Page 45 of Knocked Up

"I bought them at a Walgreens."

"There's a wolf sanctuary in Montana," I said.

Violet stopped.

"I'm sorry?"

"Outside Missoula. I went for a conference in 2019. They were understaffed. They said if I ever wanted a change. Four animals and a fence and no clients. Nobody calls. There's no lease. There's no man from Apex in a quarter zip."

"You want to flee to a wolf sanctuary."

"I'm saying it's an option that exists."

"You would not last nine days without a client to be rude to," Violet said.

I put my hands flat on the counter.

"Okay. Here's a real one."

"Oh good."

"We have a whole system for this. We place forty animals a year with people who did not plan to have them." I was talking fast, which she would have clocked. "There's an application, a home check and a two-week trial. Then there's a foster contract with an option to convert. There's a support line and a supply stipend and a check-in at thirty days. And it works, Violet, because nobody is asked to decide everything on day one."

Violet looked at me for a long moment.

"You want to foster your baby."

"I want the paperwork," I said. "I want somebody to hand me a form with boxes on it and a two-week trial."

"Human children do not come with foster contracts."

"They should."

"They very much should," Violet said. "And they don't. I need you to sit down, because you've gone a color."

I sat down on an upturned bucket.

She sat on the floor across from me with her back against the fluid shelf and said nothing for a while. For her that was an act of enormous violence against her own nature.

"Talk to me," she said finally.

"I was twenty-two. He was twelve. Mom died in March. I had a semester left and a clinic going under and a twelve-year-old boy who had stopped talking. I drove I-25 twice a week for two years, with him asleep in the back seat and a cooler of vaccines in the footwell."

"I was there for most of it."

"And I don't regret an hour of it. People always think there's a regret in there and there isn't. He's twenty-one and he's alive and he's employed and he stands up straight. I did that. It's the best thing I've ever done."

"Nobody ever asked me," I said.

Violet went still.

"Nobody ever sat down across from me and said, Tessa, do you want this life or a different one? There was no form. There was no two-week trial. There was a phone call and a funeral and then a Tuesday. On the Tuesday I just started doing it. I've been doing it nine years and nobody has ever once asked me."

"Tess."

"And now something's asking," I said. "It's the first thing in my entire adult life that has actually asked."

Violet reached over and put her hand on my ankle, because that was the part of me she could reach.