Part Two: How We Met

I’m Khloe Reyes. I’m thirty-nine years old, and I work as a 911 dispatcher for Pierce County. Four ten-hour shifts a week, sitting in a dark room full of glowing monitors, answering phones on the worst day of strangers’ lives. I talk people through CPR on their husbands. I keep frightened teenagers on the line while the deputies are on their way. I’m good at staying calm. You have to be.

I’ve never been married. For most of my twenties, I thought I would be. Then I turned thirty-two and realized I’d spent so long waiting for my life to start that I’d forgotten it already had. So I stopped waiting.

I got licensed as a foster parent the next year.

I met Morgan at a holiday party in December, seven years ago, before I’d been matched with any child at all. The foster agency held it every year in the fellowship hall of a Lutheran church on the east side of Tacoma: a big room with folding tables and paper snowflakes taped to the windows and a Santa who was really a retired electrician named Gus. There were crafts and games and a cookie table, and a ticket system so kids could win little prizes. Each kid got ten tickets at the door. Volunteers like me ran the booths.

I was working the ring toss. And I noticed a little boy sitting by himself on the edge of the stage.

He was four and a half, small for his age, in a sweatshirt two sizes too big with the sleeves rolled up four times. He had dark curly hair that needed cutting and big serious brown eyes. He wasn’t playing anything. He was just sitting on the stage with his knees pulled up to his chest, watching the other kids.

When my shift at the ring toss ended, I walked over and sat down next to him.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m Khloe. Don’t you want to play?”

He looked at me for a long moment, deciding whether I was safe.

“I don’t have tickets,” he said finally. “A big kid took them.”

I went and bought him a giant cookie. They were selling them at the cookie table for the agency’s scholarship fund, three dollars each, chocolate chip cookies as big as a dinner plate, wrapped in plastic with a curly red ribbon. I gave it to him and sat back down. I didn’t give him any of my own tickets. I’ve never known exactly why. I think I just sensed that what he needed most wasn’t to play the games. It was for somebody to sit with him while he watched them.

He ate the whole cookie in silence, very slowly, sitting beside me on the edge of the stage. When he finished, he folded the plastic wrapper into a tiny square and put it in his pocket.

“Thank you,” he said. Then, after a pause: “Are you a mom?”

“Not yet,” I said.

He looked at me with those big serious eyes. “You’d be good at it,” he said.

His name was Morgan. His caseworker, a tired, kind woman named Theresa Kim, found me at the end of the party and told me a little bit about him. He’d been in the system since he was two. Four placements in two and a half years. His mother had struggled with addiction, and his father wasn’t in the picture. He was quiet and polite and didn’t cause trouble. He’d been passed around so many times that he’d stopped unpacking his things.

I called Theresa the next morning. Four months later, Morgan moved into my apartment. Two years after that, on a rainy Tuesday in a courtroom in Tacoma, he became Morgan Reyes.

The folded cookie wrapper from that night is in a picture frame on his bedroom wall. He put it there himself.