Page 4 of Mornings By the Linden Tree
There was not enough bourbon at hand to drown every bad memory. But Lord I had tried. And now I was paying. I was locked in a stuffy office, discussing my plans for my niece.
“Mr. Barlowe, the final wishes of your sister…” The dark-skinned and severely overworked social servant tapped a file resting on her desk. Her name was Susanne Wickens, an older Black woman with salt-and-pepper hair and large red button earrings to match her red and black dress. “I wish you would take more time to recover from her loss. Many times when we’ve had a shock of this kind—”
“My sister overdosing was not a shock. It was a pity, but it was one of two inevitable outcomes for a person fighting addiction. The addiction either kills the addict or the addict kills the devil on his or her back.” She blinked at my reply. “That being said, Aida leaving this scribbled out last request for me to take the child—”
“Valeria,” she corrected. I knew exactly what she was doing. Making me use the child’s name in order to build a bond was clever. I used it myself in court all the time.
“Yes, Valeria. I will, of course, have to ensure that the validity of the document found in her apartment is, in fact, written in her hand and that she was in a sound mind when the will was drafted.”
“Would you like to meet her?” Mrs. Wickens asked.
“I…meet who?” I asked, feeling a little taken aback at this social worker stepping all over my carefully laid-out, if slightly error-ridden, dictation to text speech to explain why it would be best to leave the child in temporary foster care and not ship her back with me to Boston. An idea Mrs. Wickens seemed to be floating, and it was obviously outlandish.
“Valeria. Your niece. She’s a darling child. Bright, happy, and eager to get to know her uncle.”
My heart stuttered. “She has no knowledge of me,” I quickly argued.
“Oh, but she does. She’s been saying that her mama said Uncle Wes would take care of her if Mama had to leave.”
“Dear God,” I whimpered, my brilliant summation blown to bits. Damn it. Perhaps this lowly civil servant should pursue a career in law if she could detonate a skilled litigator and orator like me with such skill and ease. “I…why would Aida tell the child such a thing?”
“I would imagine so she was prepared in case something like this took place,” Mrs. Wickens said, handing me a yellow box of tissues. Damn it all to hell where were all of these tears coming from?!
“Surely the father of the child…” I coughed out as I blotted my eyes. “Surely he would wish to have custody of his daughter.”
“The father is unknown and not listed on the birth certificate.”
“Of course he is. Was. Whatever.” I cleared my throat and lifted my jaw. “Still, a search for him should be made to ensure he has no legal claims on the child.”
“Agreed, and that will be done, but for now, Valeria needs a stable home with family, if at all possible. And until we can locate the father—if we can—you are the person Aida wished to take her daughter. Why don’t we just have you two meet while we hash out temporary custody, check your background, and allof that? If you’re willing, of course, I don’t want to push you into any decision.”
“Oh you’re good,” I conceded. She looked at me with all the innocence of a cherub. “Since the child—”
“Valeria.”
“Yes, since Valeria knows of me and no father is listedandthis last request of my sister’s is in flux as we ascertain its validity, meeting the…Valeria seems prudent. Even if just to explain that her uncle is here but may not be able to take her at this time.”
“Yes, of course. That’s all perfectly reasonable.”
“I am a very reasonable man.”
An hour later, in a very small but tidy home in the neighborhood of Soulard, I discovered how an incredibly commonsense person could plummet into an irrational fool.
Chapter Three
My fall into what I was sure Percy would call temporary insanity began when a tiny child in pink leggings and an oversized tee with a penguin on the front was led into a modest living room by a social worker with a heart as tall as the famed arch I’d spied on the way here.
Looking at Valeria was like looking at Aida when she was a little moppet. Big brown eyes, thick black hair combed and pulled into a tiny ponytail, and a strong chin. Aida could jerk that chin up in a flash, and as soon as Valeria entered the room, she did the same. That small motion scattered all my rehearsed lines to the wind. The child was scared. Yes, I could see it in her eyes. Taken from a person she knew, the neighbor who cared for her when Aida was unable to, according to the information Mrs. Wickens had passed along on the drive here, and plopped into a strange home. Valeria was a smart, cheerful girl, and would be four on her next birthday. She was confused but not acting out. I didn’t know if she had been told about her mother. She seemed rather calm, if anxious, so I had to reason that she had not.
“Valeria, this is your uncle Wes,” Mrs. Tanner, a slim Black woman with crooked teeth, explained. The tension around my niece’s eyes lessened. “He’s come here to meet you.”
“Hello,” I said, every muscle I possessed tight as a bowstring, my ass cheeks clenched tightly as I balanced on the edge of a moderately new sofa. The house was clean. Somewhere a television was playing, and the air held the faintest hint of vanilla as if someone had recently baked a cake. I stood. Valeria looked up at me, her mouth dropping open, as she peered skyward.
“Mama said you were tall like the clouds,” she whispered, awestruck.
I nodded, unsure of how to proceed. My interactions with children were limited to clients’ kids, for the most part. Most of my friends, the few I had, were childless by choice.
“I am tall,” I conceded, for it was true. I topped out at six-three. “And you are short.”
