A Theory of Relativity by Jacquelyn Mitchard
It should not surprise her. Even self-aware people were prone to avoidance. And the self-aware were not Faith’s customary clients.
Gordon had been in the shower. She’d rung the buzzer politely, twice, then leaned on it, and then finally rung the other apartment. A fierce-faced woman nearly ripped the outer door from its hinges, spitting out a perfunctory “Yes?” When Faith explained her errand, the woman, who introduced herself as Judy Wilton, the owner of the house, quieted down and explained how fortuitous it was that she was there at all; she wouldn’t have answered either except for having come home from the store to shower off the cheese smell from the store before her annual gyn checkup, a little more than Faith had needed to know.
Gordon opened the door in his gym shorts, thankfully not his boxers, with Keefer toddling naked behind him.
The stern faces of the two callers alarmed him.
“What’s wrong?” he asked sheepishly.
“You’re okay, then,” Judy Wilton said, ruffling her spiky hair. “You didn’t answer.”
“We were . . . busy,” Gordon said, “What’s the matter? Were we making too much noise? We were in the shower.”
“Evidently,” said the other woman. “I’m Faith Bogert?”
He smiled and cocked a finger at her and said, “Here’s looking at you, kid.” But she saw the realization dawning in his face, even as he made his feeble joke, that this was the social worker and he had forgotten his appointment.
Judy Wilton, meanwhile, whirled and stomped down the stairs.
Faith reflected that people always said the same thing when they heard her name. “It’s with an e, not an a,” Faith said. She always said that. “No relation to the actor.”
That had the effect of relaxing him. Faith noticed his shoulders sliding down from their protective posture. Good. “May I come in?”
“Of course, I’m sorry. Well, the C in my name is for ‘Cooper,’ ” he said, blushing, suddenly aware of his clothing deficit, “not that anyone ever knows that. My dad was this big space buff.”
Faith had no idea what he was talking about. But she nodded. “Parents,” she said, with a practiced sigh.
Gordon swept a pile of laundry from the sofa to make room for her. He really was good-looking, Faith thought. The kind of man who never noticed her, who would see right through her if she walked down the aisle of the church stark naked. She was practical about men; her mother had seen to that. She didn’t even send prayers after the ones who wouldn’t be worth the effort. Pretty boys never went the distance; she’d known that since middle school, before she’d ever heard of a narcissistic personality. She stifled the reflex irritation with herself for having felt so fat that morning that she’d resorted to her stirrup pants and a tunic—stirrup pants were like a genetic marker for women who had something between their neck and their knees that they wanted to cover.
Never mind. This guy was where he should be. He wasn’t paying more attention to her than to the little girl. He didn’t let the baby run past him out into the hall. There were stairs out there. He was probably a good guy.
Her job was to find out whether he’d be a good father.
Faith had been carefully named (her middle name, to her despair, was Angel). She’d been carefully raised by a mother few people thought had the gumption for it. That she’d gone to college at all, much less become a psychologist (and there were people who hadn’t thought she’d had the guts or the genes to do that, either), was a by-product of her own rearing. The single daughter of a single mother, she’d turned out better than anyone in Plano, North Dakota, had expected. That was a factor in her getting this job, a weighty job. She was only a twenty-seven-year-old whose ink hadn’t dried on her Ph.D., still in her postdoc supervision. But her boss gave her cases they called A Gees, their private code for “anybody’s guess,” evaluations mandated by nasty divorces or investigations into charges of neglect. Faith had already seen much during her internships, public and private—a pregnant ninth-grader with a baby and fifteen possible candidates for the lucky sperm; grandmoms who went to play bingo and left six-month-olds asleep, watched over by Dobermans who bit the sheriff’s deputy after she forced the door. And worse, much, much worse. A nine-month-old with gonorrhea of the mouth. One perfect five-year-old—the object of a feral struggle between two divorcing parents—who could tap dance like a Mouseketeer but screamed whenever she saw a cigarette.
Faith’s mother had been poor, a waitress literally until the day she died three years before, struck head on by a drunk while driving home from work. Faith had not only the credentials, but the chops. She could see past dirty hair and ragged pajamas to identify love unlearned but devoted, and past Baby Gap clothes to dirt that would never show in a photograph. She understood her prejudices and guarded herself against them.
She’d already visited the busy, sparkling interior of the Cadys’ condo—mermaid wallpaper already going up for Keefer; the older girl’s room plain white, no attempt to impose any decorating ideas on a teen, good job, there—it had turned her heart, she couldn’t deny. And Delia, who ran her own cosmetics business from the house. Faith admired her skill in making more money than her husband while still keeping up the impression of a wife at home, so important to both of them.
Delia was probably a little too organized, the kind who offered a coaster before the guest accepted a drink. But Faith knew Delia would offer the same drink to a bum or a senator. There was something in Delia of Faith’s own mother, that same combination of deep pride and caution. She had no illusions about the advantages of the two-parent family. All a child really needed was the absolute love of one relatively sane parent.
Craig didn’t really loom large in the Cady family unit. Craig was a little uptight. His relationship with Alexis Tyson, the child of his wife’s previous marriage, who lived with them except for two weeks each summer when she went to visit her motorcycle mechanic papa, was clearly a source of strain. The girl’s room was the typical cyclone scene, and Craig winced when he opened the door. Craig might have stayed at home with his folks just a couple of years too long—thirty-five was pretty late for a first marriage. And yet, despite their shared devotion to religion, neither Cady insisted that Alexis attend Cornerstone Community Church with them on Wednesdays and Sundays. The girl had no interest in Sunday school—“Why would anybody want more school?” she’d asked.
It was a sort of garden-variety rebellion, a lot less harrowing than others she could have chosen. Delia and Craig seemed to know that and took care to drop her off at the pool or the library with her own cell phone for emergencies. This pointed to a welcome flexibility that didn’t always go along with a big emphasis on organized religion, as well as an untutored wisdom: After all, the great majority of premature sexual experimentation took place when the parents of young teens were at work.
Both Craig and Delia would come up a little high on the inventories for obsessiveness. She would explain in her report to the guardian ad litem that the Cadys’ results on the MMPI-Inventory II weren’t exactly reliable, but no cause for alarm—they would not only be “faking good” the way everyone did who wanted the child, filling in all the most virtuous circles on those endless questions, but they would actually be “too good.” As born-agains, they would have to be less suspicious about their fellow men than others.
For Faith, the most telling point in the Cady evaluation had been the play observation. That couldn’t be faked. Delia was a real mother who knew that playing with a toddler basically meant following the little person around, offering a sponge when the chubby fist closed determinedly around a fork, changing activities every ninety seconds, hanging loose when the kid kicked over the blocks. The outlets were covered but the cabinets that held the Tupperware were open.
Craig had done the right thing, too, during playtime. Nothing. He’d held back. He’d had no idea what to do with Keefer, so he’d watched his wife. The Cadys had no children of their own, he’d confided, because Delia’s health was delicate.
Gordon’s house was also neat and safe, if not exactly child friendly. There were half-filled glasses of water sitting around and a gymnasium’s worth of bats and rackets and golf clubs . . . yikes, and a jockstrap. The outlets in use were in plain sight at baby eye level, though the ones not in use had plastic caps.
Still, Keefer wasn’t yet in residence full-time.
Gordon began to show Faith around. He seemed very proud of the dog bed.
Faith had to smile.
She didn’t smile, however, when Gordon twice let his arm brush her shoulder for a trace of a second too lingeringly. He was checking her out, trying to figure out if she was unmarried and susceptible. Perhaps unaware that he was doing it at all. Faith offered to hold the baby while he got into some clothes.
“I don’t know if she’ll go to you.”
“Well, they usually do,” Faith told him, taking Keefer and turning, in one motion, to point out the robin tending to its nestlings in the fragile birch outside Gordon’s living room window. “Lookee. Baby birds,” she said, and Keefer—what a doll she was—made peeping noises.
“I’m surprised,” Gordon said. He’s disappointed, thought Faith.
“Well, better get dressed before she decides against it,” Faith instructed him. He emerged in two minutes, still mostly wet, but at least decent.
“I’m sorry I was still in the shower when you got here,” he began. “It’s right on the calendar. But she was up all night. She got a cold at the Cadys’ house. I know that’s prejudiced of me. I feel like, whenever she’s away from me, they don’t look after her as well.”
“What did you do about it?”
“Well, I can’t kill them.”
“I assume that’s a joke.”
He’d given her a sharp glance. “Of course. The Cadys are good people. They just don’t know the Keefster very well.”
“I meant about her cold.”
“There’s a routine. You have to feed her buttered noodles. That’s her comfort food. And then, I put her in the bed with me . . . that’s okay, isn’t it?”
“Plenty of people have their kids sleep in their bed with them.”
“And then we do the chant.”
“The chant?”
“Well, I make this noise, like a little motor. And then she starts to make it, too. And I pet her head. And she falls asleep. Of course, then I can’t move.”
“Move?”
“Well, then I have to stay there with her. So she doesn’t roll out. Like, last night, I was going to do some lesson plans, but I didn’t put them by the bed before she fell asleep. And the chant can put me to sleep, too. I’m just a sleeper. So, I guess that’s how I forgot. Though my mother did remind me last night at the fireworks.”
“Did they scare her?”
“Nah. Nothing scares her,” Gordon told Faith, with a sniff of pride, “except when you hand her to someone she doesn’t know.” The previous year, Gordon said, he and his sister climbed out on the roof with Keefer to watch the display over Rotary Park. “My sister and I used to sit out there and talk in the summer and flick the butts . . .”
“You’re a smoker, then?”
“No, I don’t mean . . . cigarettes. We were kids. You know, in college. We weren’t . . . smoking when we were out there with the baby. We were just watching the fireworks. The other . . . What I was talking about was years and years ago.”
“Ahhhh, yes.”
“And it really wasn’t a hundred times. I didn’t do the drug thing much. Neither did my sister. Really.”
“I’m not thinking that,” Faith told him warmly.
“Good,” Gordon let out a long breath. “Keefer, Keefer. Your mama loved you.” Hearing her name, Keefer toddled over and leaned against her uncle’s knee.
“Oh, gosh,” Faith sighed, going for empathy, enlisting his cooperation, “we have a million miles of ground to cover. And these things.” She took out her sheaf of forms, the MMPI and the MCMI-III, the sentence completion sheet. “This junk takes hours to do. Who’s going to watch the baby?”
“Uh, well, I am,” said Gordon, his eyes popping. They were truly gray. Most people, Faith had observed from having to observe so many, described misty, changeable eyes as gray or green if they’d been to college, and blue if they had not. It was a weird artifact.
Few, however, no matter how they described them, really had gray eyes. She hauled her gaze back to the folders.
“I’m afraid this stuff is something you really have to concentrate on,” Faith apologized. “It’s like the SATs. If you even get a mark in the wrong place—
“I’ll end up saying I prefer killing animals to building birdhouses,” he said. “Or dressing up in women’s clothes and making phony nine-one-one calls.”
“Something like that. It’s a personality inventory.” Faith made quote marks in the air.
“I only have one.”
“What?”
“Personality.”
“Let us be the judge of that,” Faith replied, walking the line.
“I’ll call my mom.”
“Is she . . . at work?”
“She’s home because it’s summer. She’s a teacher. We’re both teachers. My dad was a teacher, too. Now, he’s a vitamin butcher.”
“A . . . butcher?”
“He sells vitamins. Like, to all the health-food stores on the planet. Sort of helps . . . plan them. He works at Medi-Sun.” Gordon picked up the phone and called Lorraine, who said she’d be over within ten minutes.
“Okay. We’ll just do a couple of things while we wait,” Faith went on, “stuff I have to cover. Turn on the big lights, you know.”
“Serious business.”
“The most serious.”
“Shoot.”
“You’re adopted,” she’d said, when they sat down, Keefer in a diaper and a onesie planted with her musical blocks between Gordon’s feet.
“I . . . I was adopted, yes,” he acknowledged. Faith picked up on the tense.
“Of course,” she said.
“I mean, as my mom always says, you know, it’s not a life condition.”
“Of course. What I meant was, do you think that’s going to give you any special insights into raising Keefer?”
“Well, sure. My parents always told me certain things. . . . Like, you were so wanted we had to . . . you know, go out of our way to get you, to have you . . .”
“And . . . well, that’s not true for Keefer.”
“No. Yes and no. I mean, I could have done the same thing as Caroline Nye and Alison Nye, Ray’s sisters.’ ”
“In choosing not to try for custody . . . but they already have families—”
“Caro doesn’t. And it’s still selfish.”
Faith could see him panic, wish for an air hook to reclaim the last word.
“I don’t mean selfish. I mean, she’s their brother’s child, too. But Caroline is apparently getting a divorce, and Alison, I don’t even know Alison. I guess they have their reasons.”
“Do you wish they’d shown more interest?”
“No. It’s not like I want the competition.”
“Did you always intend to adopt Keefer?”
“I guess so. Sure.”
“Still, raising a baby is a big deal. And facing a custody case.”
“Yeah. I guess it’s a big case now, for sure. I hope they pull out of it and it doesn’t get that far. It would be a disagreeable business. Delia and Craig are nice people. Not exactly people I’d hang out with but . . .” Gordon scanned Faith’s face, which she’d composed to look impassive yet interested. “Still, I mean, this isn’t my top idea of how to spend a summer.”
“What is?”
“Oh”—Gordon leaned back, stretching out golden legs—“traveling. I used to work for this outfit that took families or corporate types on sort of semiscientific cruises. Really, vac
“Won’t be doing much of that now.”
“No,” Gordon sighed, “I guess not.” Faith waited, giving him room for the obligatory follow-up, that Keefer was worth it, of course. It didn’t come.
“I’m hearing that maybe this is all kind of overwhelming.”
“Well, it is kind of overwhelming. Not Keefer. I’ve always helped out with Keefer, because . . . her mom, my sister, was sick, and her dad was . . . away a lot of the time. We didn’t blame Ray. He played golf. He was just starting to make it pay, you know? Georgia accepted it. She wanted that for him.”
“But the whole parenthood thing. It’s huge.” Faith leaned forward, making a deliberate, visible effort to set her clipboard down beside her, as if she might neglect to take notes.
“Well, yeah. Being a parent. It’s . . . like full-time all the time. No overtime.” Gordon laughed. “I guess I had it kind of easy.”
“Not everyone would say that.”
“How so?”
“Well, being adopted . . .”
“There’s no . . . you know, there’s no difficulty with being adopted.”
“But there are issues.”
“All I hear about is issues, these days.”
“Well, it’s one thing to think about that kids don’t ordinarily have to think about.”
“Are you adopted?”
“No.”
“Well, how do you know what people think about it?”
“The literature. It’s known.”
“Who does the literature come from?”
“I don’t get you.”
“Well, it comes from psychologists who were . . . studying people who were already having trouble with something, or else they wouldn’t have been talking to a psychologist, right?”
“No,” Faith said, “just ordinary, well-adjusted, normal adoptees, too.”