Three Little Words Read online

When we got to the boys’ bedroom door, his bottom lip began to quiver. He looked up at Mrs. Moss to see if he would get a reprieve.

  “Luke!” She began to count: “One, two—” He bolted in the room so fast that I wondered what would happen if she got to three.

  Mrs. Moss showed me the girls’ bedroom, which had two sets of bunk beds, a crib, and a cot. It smelled like diapers. I gagged. “What’s wrong?” Her voice was harsher than when the caseworker had been there.

  “I’m hot,” I said, which was true, since there was no air-conditioning in the trailer.

  “You can have something to drink later.” We went outside again. A girl about my age approached warily. “Mandy, come and meet Ashley.”

  “You have a lot of stuff,” Mandy said, eyeing my garbage sacks.

  “You’ll have to sort out the dirty and clean clothes,” the foster mother said.

  “Everything is clean,” I said, “and my dressy dresses are on hangers.”

  “Where are the dresses?”

  I touched the bag where the hoopskirt begged for release. Mrs. Moss grabbed a padlock on a storage shed and inserted a key. She lifted it off the hasp and opened a creaking door. Inside, clothes hung on two poles, and underneath were boxes.

  I reached for the sack with my best clothes. “Want me to help you hang them?”

  “No need for fancy things here. I’ll put them away in another shed.” Mrs. Moss peered into the sack that contained my sleeping bag and dolls.

  “I’ll take those to my room,” I said.

  “We don’t keep personal possessions in the house,” Mrs. Moss said. She unlocked another shed and tossed the sack containing my dolls on top of a pile of unmarked boxes and then added the bag with the fancy dresses.

  “What about my play clothes?”

  She pointed to the first shed. “They’ll stay here. Every day two of the kids pick the clothes for everyone else.”

  “How will they know which are mine?”

  Mrs. Moss locked both sheds. I noticed she wore a flashy ring on each finger. “You’ll see how it works around here,” she said. I had nothing to take in the house.

  When we opened the front door, I heard Luke whimpering. “If you keep that up, you’re not going to get lunch.” Mrs. Moss watched for my reaction. “Your brother was spoiled before he came here. And the language he uses! I hope you aren’t like that.”

  “No, ma’am.” I picked a corner of the ceiling where a spider had spun a web as my focal point.

  She smiled. “I heard you might be a good influence on him. That’s why I took you in; but if you start trouble, I’ll call Miles in a heartbeat.”

  All I wanted to do was get back to the Hagens’ and go swimming with the other girls. My mother or somebody else had better come for me soon because I did not think this was a very nice place.

  I felt as if Miles Ferris had stranded me on a remote island. Charles and Marjorie Moss lived on a little more than ten acres of land with three fenced areas. The only neighbors were family members living in other trailers. Their home was a double-wide with three bedrooms and two bathrooms. At one point there were as many as fourteen children in there, plus the parents, even though their legal capacity was for only seven. We were all outcasts with convoluted lineages. Luke and I had different last names and fathers, as did Heather and Gordon as well as Mandy and Toby. The baby sisters, Lucy and Clare, looked like twins, but they were a little more than a year apart. It was comforting to know that the other kids’ lives were as accidental and chaotic as ours were.

  The Moss menagerie also included a mule, goats, cows, and various smaller animals. During the day we were restricted to the fenced areas like livestock, with the sexes separated. Inside, the girls’ room was as cramped as a submarine. Beds used up all the floor space. There was no place for any belongings except under the bed and one dresser where we kept our panties, which we could not wear to sleep. Mandy and I shared one bunk bed while Heather was on the top of the other. Clare had the crib, and her younger sister, Lucy, slept in the master bedroom.

  When I tried to fall asleep that first night, I ached for something familiar to hug. I had not slept without my dolls in years. Even the Paces had given me a stuffed bunny. My thin pillow was lumpy and had an ammonia scent that burned my nose. A lattice crisscrossed the window and made me feel as if I were imprisoned. No light from the moon, stars, or cars along the distant road pierced the inky blackness. I recalled one very dark night the year before when Mrs. Potts had warned me not to sit on the porch by saying, “If there are no stars out, something bad is about to happen.”

  “Did you know that when there are no stars, bad things happen?” I whispered.

  “That’s stupid,” Heather retorted.

  “Shut up!” Mandy warned.

  “Oh, fuck you,” Heather, the only teen in the house, said.

  We heard footsteps. I was facing the wall, so when the door opened, I saw only a sword-shaped sliver of light.

  Mrs. Moss stepped into the room. “Who’s talking?”

  “The new girl is scared of the dark,” Mandy replied in a tremulous voice.

  “If I hear another word, ya’ll have something to be scared about.”

  In the morning Clare’s crying awakened me. “It’s your turn for the shitty diapers,” Heather called to Mandy.

  Mandy made a gagging sound. “They make me sick.”

  “Let’s get the new girl to do it,” Heather chortled.

  Heather showed me how to swab Clare’s bottom with baby wipes and how to tape a diaper. Mandy carried the baby into the kitchen, lifted her into a high chair, and put some dry cereal on the tray. Heather made toast in batches and handed me one of the first pieces, which I gobbled dry. Then I reached for a second slice.

  “You can’t eat in the house.” Mandy shooed me outside.

  “When’s breakfast?” I asked.

  “You ate it,” Heather answered.

  “Can I have some milk?”

  “Only the babies get milk.”

  “I’m thirsty,” I whined.

  She pointed to the garden hose. “That’s what we use.”

  An hour later I went back to the house. I could hear the television through the locked door. I knocked. Mrs. Moss glared down at me. “This is outside time.”

  Mrs. Moss expected us to remain outdoors for most of the day. Tall oaks shaded much of the Mosses’ property, but when the temperature and humidity were both high, we were miserable. Although the house was not much cooler, there were at least fans in there, and Mrs. Moss parked the babies in front of the TV during the hottest part of the afternoon.

  Many of the older children were in summer school until around noon, making the mornings especially boring. For some unexplained reason, the girls and the boys could not share the same play area. The boys’ side had a wooden swing set, but the girls’ side had only a table and chairs. We could play with some old dolls and broken toys, although we mostly made up our own games and caught dragonflies. If I grabbed one’s wings, I could get its jaws to clamp on my fingers. With a deft maneuver, I then transferred the dragonfly to my earlobe and wore it like an earring.

  By lunchtime I was always starving. Peanut butter sandwiches—sometimes with, sometimes without jelly—were typical; cheese sandwiches were a treat. Mrs. Moss reserved Kool-Aid for caseworkers’ visits. I could always tell when someone was having a visitor because the smell of vanilla or chocolate meant Mrs. Moss was baking. Unless it was your worker’s day, you were unlikely to taste the special treat. She distributed the extra goodies to the other family members who lived around the property. We were often hungry.

  Years later, when I saw the film Oliver, I wondered if anyone knew that, like those British boys in the orphanage, American children beg for food in some foster homes. At the Mosses’, several of the older boys were so hungry that they stole snacks at night. When Mrs. Moss discovered their crime, she locked the boys in their bedroom, which had a sliding glass door that opened into the indoor din
ing room.

  “Wave your sandwiches at them,” Mrs. Moss coaxed us to tease them.

  For the next several meals they had to watch us eat. Eventually, she locked them in their room at night with an alarm that sounded if anyone tried to escape, and they were given a bucket to use as a toilet.

  I hated mystery casseroles. When Mrs. Moss spooned out a fishy mixture, I pleaded as cutely as possible, “May I pretty please have a bowl of cereal instead?”

  “Well, okay,” Mrs. Moss said with a sly grin. She poured a meager portion of Lucky Charms into a plastic bowl, and then she rummaged in the refrigerator for a gallon of milk. It poured thickly, with some chunks plopping into the bowl, and I carried it outside to the little plastic table where we kids usually ate our meals. It sloshed on the table as I set it down.

  Luke said longingly, “I wish I had some.”

  The first swallow made me gag. I ran to the hose and rinsed out my mouth. When I came back to the table, Luke was shoveling the cereal in his mouth as fast as he could. “Luke! That’s disgusting!”

  “It’s yummy in my tummy!”

  Nausea overwhelmed me. I rushed toward the house. As usual, the door was bolted. I banged on it. Mr. Moss came to the door holding his napkin.

  “Gotta go!” I blurted. As I rushed toward the bathroom, my stomach lurched. A flume of vomit arched onto the floor.

  “You’ve ruined the carpet!” Mrs. Moss screeched. She gripped my hair and pushed my face into my puke. I don’t know what was worse: the taste of the curdled milk, watching Luke eat the sickening concoction, vomiting, being humiliated, smelling my mess up close, or having to clean it up, which I couldn’t do to her satisfaction. Later, as the sour smell lingered, Mrs. Moss reminded everyone that it had been my fault and made me stand in the corner.

  The Mosses punished us for anything they could think of. Mrs. Moss kept a bottle of Crystal hot sauce on a turntable with other condiments. If she did not like what someone said, she would announce, “My mother would have made us eat soap—be thankful this is real food.” Then she would make the troublemaker swallow spoonfuls of the hot sauce. If you moaned or spit it out, she would force more down.

  I decided I would do whatever was necessary to stay on this woman’s good side. Unfortunately, my brother had neither the good sense nor the self-control to do the same. Luke was so hungry, he would eat almost anything. If Mrs. Moss caught him biting off hunks of soap, eating big globs of toothpaste, or drinking from the shampoo bottle, he would get the hot-sauce punishment. He hated it; but he never learned to avoid it.

  “We’re going to have a picnic with some other foster families at the beach!” Mrs. Moss announced one day, sounding unusually jolly. She liberated buckets, shovels, and other sand toys from one of the sheds. “Everyone hurry up and get into your swimsuits.”

  As soon as we were ready, we lined up for photos, posing first individually in front of some palms and then as a group—“one big happy family.” Even though I had lived most of my life in and around Tampa, which is only a short drive from many Gulf of Mexico beaches, I had not been to the shore since the trip with Aunt Leanne in South Carolina.

  At the beach Mrs. Moss gave Toby and Mitchell, another of the foster boys, an inflatable shark. Almost immediately, Mitchell pulled it out from under Toby and a fight ensued. Mrs. Moss made the boys sit on their towels. I had a turn with the shark, but when everyone quarreled over who was next, Mrs. Moss stowed it away.

  Mandy and I headed for the wet sand closer to the water. I began filling a bucket and packing it, then turning it over to make towers of a castle. I showed her how to take a thin stream of sand and make squiggles to decorate the turrets. Just as I was scooping out the moat, Luke rushed past, kicking clouds of sand in his wake. I knew him well enough to anticipate what he was about to do. “Don’t you dare!” I shouted. With one long jump, my brother flattened our castle.

  A swell of anger rose from a black, dark space inside me. Luke was the problem all along! If it had not been for him, I would be with my mother! I clenched his arms tightly and shook him. “Don’t you ever touch anything of mine again!”

  One of the other foster parents broke us apart. “You’re with Marjorie Moss, right?” The woman marched us back to face her wrath.

  Instead of reprimanding us, Mrs. Moss acted concerned. “Look at you two! Why, your faces are red as beets. Let’s get you some cold drinks.” She handed us sodas from her cooler.

  “I don’t know where you get your patience,” the other parent said.

  “They’ve been separated and …” As she gestured, all her rings glinted in the sun. Then she whispered, “Grandfather … shot …”

  The other woman glanced at us as if we were interesting specimens. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “All they need is love and attention,” Mrs. Moss said, “and I have plenty of both to go around.”

  My mother’s face followed me like a shadow. I mentally cataloged all the injustices in the Moss household—the vomiting episode, going hungry, the hot-sauce treatments—so I could inform her on my next visit. At the end of June, Mrs. Moss handed Luke and me two of our best outfits from the shed and told us that we were going downtown. I suspected that we would see our mother but that we weren’t being told in case she did not show. As we entered Miles Ferris’s office, Mrs. Moss promised, “If you’re good, we’ll get ice cream afterward.”

  During the meeting Luke kept kicking a desk, but I mouthed, Ice cream.

  “Can you bring them for a visit on July fifth?” Mr. Ferris asked. “Or do you need someone to transport?”

  “It’s no trouble for me,” Mrs. Moss said deferentially. “And don’t you think it would be wise if I stayed with them?”

  “That would be helpful,” the caseworker replied. “How are they adjusting?”

  “We’ve had our struggles, but they are settling down.” She lowered her voice. “I just hope this visit from M-O-M doesn’t rile them up.”

  “Your concern is a big plus for these children and the department,” he replied.

  Mom! Did Mrs. Moss really think I didn’t know such a simple word? I was disappointed that I wouldn’t be seeing Mama that day, but at least she was coming. I even forgot about the ice cream, which Mrs. Moss had only offered in front of the worker to make it seem like she was a good foster parent.

  There is one awful day with the Mosses that is most vivid in my mind. That afternoon Mr. and Mrs. Moss took several children to an appointment, leaving the rest of us with Melissa, who was either the wife or girlfriend of Ricky, one of Mrs. Moss’s sons. They lived in one of the trailers on the property. Melissa made us sandwiches. After lunch Mandy and I played one of my favorite games—tea party princesses—on the patio.

  “Would you care for an icing cake?” I handed Mandy the top of a Tupperware container laden with little stones and leaves as props for my imaginary delicacies.

  She took a leaf, then let it flutter away without pretending to taste it. I made refined smacking noises with my lips. “Delicious, don’t you think?”

  The roar of an engine interrupted our game. “Wow!” Mitchell shouted as Ricky drove his dirt bike into the field on the other side of the boys’ fence.

  “Whoa! Check that out!” shouted Toby. He ran closer to the fence as Ricky splattered through puddles left by a recent thunderstorm. Toby yelped as some of the muddy water splashed him.

  Forgetting the gender boundaries, I rushed in position to be splashed next, with Mandy at my heels. As the bike came around, I held up my arms and got drenched. Playing to his audience, the driver angled closer to the fence and did a wheelie during his next pass. We whooped in appreciation.

  As I was cheering, someone clutched my arm and jerked me back. “What are you doing on the boys’ side of the yard?” Melissa bellowed.

  “W-watching the bike,” I stammered.

  “I’m going to tell Marjorie,” she said, “unless you get back on the patio.”

  Mandy scurried away, but I li
ngered long enough to catch another trick.

  When Mrs. Moss returned, Melissa told her that we had gone over to the boys’ side and blurted, “Ashley wouldn’t listen to me.”

  “You know what that means, girls,” Mrs. Moss said. “Twenty-five laps.”

  Mandy and I marched to the front yard and began to run around the long, horseshoe-shaped driveway, across the grassy spot laced with tree roots, then through the spiky weeds that lashed at my bare legs. Melissa had betrayed us! I was so furious that my eyes blurred. After three laps I stumbled; on the fourth, I tripped over a root. When I tried to stand, I couldn’t. “Get up, Ashley!” Mrs. Moss shrieked.

  “I can’t! I hurt myself.”

  She gripped a chunk of my hair and jerked me toward her. I yelped like a puppy whose paw had been stepped on.

  “Uh-oh!” Mandy gasped. “Ashley’s gonna get it now.”

  Inside the trailer Mrs. Moss drummed her fingers on the counter as she contemplated my punishment. I was hoping to get sent to a corner, where I could fantasize about a grand Cinderella wedding with Jonathan Rodriquez as my groom. Almost as if she were reading my thoughts, Mrs. Moss said, “Standing in the corner hasn’t taught you any lessons. Let’s see if squatting gets better results.” She pressed me under the kitchen counter. I knew from watching Mrs. Moss punish Heather that I had to hunker down without letting my head touch the top of the counter ledge or my butt or heels rest on the floor. My hands had to be straight at my sides, but I couldn’t put my fingertips on the floor to help me balance. “Ten—no, twenty minutes,” she announced.

  My left foot throbbed from the fall, so I leaned my weight on the right. Concentrating on a splash of light on the floor, I bit the inside of my cheek. I had a strong will and tough leg muscles, but in less than five minutes I needed my fingertips to steady myself.

  “I saw that!” Mrs. Moss crowed. She pulled a slotted spoon from a crockery pot on the counter and began pummeling my butt. I tried to escape her by crawling farther under the shelf and trying to reassume the position. I bit down even harder on my cheek and felt a rusty taste in my mouth. She kicked me several times to get me out from under the counter and then struck me even harder.