“Your scores are also fine,” she added. “Better than fine, actually. Based on scores only, I’d like to place the baby with you,” she continued. And Rick waited for the “but.”
“We have an unusual—for us—situation here, Mr. Kraynick. We have two good candidates both related to our charge. So we ask ourselves, looking at the overall picture, who stands to make the most impact on the child?”
Carrie. Her name is Carrie.
“I’m not going to give you all of the strengths and weaknesses we’ve weighed,” Sonia continued, “the pros and cons of each side. I’ll just break it down for you this way. You’re a single male. Your mother’s female. The child is female.”
“Single men adopting children is quite common in the state of California.” He could quote her the statistics, but had a feeling she already knew them. And that they didn’t matter here.
“But not when there is an equally good candidate, a grandmother who is still almost young enough to be having a child of her own, as an option.”
“So what are you telling me? That if I were married, I’d get her?”
“Yes. You’re younger. You’ve had the same job for a longer period of time. Your neighborhood is nicer. You were a stellar parent in the past….”
Frustration, like bile, rose in him. “And all of that isn’t enough to counteract the fact that I was born male?”
“Your mother showed a much stronger desire to have the child simply because she wanted her,” Sonia said.
You only want her so your mom can’t have her. Sue’s words.
“And we were also concerned about your lack of inability to clean out your daughter’s room. To pack her stuff away. That indicates you’re still in early stages of grief, and perhaps not as emotionally stable as we’d like….”
He grieved. Hell, yes, he grieved. He’d lost a daughter. Tragically. And far too young. A part of him would be grieving for the rest of his life.
But he wasn’t nuts. Or unstable. Or even depressed.
“That wasn’t her room. That was the spare bedroom.” He heard himself excusing what they’d found. “Her room was the one across from mine. The one with the crib now. Carrie’s crib. So I can hear her when she wakes in the night….”
Maybe it was time to call Darla and have her help him sort through Hannah’s things.
He resisted the thought. Pushed away the vision.
And then in his mind’s eye, he saw Sue there, in Hannah’s room, helping him….
“So you see, while we haven’t come to any conclusions yet, I feel as though we’re getting close and I…well…the question has come up, you’re sure there’s no significant other in your life? Someone who would be playing a significant role in the child’s life? Someone we could interview?”
“There’s no one.”
Sonia sighed. “I have another question.”
“What’s that?”
“If you were granted placement, would you allow your mother to visit the child?”
He bit the inside of his mouth, his fist clenched in the sling. He didn’t want that woman anywhere near Carrie. Didn’t anyone get that? Was he the only one in the city who knew what a danger Nancy Kraynick was to anyone who cared about her? To anyone she cared about?
“Mr. Kraynick?”
His mother was Carrie’s grandmother. “Yes, ma’am. I would.”
“Then let me ask you something else. Have you tried talking to your mother?”
“About what?”
“It seems clear that both of you have the best interests of your young niece at heart,” she said. “You both want what’s best for the baby. We thought that, perhaps, if it were possible for the two of you to talk, you could work out a solution between the two of you.”
“You mean like shared parenting?”