Child of My Heart Read Free Page B

with him over our split-rail fence or at the dock in Three Mile Harbor, where they both kept their boats. On occasion, the town police would pull into Mr. Moran’s driveway—bringing him home, my father would explain, after a “bender”—and twice my parents had to summon the police for him themselves:
    once when he appeared at our door at dinnertime with his lip gashed open and blood pouring from his mouth; another time when they discovered him out cold on our side lawn, his face in the grass and his pants down around his ankles (too late, they had tried to shield my eyes, but not before I got a quick, bone chilling glimpse of a mound of a pale adult backside, as gray and lonesome as a sand dune in winter). Not long after this, Sondra, Mr. Moran’s daughter, and her family moved into the ramshackle house.
    It was the winter before I took my first mother’s helper job with Mrs. Carew. Sondra was a bleached blonde in those Marilyn Monroe/Jayne Mansfield days when being a bleached blonde made for instant glamour. She wore a black lambskin jacket and had a baby in her arms and three more toddling, towheaded children around her. On that first day, there was no sign of their father. They arrived in a wood-paneled station wagon that for the next week was left parked and unpacked by the side of the road. My mother had seen them all arrive from our kitchen window, and it wasn’t an hour or two later that I stepped out our back door and found the three little ones draped over the wide wooden plank of our tree swing. Although it must have been January or February and the winter chill of the ocean was in the air, only one of them, the girl, wore a jacket and a hat. The two boys were in sweatshirts and pajama bottoms. All three wore socks on their hands but none on their feet, which became abundantly clear when one of the boys (Petey as it turned out), not ten seconds after I’d said hello to him, leaned too far over the seat of the swing and landed headfirst on an exposed and frozen tree root.
    Rivulets of blood running over a pink scalp, running through the stubble of their white-blond hair, will remain for me forever the emblem of the Moran kids.
    Nobody ever paid me for minding them, but from that day forward I had only to walk out our back door to find one or more of them suddenly in my care. They’d be slumped against our fence, all four, eventually all five, of them, locked out of their own home by their raging parents, or one or the other would be sitting bereft in our yard, tears streaking dirty cheeks, blood, more often than not, coming from somewhere—a scraped elbow, a scratched mosquito bite. It got so that when I brought one of them inside to wash the cut and the dirty hands and face, I could pretty much name the date and place of every other scar I found on them as well.
    Sondra’s husband arrived a week or so later, a vague figure coming and going, sometimes in dark suits, sometimes in jeans, sometimes, I suspect, in the guise of another man altogether.
    She fought with him, and with her old father, exchanging curses and throwing things and then screeching out of the driveway in her car at any hour of the day or night, the children left in her wake seeming to settle behind her, in the road, on our lawn, across our back steps, like the detritus of some explosion.
    Every once in a while the Moran kids would show up with a new pet, sometimes a cat or a dog they had found, a length of clothesline tied around its neck, sometimes a turtle or a salamander or a fledgling bird. These, too, of course, would eventually fall into my care, at least until they ran away or died or were claimed by their real owners.
    Two of them came and went regularly: Rags, a mangy but sweet little mutt, and Garbage, an orange tabby cat.
    The summer Daisy came, I had limited my babysitting duties to Flora, the artist’s child, but had also supplemented my pay with a couple of dog-walking and cat-sitting arrangements with some of the people