Two Highlights
Part One: The Rules
Morgan was eleven, and for six years it had been just the two of us.
We lived in a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor of an old brick building in Tacoma, Washington, with a view of a parking lot, a laundromat, and on clear days, if you leaned out the kitchen window and squinted, a tiny white corner of Mount Rainier. The radiator clanked in winter. The kitchen faucet dripped no matter what I did to it. Morgan had decorated his bedroom door with stickers of every NBA team except the Lakers, because he said a man has to have principles.
He was the sort of kid who hugged me every morning before school, quick and hard, around the waist, and then glanced over his shoulder to make sure none of his friends had seen. If anyone was within fifty yards of the car, the hug became a fist bump. If the coast was clear, I got the whole thing.
Dinner was our time together. That was the one rule I never bent, no matter how late my shift ran or how much homework he had. We sat at the little round table by the kitchen window, phones in a basket on the counter, and we each shared the best and worst parts of our day. One highlight. One lowlight. That was the rule.
Morgan usually bent it and told two highlights.
“That’s against the rules,” I’d say.
“You’re the mom,” he’d say, pointing his fork at me. “Change the rules.”
I’d smile and shake my head. “Nice try.”
He never seemed to have much trouble finding highlights. A good grade on a spelling test. A three-pointer at recess. A dog he’d seen on the walk home that looked exactly like a dust mop. He’d tell them all with his whole body, waving his hands, knocking over his milk at least once a week.
The lowlights were harder for him. He’d shrug and push his peas around his plate. “Nothing, really,” he’d say. Or he’d pick something small and safe. We had a sub in math. The vending machine ate my quarter.
I knew why. I’d known since the day I met him. Morgan had learned very young that when you don’t say the bad things out loud, nobody can take anything away from you because of them.
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.
Part Three: The Fair
For the past two weeks, all Morgan talked about was the fall fair at Whitman Elementary.
It was an annual thing, held on the Friday before Halloween in the school gym. The PTA ran it to raise money for field trips. There were carnival games and a bounce house in the corner, a cakewalk, face painting, a raffle, and a lunch of pizza from the place on Sixth Avenue. And, most importantly, according to my son, the giant cookies.
“There’s pizza, games, prizes, and giant cookies, Mom,” he told me at dinner on a Wednesday. “Real giant cookies. As big as your face.”
“Sounds like a very serious educational event,” I said.
“Extremely educational,” Morgan said. “There’s a math game where you guess how many jelly beans are in a jar. That’s estimation.”
He talked about it every night. Which games had the best prizes. Whether he should do the cakewalk or the duck pond first. Whether the giant cookies would be chocolate chip or M&M this year. His friend Jaylen said M&M. His friend Aiden said chocolate chip. It was the subject of intense debate in the fifth-grade cafeteria.
Whitman is a Title I school, which means most of the families there don’t have much money. Mine included. Seventy-eight percent of the kids get free or reduced lunch. The fair was cheap, a dollar a ticket, most games one or two tickets, the pizza two dollars a slice, the cookies three. But even a cheap fair costs money, and I knew some kids would go with nothing.
I tried not to think about it too much. I couldn’t fix it. I could only take care of my own. 