a porch swing and smoke rising from the chimney, and a three-legged black Lab named Tripod who came bounding down the porch steps on his three legs and nearly knocked June over with joy. June shrieked. It was the first time Sam had heard her shriek with anything but fear. Maureen Brennan, who was tall and gray-haired and wore a flour-dusted apron, came down the steps behind the dog and crouched in the gravel and said, "Well, you must be June. Tripod's been waiting for you all morning. He's very particular about who he likes, and he likes you."
June looked at Sam.
"I'll come Saturday," Sam said. "Me and Nora both. Gloria says we can visit every Saturday. And you can call us any time. Maureen has our number on her refrigerator."
"Do you promise?"
"I promise."
June considered this. Then she reached up and put her arms around his neck, quickly, hard, and let go, and turned and took Maureen's hand and walked up the porch steps with Tripod hopping at her side, without looking back. Sam was proud of her. He sat in the truck at the end of the lane afterward with his hands on the wheel and did not start the engine for a long time.
"That was the hardest thing I've ever watched," Nora said from the back seat.
"Yeah," said Sam. "Me too."
Gloria Maddox, in the passenger seat, said nothing at all. But she reached over and patted his arm, twice, the way you might pat a dog that had done something good.
He started the foster parent classes in January.
They were held on Tuesday nights in a church basement in Allentown, and they were long and hard and full of things he did not want to know. Trauma and attachment. The way children who have been hurt test the adults around them, again and again, to see if they will leave. Why a six-year-old might hoard food under her mattress, or wet the bed, or flinch when someone raised a hand to scratch his nose. There were eleven other people in the class: two married couples, a retired schoolteacher, a pair of brothers who wanted to foster teenage boys, a young woman who had aged out of foster care herself and said she wanted to be the person she had never had. Sam sat in the back and took notes in a spiral notebook and said almost nothing for the first three weeks. On the fourth week, when the instructor asked why each of them was there, he stood up and told them about the peanut butter, and the drawing on his daughter's wall, and the hole in the bakery basement, and a little girl who had looked at him and said Daddy. When he sat down, the young woman who had aged out of foster care was crying, and so was one of the brothers.