He did not eat. He watched the fire move in the hearth, and he watched the lake go fully black beyond the windows, and he watched, occasionally, the small bent head of the boy who had walked out of a back alley four days running to deliver a message to a man he had never met. Mrs. Adame arrived four minutes past 10:00 in a small dark blue sedan that crunched up the gravel road quietly. She was a tall woman of perhaps 50, dressed in a long dark coat over a deep green sweater and brown slacks with her hair pulled back in a soft low knot. She carried a leather portfolio and a small canvas bag from which Richard later learned she had brought a stuffed elephant, a coloring book, three brand new pencils, and a pair of warm pajamas in size eight because she had been told over the phone what the child weighed and she had a closet at home full of clothes for exactly this kind of evening.
She did not ask Richard any questions before she went to the boy. She knelt in front of the armchair where Elijah sat and she introduced herself by her first name, which was Folake, and she told him that her job was not to take him anywhere and not to ask him hard questions, but to make sure that the grown-ups around him were doing what grown-ups were supposed to be doing, which was making him safe and warm and fed. She asked him if he had been safe tonight. He said yes. She asked him if he had been fed.
He said yes and pointed at the empty soup bowl on the table by the window. She asked him if anyone had touched him in a way that did not feel right. He said no. She nodded and made three small marks in her portfolio and that was the entire intake interview. Afterwards, she sat with Richard at the small round table while Elijah dozed in the armchair by the fire, the gray blanket pulled to his chin, the stuffed elephant she had given him tucked into the curve of his arm.
"Mr. Caldwell," Mrs. Adame said quietly, "I have done this job for twenty-six years. I have placed seven hundred children in emergency situations. I am going to say something to you that I do not say to most of the adults who sit across from me at midnight on a difficult night. Are you listening?"
Yes. This boy will let you love him. He has been hurt and he is wary, and he will test you in ways you do not yet anticipate, but he is not broken. The mother who raised him for 7 years built something in him that the streets have not been able to take. He will let you love him if you decide to love him.
The question I need you to think about tonight before I file any paperwork in the morning is whether you understand what you are deciding. Are you a man who is going to be in this child's life next December? Next December, five years from now? At his high school graduation?
At the wedding of a girl or a boy he has not yet met? Because if you are going to drift, Mr. Caldwell, you will drift now and we will find him another home. There are good homes available. There are not as many as we need, but there are some. What there is not for this child is room for another adult to come close and then leave.