I had Kat on the line. “Hey, Kat. You got a minute?”
She paused, and I heard the audio quality shift as she switched it from speaker to headset. “Yeah, what’s up, Laur?”
“How would you feel about helping us run a nonprofit we’re starting?”
She sighed. “I mean, my schedule is pretty full, you know that. What’s it about?”
“Well, we took Isabela shopping to celebrate us getting married this morning, and she decided, after helping us buy out half the mall in clothes and toys, that she wanted to give the toys away to other foster kids.”
Her breath caught. “Oh. Um. Yeah. I…yeah.”
“That’s not the whole story, though,” I said. “It sort of just…snowballed, you know? And now, suddenly, we’re starting a whole nonprofit corporation, called Isabela’s Extra Christmas, and we want you to be part of it. I guess, partly just as one of my best friends, but also I figured because it’s something I assumed would be…close to your heart.”
“This was all Isabela’s idea?”
“It started with giving away toys and Jeremy and Titus sort of…ran with it. But it was her idea to start with, yeah.”
“That little girl is…” She swallowed hard. “She’s something else.”
“Reminds you of someone, doesn’t she?”
Kat didn’t answer right away. “How can I help?”
“That’s up to you, babe. You decide the level of your involvement.”
“It’s gonna help foster kids?”
“Yeah.”
“I…” She sighed, a soft, shuddery sound. “Anything and everything. I’m in, Laur. All the fucking way. If I can help other kids not go through the hell I went through…? I’ll do it. I’ll do it all.”
“I know, honey. That’s why I called you.” A thought occurred to me. I beckoned to Mena and whispered a request for the address of the next stop, and relayed it to Kat. “Meet us there. You can help us with the toys, to start.”
“On the way. I’m close anyway, I was showing a condo downtown.”
“Okay.” We were in the car, then. “Kat…this is all you. Take this and run with it, okay?”
Kat laughed. “Oh, honey, this is gonna get the full-octane Katja Spears treatment, believe me. I think I’ve been waiting for this my whole life.”
“I know you have, Kat. I’ll see you soon.” I paused, and then went for it: “Love you, babe.”
She inhaled sharply; we’d never said that between us two before. “Love you, too, Laur.”
“Was that Auntie Kat?” Isabela asked, after I’d put my phone into my purse. “Is she gonna help us give stuff to people?”
“She sure is,” I said. “She was one of those kids who grew up with not-all-the-time parents. Foster parents, they’re called.”
“I think she needs more hugs. She seems sad, sometimes.”
Oh, from the mouths of the young. “Isa-belly, you are exactly right. She needs a lot more hugs. I bet if you gave her all the hugs you can, it would help her be happy more.”
A sigh, as if taking on the weight of the world. “Okay, but I’m not sure if I can give her enough hugs. I think you guys might have to help.”
I laughed. “Yeah, you’re probably right. The problem is, Auntie Kat doesn’t always like hugs, especially from adults. She might be more willing to allow herself to be hugged if they came from you.” I huffed a sad laugh. “I’m not sure she even understands how badly she just needs a hug, sometimes.”
“Can’t you just tell her?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that, unfortunately.”
“Adults are weird.”
“We sure are,” Titus said. “We make things way more complicated than they need to be a large majority of the time.”
Late morning turned to early afternoon, and then finally around four we dropped off the last of the toys. We were supposed to be at home already, getting ready for the party, which was supposed to start at 4:30. We finally trooped inside at 4:15, and nothing was ready.
We hadn’t even had time to straighten the house, much less do any other party preparations, but none of that mattered. We collapsed together onto the couch, me in the corner with Titus beside me, and Isabela across both of our laps, her head on Titus’s, her feet on mine.
Titus squeezed her shoulder. “I’m proud of you, Isabela. You did a really mature and amazing thing today. You inspire me to be a better person, you know that?”
She snuggled closer to his chest. “It was really fun. Watching people get presents and be all excited is almost more fun than getting presents for me.”
“Well there is a saying about that you know,” Titus said. “’Tis better to give than to receive.”
“What’s ’tis mean?”
“It is. Kind of like an old contraction we don’t really use anymore.”
“What’s a contraction?”
“Like it’s instead of it is, or can’t instead of cannot, like that.”
“Oh.”
“So we just use it’s instead of ’tis?”
Titus laughed. “I guess? You’re sort of swinging above my pay grade here, babe.”
“I don’t know what that means, but it sounds not true. You make a lot of money.”
Titus laughed even harder. “You’re funny, kiddo. I just mean you’re asking questions I don’t really have solid answers to.”
“’Cause you didn’t finish school?”
“Right-o.”
“Why don’t you just finish school now?”
“Because there’s no point. There’s nothing I want to do with my life that I need a diploma or degrees for. Anything else I need to know, I can teach myself or learn other ways.”
“So can I quit school, then?”
“You may not,” Titus said. “You still have lots to learn. School is good for you. I shouldn’t have quit. I wish, looking back, that I’d had someone make me stay in school. It worked out for me okay, but there were some times that I wished I’d had something to fall back on, you know? Like, I was committed to music, and at a certain point I was locked into it. I had no choice but to make it. You’re just a kid, and you have your whole future ahead of you, and by god you’re going to get the education I didn’t.”
“But what if I want to be a rock star like you?”
“I’ll support you and help you along the way, honey, but you’ll be a rock star with a high school diploma at very least. If you graduate high school and you know without a single doubt that all you want to do with your whole life is to be a touring musician, we can talk about it then. Until then, though, you’re going to go to school and get the best grades because you’re such a smart young lady.”
“I teached myself to read before I was in kindergarten. Mommy didn’t believe me, so we went to the library and she picked a book I hadn’t read before and I read it to her so she could know I wasn’t just saying a book I already knew all the words to.”