that they had been jolted and were determined to get on with their lives
at last.
To both of them, getting on with life meant having a child in the house
again. The desire for a child was not a sentimental attempt to
recapture the mood of the past, and it wasn’t a neurotic need to replace
Jimmy in order to finish getting over his death. They were just good
with kids; they liked kids; and giving of themselves to a child was
enormously satisfying.
They had to adopt. That was the hitch. Lindsey’s pregnancy had been
troubled, and her labor had been unusually long and painful. Jimmy’s
birth was a near thing, and when at last he made it into the world, the
doctors informed Lindsey that she would not be capable of having any
more children.
The Nun with No Name stopped pacing, pulled up the voluminous sleeve of
her habit, and looked at her wristwatch. “Maybe I should go see what’s
keeping her.”
“Give the child a little more time,” Sister Immaculata said quietly.
With one plump white hand, she smoothed the folds of her habit. “If you
go to check on her, she’ll feel you don’t trust her to be able to take
care of herself. There’s nothing in the ladies’ restroom that she can’t
deal with herself. I doubt she even had the need to use it. She
probably just wanted to be alone a few minutes before the meeting, to
settle her nerves.”
To Lindsey and Hatch, Father Jiminez said, “Sorry about the delay.”
“That’s okay,” Hatch said, fidgeting on the sofa. “We understand.
We’re a little nervous ourselves.”
Initial inquiries made it clear that a lot-a veritable army-of couples
were waiting for children to become available for adoption. Some had
been kept in suspense for two years. After being childless for five
years already, Hatch and Lindsey didn’t have the patience to go on the
bottom of anyone’s waiting list.
They were left with only two options, the first of which was to attempt
to adopt a child of another race, black or Asian or Hispanic. Most
would be adoptive parents were white and were waiting for a white baby
that might conceivably pass for their own, while countless orphans of
various minority groups were destined for institutions and unfulfilled
dreams of being part of a family. Skin color meant nothing to either
Hatch or Lindsey. They would have been happy with any child regardless
of its heritage. But in recent years, misguided do-goodism in the name
of civil rights had led to the imposition of an array of new rules and
regulations Agencies enforced them with mind-numbing exactitude. The
theory was that no child could be truly happy if raised outside of its
ethnic group, which was the kind of elitist nonsense and reverse
racism-that sociologists and academia formulated without consulting the
lonely kids they purported to protect.
The second option was to adopt a disabled child. There were far fewer
disabled than minority orphans-even including technical orphans whose
parents were alive somewhere but who’d been abandoned to the care of the
church or state because of their differentness. On the other hand,
though fewer in number, they were in even less demand than minority
kids. They had the tremendous advantage of being currently beyond the
interest of any pressure group eager to apply politically correct
standards to their care and handling. Sooner or later, no doubt, a
marching moron army would secure the passage of laws forbidding adoption
of a greeneyed, blond, deaf child by anyone but greened, blond, deaf
parents, but Hatch and Lindsey had the good fortune to have submitted an
application before the forces of chaos had descended.
Sometimes, when he thought about the troublesome bureaucrats they had
dealt with six weeks ago, when they had first decided to adopt, he
wanted to go back to those agencies and throttle the social workers who
had thwarted them, just choke a little common sense into them. And
wouldn’t the expression of that desire make the good nuns and priests of
St. Thomas’s Home eager to commend one of their charges to his care!
“You’re still feeling well, no lasting effects from your ordeal, eating