely hopeful. And this trip, this visit, did it mean saying goodbye to ever holding a baby in her arms? What could be so wrong with this child that would make them say no, not her. Maybe if the child disliked them? How likely was that? They were nice people. Pleasant people. She glanced at Henry. If he saw this girl and wanted her, really wanted her, could Joanna say no? If she did because of hope of a baby and that baby never came, would he ever forgive her?

He wasn’t thinking about the negatives. Yet for the past few days the negatives were all Joanna could see, the fact that maybe no child would be better than this child. A child who had a whole other life. Other parents. Who no one wanted.

Joanna could almost hear her mother’s words—a ragamuffin, a cast off. Her breath felt stilted. A child who no one wanted? But those were her mother’s words, her mother’s thoughts. She was not her mother.

Joanna glanced at Henry again—his strong jaw, the hint of excitement etched along it. In many ways she was her mother: her obsession with cleaning, with things being ‘just so’. Not in this way though. She wouldn’t be her mother in this way. Marie had put all these negative, overcautious thoughts in Joanna’s mind. The child wasn’t a cast off. She was a child. A little girl in need of a home. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Henry pulled into the long driveway. It looked more like an oddly spaced row of townhouses than a home. Two buildings, each the width of two regular houses, sat beside each other with a walkway between them. Simple rectangles. No character. No aesthetic appeal. Joanna glanced at Henry. Everything he made was beautiful. He’d talked about it multiple times, the importance of a home being somewhere a person could drive up to and love from the outside just as much as the inside.

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