Red Web by Ninie Hammon

Author:Ninie Hammon [Hammon, Ninie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sterling & Stone
Published: 2020-02-24T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Sadness passed between Juanita and Wendell Bartley as palpable as a cold breeze.

"Part of what happened was our fault," Wendell said. "We got to depending on Caitlyn and we shouldn't have done that. If we'd gotten out of the foster care system when we should have … but with Caitlyn around, to help and to just … just be, we stayed with it."

"You can only do something like that for a time, then it wears you down. It's like you're a pencil eraser and the rubbing back and forth is all the frustration, all the difficulties. But Caitlyn changed everything. We tried to adopt her." Juanita paused and when she began again her voice was tear-clotted. "We did love that little girl somethin' fierce. We wanted her to be our little girl for always. And maybe we could have, but some of her medical records had gotten destroyed in a flood, and they wasn't sure whether or not she had family somewhere. They looked, but they wasn't in no hurry. And we wasn't neither. She was a teenager by then. Time just got away from us."

"In the foster care system, you rotate out at age eighteen," Wendell said. "When you're a legal adult, you're on your own. But we didn't intend that for Caitlyn. Soon's she started high school, we started talking about her future. Got serious about it when she was a senior. She wanted to be a scientist, loved to study, a biologist. Or maybe a fashion designer. Those wouldn't seem to go together, but with Caitlyn, you could believe it as possible. She'd been accepted, already enrolled in a community college and she was going to stay with us. She could have moved into a dormitory with other girls, but she wasn't interested, said she wanted to stay 'home' with her 'family.'"

"We had a party for her eighteenth birthday a week before classes started," Wendell said laboriously, then ran out of gas and Juanita continued.

"At that time, we had three junior high boys and a five-year-old girl named Missy — who'd been taken away from her parents because they was abusing her. She was shy, quiet, withdrawn, scared of her own shadow. The boys were … oh, they were just boys. Acted like boys, a little too rough and rowdy, but not as bad as lots of others we had. They went to a flea market the weekend before the party, and they came back with a sack full of stuff they wouldn't let us see. Secret stuff."

She smiled.

"Of course, as soon as they went to school, we searched their rooms, making sure they hadn't got something they shouldn't have. And it was basic junior-high-boy stuff. A whoopee cushion, fake vomit, a couple of plastic turds, a big black rubber spider, a dead rat, and a rubber snake. Because they were so secretive about it, we knew they were planning to haul those out at the party. We told Caitlyn they were going to play tricks on her and she just laughed and said she'd enjoy it.

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