Chapter 19
Britt
Britt’s mother didn’t have a will, which came as no shock to Britt. Her mother could barely keep a checking account, could barely manage a grocery list. Without a will, there was no obvious guardian for Britt, and the court had no choice but to turn to foster care. Rainbow promised Britt she would try to obtain guardianship. It was a promise she kept, eventually, after months of effort. In those intervening months, Britt found what her mother never had—rock bottom.
In an effort to keep Britt in the same school district, the court placed Britt with a foster family just a half hour from the mobile home park. The husband and wife, Ron and Ruby, were the type of Catholics who had figurines of saints all around the house, along with a painting of Jesus on the cross in each of the three bedrooms. They could not have children of their own and felt it was their mission in life to take in the children who had been abandoned.
“I wasn’tabandoned,” Britt told them when they gave her their spiel.
Ruby smiled and put her delicate, child-size hand on Britt’s shoulder.
“I understand, honey,” she said, her voice dripping with pity.
“No, really. My mother died. She didn’tleaveme.”
It was a weak defense. Britt’s mother had left her long before she died.
Britt had told the story of how her mother died so many times that she’d started to believe it. She and Becky had walked in as her mother was holding the gun against her chest. It was an awkward way to commit suicide.Why not hold the gun to her head?One of the police officers asked her that question. She was just a kid, so it sufficed to shrug and say, “I have no idea.” Self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the chest weren’t unheard of. “She was drunk,” Britt told them. “I guess she was aiming for the heart.”
The bullet had gone straight through the heart, a fact that made it impossible for Britt to sleep most nights. She had shot her mom in the heart. She knew this. Becky knew this. She’d sworn Becky to secrecy, but she was sure Becky had told her mother. This was why Britt didn’t believe Rainbow would try to become her guardian. Why would she want a murderer under her roof?
Ron and Ruby housed two other foster children—a fifteen-year-old boy named Carlo who stayed in one of the bedrooms by himself, and a fourteen-year-old girl named Deanna who was less than enthused about sharing a room with Britt.
“We’ve got a good thing here, so don’t go fucking it up,” Deanna said as her greeting.
By “a good thing,” Deanna meant that she and Carlo did whatever they wanted while their naive foster parents were none the wiser. When Britt was older and looking back on this time in her life, she would conclude that Ron and Ruby knew what was going on. They weren’t idiots. They wanted to collect their government money while presenting themselves as morally superior to the world around them. They didn’t care about raising upstanding citizens.
Once Deanna and Carlo realized that Britt was not going to disrupt their status quo, they started inviting her to hang out with them. Thatwas when the real trouble started. They met up with other kids, most of them a few years older, at a dilapidated ranger shack in the woods. They passed around joints and beers. Occasionally, a guy named Conrad brought pills he’d gotten ahold of on his shift at a nursing home. Benzos, mostly. Sometimes, oxy.
Oxy was Britt’s first experience with love at first sight. One pill, and all the clouds that had been following her around parted, beams of light shining through, illuminating the joy that she’d previously thought impossible. When she was on oxy, she didn’t think about her mother. She didn’t think about Steve. She didn’t think, period. She just floated through space, untethered, free.
It didn’t take long for it to go from a solution to a problem. To afford her new habit, she started stealing money from Ron and Ruby’s stash in their dresser drawer.
“You’re gonna fuck this up,” Deanna told her one night in their room. “Ron and Ruby are dumb, but they’re not that dumb. You think they’re not gonna notice all their money going?”
Britt hadn’t thought ahead. She maintained a pleasant distance from consequences.
“I’ll cross that bridge when—”
Deanna laughed. “Bitch, every bridge you have’s gonna be burned.”
The inevitable come-to-Jesus (literally, in Ron and Ruby’s household) happened over a weeknight dinner. One of the household rules was that they always ate dinner together—Ron, Ruby, Carlo, Deanna, and Britt. They had to go around the table and say one thing they were grateful for from their day, then Ron led them in a prayer thanking God Almighty for the food before them. It was after that prayer that Ron cleared his throat, and Britt knew what was coming.
“I wanted to talk to all of you about something,” Ron said.
Deanna eyed Britt. She knew what was coming too. Carlo kept his eyes fixed on his plate, shoveling peas into his mouth.
“We’ve noticed that some cash of ours is missing,” Ruby said.
Britt didn’t blink. She looked straight into the eyes of these people taking care of her, doing her very best to project innocence.
“We understand that we all make mistakes. All we ask is that the cash is replaced by the end of the week and that this does not happen again,” Ron said.
Ruby folded her hands together and set them on the table in front of her.
“The Lord always forgives,” she said.
Deanna and Carlo told Britt that she had to return the money. Britt laughed. It wasn’t like she was holding the money in some secret location. It was gone, spent. They knew that. They didn’t care. They told her to figure it out.
