Better Than the Best Plan Read online

  And to spill it all now would be a much bigger conversation than I have time for, especially with that business lady outside my door calling my name.

  “You sure you don’t want me to stay?” she asks.

  “Positive,” I say. “I’ll text you when I know what’s what.”

  Her face tells me that she’s going to expect an explanation later, but she reaches for her bag and heads for the sliding door that leads to the deck and down the back stairs.

  I take a deep breath and make my way back to the front door. I look through the peephole one more time to see if she’s given up and left, which would mean it probably wasn’t all that important. Maybe a surveyor or a solicitor. But no, she’s still there, her shoulders squared, her gaze leveled straight at the peephole, like she knows I’m standing here, looking out at her.

  I’m going to have to deal with this one way or another, so I take a deep breath, open the door, and plaster on my best teacher-pleasing smile.

  “Hi,” I say, trying to sound like she’s any other visitor. Now that the woman standing there isn’t magnified through a fuzzy lens, I can get a good look at her. She’s wearing a pair of black dress pants, cropped and cuffed, with a white button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and black patent leather ballet flats. She has a leather bag slung over her shoulder that looks stuffed just a little too full with papers and folders, her blond hair pulled back from her face. Despite the heat, she doesn’t seem to be sweating off any of her perfectly applied makeup. She’s definitely not a cop, and that somehow makes me feel more nervous.

  “Maritza?” the woman asks.

  I try to answer, but my voice feels trapped in my throat, so instead I nod.

  She sticks her arm out, and her manicured hand reaches across the threshold of the front door. “Hi, I’m Tess Lloyd. I’m with the Florida Department of Children and Families. Do you mind if I come in?”

  There’s a brief moment where I consider slamming the door shut and cranking the dead bolt, then maybe running back to my room and burrowing under the covers. As if that will make whatever’s coming next stop. But the door is open, and as soon as she introduces herself, passing a crisp white business card to me, I know that I’m in trouble.

  Still, I try to salvage what I can. It takes everything I have, but I manage to open the door wider and step aside, ushering her into the living room like hey, I’ve got nothing to hide. I see Tess glance around, and I imagine her sweeping the room for drugs or weapons or other signs that I’m in trouble. Or that I am trouble. But of course, she doesn’t find anything. I may be alone, but everything is fine. It’s all under control. I’m handling it all better than my mother would, if she were here. I’m not starving. I’m healthy and my grades are fine. Hell, I’m seventeen, just a couple months away from being eighteen. Old enough to vote and buy lottery tickets and serve my country. Certainly, I can be trusted to stay in a furnished, air-conditioned apartment with a decently stocked fridge all by myself.

  But if I’m going to convince this very well-dressed social worker of that, I’m going to have to start doing the work, and fast.

  “Can I get you anything?” I want to ask her what’s going on, but I find it best in situations like this to make the other person say it first, in hopes that maybe they’ll chicken out. We had a landlord once who did that when I was ten. We were living in Maryland, where we’d moved after my mother decided “professional political activist” was the nonpaying job she wanted next. That had meant a lot of days spent either making signs or holding them at some protest or another. I was never totally clear on the issues we were protesting, and sometimes I got the impression that my mom wasn’t either. Our landlord at the time was this little old lady who wore velour tracksuits and visited the beauty parlor once a week. We were renting the mother-in-law cottage behind her house. She’d come over to inquire about the rent check, and my mother would simply act like it was a social call, offering her sweaty glasses of iced tea and packages of off-brand Fig Newtons, diving into the neighborhood gossip and treatises on the weather. It took poor Mrs. Healey four months before she could work herself up to asking my mother to actually pay her, at which point we packed up and moved out.

  “No, I’m fine,” Tess says, and I hear the southern come out in the fiiiiine, a word she flattens and stretches just a little too long. “But that’s sweet of you to offer. Why don’t we take a seat?”

  And in that moment, I know I’m not dealing with a Mrs. Healey. Tess doesn’t seem nervous. She seems in charge, offering me a seat in my own house. And that makes me nervous, because if she’s in charge, then I’m not.

  She reaches into her bag and pulls out a file folder, but I can’t read the label printed on it without making a spectacle of my attempt. She flips it open.

  “Is your mother home, Maritza?”

  I shake my head. “No, she’s not here right now.” A reply that has the virtue of being 100 percent true.

  “When will she be home?”

  “I’m not sure exactly.” Still true.

  Tess flips the folder shut again, squares it on her knees, then folds her hands in her lap. She looks up at me with a smile that seems kind and sympathetic. “Okay, well, I really need to speak with her, so would it be okay if I wait?”

  Crap. This lady clearly has my number already. Who ratted me out? Definitely not Mrs. Sazonov. If anything, she’s happy my mom is gone, because it means she’s no longer burning incense in the apartment. Mrs. Sazonov always claimed the smell drifted down through the ventilation system and aggravated her allergies. And I’d mailed in the rent check on time, so it wasn’t our landlord.

  “Maritza, let me be honest with you,” Tess says, as if she can hear the thoughts running through my head. “We’ve received a report from your school that you’re living alone.”

  Ah, Ms. Silverstein, my guidance counselor. When my mom didn’t show up to the end-of-the-year college-counseling session she hosted for all juniors and their parents, she started asking me a lot of questions. It was only two days after Mom had left, and I wasn’t prepared with answers. I fumbled, and she got curious. She made a few calls home that I’d tried to deflect by saying my mom was at work. But there was nothing I could do about the emails I’m sure she also sent, emails that I’m sure went unanswered. She may have even called my mom’s work number. Who knows how much her friend Rose, the psychic who paid Mom to run her little crystal shop part-time, knew or told. Ms. Silverstein had to have been the one.

  Tess leaves a good, long silence for me to say something, but I’m out of somethings to say. So Tess continues. “In the state of Florida, a minor cannot live independently unless they’ve been emancipated.”

  “I’m hardly a minor,” I say before I can think better of it. At this point, I’m just operating in damage-control mode. I need to reassure this woman that everything is fine so I can get her out of my living room. “I’ll be eighteen in September.”

  She nods. “But you’re seventeen now.”

  Now it’s my turn to nod.

  “And your mother isn’t here.”

  I leave my own good, long silence, but Tess is ready to wait me out. Finally, I nod again.

  “See, that’s where we have a problem. I suspect your mother has been gone”—she glances down at her notes—“at least two weeks. And you have no idea when she’ll be back.” She looks up at me for confirmation, but all I can do is stare down at my lap. “You cannot continue on in this living situation.”

  What does she mean “this living situation”? It’s not like I’m living in a tent. I look around the apartment, which I’d vacuumed a few days ago and which I tidied every night before going to bed. It honestly looked better than it did when my mom lived here with me. In the two weeks since Mom left, I hadn’t missed a single day of school. I’d eaten three decent meals every day, some of which included fruits and vegetables. I’d done laundry and washed my sheets and cleaned the apartment. How would adult supervision improve my living situation? I op
en my mouth to tell Tess all this, but she’s already shuffling papers, moving on to the next step.

  “We have a few options. The first would be a kinship placement. Do you have any family in the area you could stay with? Maybe your dad?”

  Her voice is tentative, like she knows it’s a long shot, and boy is it. I almost laugh out loud at the question. Family in the area? I don’t have family anywhere other than my mother. The only evidence of my father is my mere existence; otherwise, he’s just a passing thought to me, a fact of biology and nothing more. I stopped asking my mother about him long ago, as soon as I was old enough to realize that her evasive responses were less about her sparing my feelings and more about sparing her own. Because it isn’t just that he doesn’t know about me, it’s that she’s not entirely sure who he is. And who wants to spend too much time thinking about that?

  “No,” I reply. “He’s not … I mean, I don’t even know…” I trail off, because I can tell from her face that I don’t need to say more.

  “That’s fine,” Tess says. She nods, ticking off a mental box in her head before moving on to the next item. “No grandparents? Aunts or uncles?”

  I shake my head. My mom’s an only child, and all I know about my grandparents is that they’re dead, and before they died they definitely didn’t approve of my mother’s “journey.”

  Tess nods, taking it in, the fact that with my mother out of the picture, I’m as good as an orphan.

  “Well, do you have a friend you could stay with? We could do a quick visit and background check to make sure everything’s in order, and then we could pack up some of your things.”

  My mind flashes to Lainey, who is probably halfway to the little shotgun house she lives in with her mom. I’ve stayed over at her house plenty of times; I know it wouldn’t be a problem with her mom, except for the whole social-worker thing. Lainey’s mom has been working two full-time jobs for the last few months to pay off some car repairs after an accident. Days at a factory that makes organic soap in neon colors (as if highlighter yellow is a color that occurs in nature), nights at the Salt and Pepper Diner near the airport, and doubles at the diner on the weekends. She’s been working so hard Lainey has barely seen her lately. I have a feeling that if DCF knew that Lainey spends every night at home alone, cycling through a selection of the finest frozen dinners the 7-Eleven around the corner has to offer, Lainey would have her own social worker to deal with. I won’t do that to her.

  “I don’t really, no,” I reply. Part of me is hoping that with my options dwindling, Tess will decide that I’m really already in the best possible situation.

  “Okay, well, in that case, we’re going to need to head over to my office to make some arrangements,” she says, confirming my very worst fears.

  “This seems silly,” I say, attempting one last-ditch effort at making this all go away. “I mean, I’m almost eighteen, and everything is fine here. Seriously, look around. You can make surprise visits whenever you want. I promise, I’ll get to my eighteenth birthday unscathed and in one piece. And besides, my mom could come back anytime!”

  But none of it penetrates. Tess keeps that kind, sympathetic smile on her face as she seals my fate. “And when she does, we can reassess. But for right now, you’re a minor with no adult supervision, which is a problem we need to solve. Luckily, you have me here to help you solve it. So let’s head on over to the office, okay?”

  I have this moment where I think of that old saying about kidnapping: Never let them take you to a second location, because the second location is where things go bad.

  I think the saying applies to social workers, too.

  CHAPTER THREE

  My path has led me directly to a vinyl-covered chair, where I’m trying to keep the peeling piece of duct tape that’s covering a crack from poking into the back of my thigh, while a social worker tries to find a place for me to stay.

  “Okay, Maritza Reed,” Tess says as she squints at her computer screen. I’m not sure if she’s asking me or just saying it out loud to fill the silence. Either way, it feels weird to hear it. Maritza. Mom always told me she picked the name up from a waitress at the Mexican restaurant she went to all the time when she was living in Taos and pregnant with me. “You were very nearly named Guacamole, but Maritza won out in the end,” she liked to say, which is why I liked that she called me Ritzy. It seemed like something she came up with for me, something that grew out of her actually paying attention to who I was.

  “Middle name?” Tess asks, as she squints at the computer screen.

  “September,” I reply.

  “Date of birth?”

  “September fifteenth.” Again, my mom with the careful name selection. You wouldn’t think she’d had nine months to decide. I shouldn’t complain, though. I’m just lucky my name isn’t Harvest Moon or Karma Sunshine or something equally ridiculous.

  I give Tess my address and my Social Security number, which I’ve had memorized since second grade (this was about the time when I realized my mom was never going to be very good with filling out forms for school).

  Amid the clackety-clack of the keyboard, I hear my phone buzz in my back pocket. I pull it out to see a text from Lainey.

  Lainey: Everything ok?

  My thumbs are poised over the screen, but I have no idea what to type. And I’m so busy trying to come up with an answer that I don’t notice at first that Tess’s brow is furrowed as she clicks through something on her computer screen. It’s not until she leans into the screen and mutters, “This is interesting,” that I’m finally pulled back into reality.

  I drop my phone into my lap. “What?” I ask.

  “You already have a file.” She holds up a manicured finger. “Just give me a minute. I need to check a few things.”

  And then she’s gone, leaving me with a thousand questions. Or maybe just a few questions repeating over and over again in my mind. I already have a file? With DCF? How can that be?

  After what feels like an eternity, Tess returns. She sits down in her chair, then turns to face me. She leans forward, her elbows resting on her knees. And that’s how I know something is coming. Something big. Because no one makes that kind of full-body eye contact with you unless they’re about to turn your world upside down.

  “Maritza, did you know that you’ve been in foster care before?”

  This is not what I was expecting.

  “What are you talking about?” I feel tears prick my eyes. “Are you sure?”

  She nods. “You have a file. It indicates that you were in foster care when you were very young. Shortly after you were born, in fact. You wouldn’t remember it, but I didn’t know if anyone had told you.” The anyone hangs between us full of things literally unsaid.

  “Wait, this was in Taos?”

  Now it’s Tess’s turn to look confused. “No, here. In Jacksonville.”

  “But that can’t be right,” I say. “I was born in Taos, New Mexico. I only moved here three years ago.”

  Tess glances at her computer screen, looking slightly pained. “Not according to our system. You were about six months old when you entered foster care here in Jacksonville, and you remained there for almost eighteen months.”

  “This has to be a mistake,” I say.

  “It’s your name and Social Security number,” she says gently. I know what she’s saying has to be true, but it still doesn’t feel right. Tess gives it time to sink in.

  I try to think back. My mom has always been a bad keeper of our history. She’d mix up our stint in Oregon with our time in Maryland. She’d think it was San Diego where we tried our hand at freeganism, when really it was Portland. She misremembered dates all the time. But I would have thought at some point she would have mentioned that we lived in Jacksonville before. That was a hard thing to forget. So was me being in foster care. So if I didn’t know, it was on purpose.

  “This is a lot of information, I know,” Tess says. She looks like she wants to reach out and pat my knee, but she stays
in her own space. I immediately wonder if it’s part of some kind of protocol, if she’s not supposed to touch me. But I wish she would. I wish she’d reach out and put a hand on each of my shoulders and hold me down, because I feel like I’m going to float away if someone doesn’t grab hold of me right now. I need someone to do my mom’s hippie Zen forehead trick.

  I need my mom.

  After a moment of waiting, of letting this all wash over me, Tess gets back to business. “I actually spoke to the woman who you stayed with when you were in foster care the first time. Her name is Kristin. There’s a note in your file saying that should you ever end up back in foster care, she wanted to be notified. She had said back then that she was open to you returning to her if necessary. And while it’s been a lot longer than she maybe thought, when I called, she said she was more than happy to have you come to stay. But if you’d rather I find another placement, I can do that.”

  A choice. The first one I’ve had since Tess showed up at my door and shook up my life like a snow globe. The fact that my mom’s parting words to me were about following my own path seems so completely laughable right now. I’m not on a path, I’m on a loop, and apparently, it’s leading me right back to where I started. I stand up from the chair so fast that it rocks backward, echoing on the linoleum floor. A look of concern flashes across Tess’s face, so I gasp, “I have to go to the bathroom” before bolting out of the office and toward the door in the corner of the main room.