Year of the Monsoon Read Free

it and catch her looking. It had been a long time since anyone’s gaze had made Nan’s heart beat faster.
    Later that night, after all the guests had left, Nan stayed to help clean up. As she hung up her damp dishtowel, Maddie pulled her over to the kitchen island where they sat with a last glass of wine.
    “So?” Maddie asked as she scooted her bar stool closer.
    Nan’s face broke into a reluctant grin. “I like her,” she admitted.
    Lyn came over and draped an arm over Maddie’s shoulders. “Have you made plans to see her again?”
    Nan’s grin faded. “Not yet. I do like her. I want to take this slow. If there’s a chance this could turn into something, I don’t want to mess it up.”
    Maddie reached across the granite and took Nan’s hand in both of hers. “You won’t mess it up,” she said confidently.

    Maddie looked up at the ping of an in-coming e-mail. Saturday sounds good. She looked again as a second message followed. Leisa and I are fine.

Chapter 2
    “IF YOU HAVE A heart, this job will break it more times than you can count,” Maddie had told Leisa often.
    “Why do you stay?” Leisa used to ask.
    Maddie always shrugged. “I have to. If we don’t care, who will?”
    “How do you protect yourself?”

    The St. Joseph’s Children’s Home had been founded in the 1930s to take in Depression-era children abandoned by desperate parents who couldn’t afford to feed and clothe them. Originally, the Home was a dormitory-style building affiliated with St. Joseph’s Catholic School, both of which were run by the Sisters of Our Charitable Lady. This had, of course, created an inevitable rift between the “have-nots”, who attended the school by virtue of the charity of the Sisters, and the “haves”, whose parents paid tuition for their children to receive a good, Catholic education and felt their children deserved better classmates than the unfortunates who lived at the Home. Eventually, this prejudice drove more and more parents to send their children to St. Agnes ten blocks away. The Sisters felt this was God’s way of telling them to expand the Children’s Home, and so in the fifties, the upper floors of the school were turned into more dormitory space. However, during the seventies, the Sisters of Our Charitable Lady, like many religious orders, experienced such a significant drop in their numbers that they could no longer staff the Home and the school themselves. After much discussion, the Sisters decided to narrow their focus to providing a stable home environment for the children in their care. So, the children began attending public schools and the remainder of the school building was converted into offices and more dormitories. An interfaith coalition of churches and synagogues banded together to help keep the Home open, aided by grants and some public funding.
    Maddie Oxendine had come to St. Joseph’s when she and Nan moved to Baltimore right after grad school in North Carolina – “we will complete our doctorates, come hell or high water,” they had promised each other. Maddie stayed through her doctorate – “which felt like hell and high water,” she would have added; through cuts in funding and cuts in staff; she stayed when Social Services began calling, desperate for placement of some of their more difficult cases – kids who had gone through foster home after foster home. Five years ago, she became the director, reporting to the Superior General of the Sisters of Our Charitable Lady, but now with only a few of the nuns working at the Home. “Anyone who sticks around here long enough will eventually become director,” she shrugged.
    Maddie joked a lot – “It’s the only way to stay sane,” she often said – but her jokes hid a heart big enough for all the children who came her way; for eleven-year-old Allison, who had silently let her step-father use her every night for years to keep him from turning to her younger sister and who had watched in disbelief as