The Girls From Corona Del Mar Read Online Free PDF Page B

them to me in the public library one afternoon. The descriptions of them were heartbreaking, and for weeks she was haunted by their nervous smiles. “Renaldo is eight years old and looking for his forever home. He has some anger management issues, but is seeking counseling and makes good grades in school. His mother is currently incarcerated, and his father …”
    There were page after page of them. From this she knew two things. One: her baby would be snatched up because it was white. And two: there was an army of young black boys who were being raised in the worst imaginable way, unloved, unseen, angry, and poor. She wondered when they would rise up. She wondered if anyone else could see it coming. She wondered if she prayed for them whether it would actually do anything, whether they would feel it, on their worn-out mattresses, in their foster homes, with the fear running through their veins, under scratchy blankets and broken moons.
    I hadn’t known what to say to her, as we wandered, dazed by the bright sun, away from the public library. My instinct, stupidly, was not to go out and protect those boys, but to protect Lorrie Ann from knowing about them.
    “How can this be going on? How can no one want these boys? Are they not human?” Lorrie Ann was literally pulling her hair. I guided her toward the window at the 76 station where I bought us 5th Avenue bars.
    “The thing is,” I said, “you can’t do anything about it now, right? So better to work now, go to college, become someone who does have power, who can help. Right? I mean, isn’t that the only way? Just—just—try not to think about them right now.”
    But where I was callous and intellectual, Lorrie Ann was all heart.
    “I can’t stand for her to ever feel unwanted like that,” she said. (She felt instinctively that the baby inside her was a girl.)
    “But you saw,” I argued, my mouth stuffed with candy bar, “she would be adopted right away. It wouldn’t be like with those boys.”
    “But don’t all adopted children feel unwanted?”
    “I don’t think so,” I said, dizzy, blinded by the white glare of the sidewalk, by Lorrie Ann’s perfect, smooth skin.
    “Well, they should. They weren’t wanted. They were given up. They’re stupid if they don’t feel unwanted.” She began the laborious process of picking all of the chocolate off her 5th Avenue bar in flakes, which she ate separately. Only when the peanut butter center was completely nude would she begin to ingest it, and only then in tiny, butterfly nibbles.
    No, she would not give the baby up. She just couldn’t. She wouldn’t. So then, if she was going to keep the baby, would it be better for it to have a father, or for it to not?
    Having loved and lost Terry the way she had, how could she not want a father for her child?
    Jim was a good guy, and so having him in the child’s life would be a good thing. It would have been different if Jim had been less good, if he had been mean or sneaky, but he was decent. And she felt that it would be easier if she and Jim were married.
    So she married him.
    The day she finally decided, Jim was working at his restaurant, a small, fairly high-class Italian place where he had learned the word “amuse-bouche,” which he loved to say, senselessly, over and over again into the skin of her neck to make her laugh. He was stupid and childish likethat, and for some reason it delighted Lorrie Ann. He had called her because the kitchen had run out of baby powder. The restaurant was housed in an old converted private home, and the kitchen was not properly ventilated, and so with the fryer going and the stove going and the oven going, it was often more than 100 degrees in there, and the boys, from standing and running around, suffered horrible ball chafe and ass chap, which they attempted to combat by dumping loads of baby powder down one another’s pants. Lorrie Ann was familiar with this practice (there was no hiding the white powdery stains on