The Foster Family Read Online Free PDF

spent how many years pushing them away and blocking them out. Couple weeks ago, my sister called. Allison. She’s eighteen. She wants out, just like I did. She told me she’ll move wherever she can to get away from them. She’s as desperate as I was at her age.”
    “But you can help her.”
    “I have to. She can come here and be safe, I can look out for her, and mom and dad will make sure we don’t end up begging in the street. It’s the timing, Kerry, that’s all. It has nothing to do with the break-in. And I hate that I’m putting you out now, but….”
    “Mommy and Daddy won’t let her come if you’ve got another guy her age living in the house.”
    He laughed, but it was weak and sad. “Doesn’t even matter you’d rather sleep with me than her.”
    “Oh fuck that, shit for brains!” I pushed his shoulder, but it was too gentle a shove to really move him far.
    “Don’t be mad, ’kay?”
    I laughed at him, and it sounded sour. “Fuck you. Help me fold the rest of this.” I picked up a shirt and stuffed it in a ball into the laundry bag.
    I couldn’t not be mad. I couldn’t argue. He’d offered me a room when he found out I was sleeping on a mutual friend’s couch six months ago, and it had been an uneasy alliance that only got worse when he found out about Andrew and who he was to me besides the guy nailing me. I think he’d only offered me the place to get me off his friend’s back. I hadn’t seen much of the guy who had lent me the couch since.
    I didn’t have sisters. Or brothers, for that matter. I didn’t have parents either. Not ones I remembered, anyway. I’d been lucky to not to have the worst foster families ever, but I knew what it was like to have no family. I didn’t know what it might be like to have a family and not be talking to them. I imagined it was probably pretty terrible.
    “Can you give me to the end of the week, at least?” I asked.
    “Yeah. ’Course.” He didn’t look at me.
    “Thanks.”
    “Sure. No problem.”
    Silence.
    “I… um.” I dropped a sweater onto the bed. “I’m gonna go clean the yard. Are there garbage bags in the pantry?”
    He nodded.
    I left.

Chapter 4

     
    L ISSA WAS more than helpful. She was an angel, offering me her spare room—which was really a corner of her living room blocked off with a movable screen and her extra futon couch—until I found a place, and letting me use half my shift the next day to make phone calls. I canceled my cards, called to make apartment-viewing appointments, and rerouted my mail to the shop. I had to cash my paycheck advance at the bank in person, which took up most of my lunch but left me with cash so I could wash some clothes at the Laundromat. Matt was right. It cost a fortune. I stopped before I was even half-done.
    Nice as she was, Lissa cleared a corner of her mudroom for my kitten’s carrier box. Miss Claire couldn’t have the run of the house—Lissa was deathly allergic—but she could come to the shop and wander the warren of greenhouses to her little kitty-heart’s content. When Lissa also offered one of the nursery’s display sheds to store my stuff until I could find an apartment, I realized just how clean a break from Matt’s I was making. It was nice of her, but unnecessary. All I had left after the cleanup were my clothes and the textbooks Matt let me leave in his closet until I needed them. Whoever had trashed my stuff had been very thorough.
    “And you have no idea who it was?” Lissa asked, waving her gloved hands as she spoke. Clods of damp earth flew and plopped on the table, the ground, and both our clothes.
    I shook my head, gently guiding her by the wrists back to our work. “And I don’t really want to talk about it anymore, okay?”
    She shrugged and handed over one of the plants we were moving to bigger pots. “I just thought if you talked about it, something would spark. Some memory or—” she flicked a hand and a bottle-cap-sized lump of black soil splatted