The Truth About Tara

“Too bad.” Mary Dee fanned herself. “Now, that’s a man who could get a woman thinking about her needs.”

Tara’s cell phone vibrated and skittered a few inches on the table, as if it were alive. With an apologetic look at Mary Dee, Tara picked it up and checked the display. Her mother. Not that she’d tell her friend that.

“Sorry,” Tara said. “I’ve got to take this.”

Mary Dee nodded, watching Tara over the rim of her glass as she sipped her margarita.

“Hey, what’s up?” Tara asked, careful not to call her mom by name.

“I think I smell gas in the kitchen!” her mother cried. “I checked and the pilot light’s not on. Wouldn’t you know the shut-off valve’s behind the stove, which is way too heavy for me to move.”

Tara turned away from Mary Dee and spoke directly into the phone so her mother could hear and her friend couldn’t. “Did you call the gas company?”

“Yes, but what if it takes them an hour to get here like it did the last time?” her mother asked. “I can’t stay outside on the porch with Danny for an hour. You know how he gets when his routine is disrupted.”

Tara tapped her nails on the table, trying to come up with the best solution to the problem. “I guess I could be there in about twenty minutes.”

“Could you?” her mother asked. “That would be wonderful.”

Tara cast a glance at Mary Dee, who was still watching her. Tara wouldn’t be leaving her friend high and dry if she cut out early. Mary Dee had mentioned that her husband had rented a movie they were planning to watch tonight.

“I’ll leave right now,” she told her mom. “In the meantime, open some windows and stay out of the kitchen.”

“Already done. Bless you!” Her mother made a few more gratifying noises before Tara disconnected the call.

Taking a deep breath, Tara addressed Mary Dee. “I’m sorry. Something’s come up. I’ve gotta go.”

“Of course you do.”

Tara finished off the last swallow of her margarita, set enough money on the table to cover their tab and stood up. “I really am sorry, M.D.”

“I know you are,” Mary Dee said.

Tara turned away from her friend and started for the exit. She hadn’t gotten two steps when she heard Mary Dee’s voice calling after her.

“Say hey to your mom for me.”

* * *

TARA GRABBED FOR HER foster brother Danny’s soft hand the following afternoon, holding it securely in hers as they crossed the parking lot to the Kroger in Wawpaney. There weren’t a lot of choices. The next closest grocery store was twenty miles away.

“You’re a good boy to come with me.” After picking up Danny from his Saturday swimming lesson at the community center in Cape Charles, where the camp was being held, she’d announced she needed to make a stop. “If I don’t buy a few things, my cupboards will be bare. Like Mother Hubbard.”

“Your mother’s name isn’t Hubbard.” Danny gazed up at her out of small brown eyes with the distinctive slant characteristic of people with Down syndrome. He was short for his age, another trait common to children like him.

“You’re right.” Tara sometimes forgot how literal children with Down’s were. “It’s Carrie. She’s your foster mother and my mother.”

No matter what the stranger who’d stopped her on the street had suggested.

Tara released Danny’s hand to take one of the grocery carts in front of the store, careful to keep him in sight. During the time it had taken Tara to get to her mother’s house the night before, Danny had wandered close to the street to follow a butterfly.

“C-Carrie is getting pretty,” Danny announced. He had a good vocabulary, although his speech was halting and not quite clear. He also stuttered occasionally. Once school started again, he’d be in speech therapy.

“Right again,” Tara said. “Carrie’s at the beauty shop. That’s why I picked you up from swimming.”

Her mother had insisted Danny take the lessons, maintaining that anyone who lived in an area surrounded by water should know how to swim.

Danny scrunched up his face. “Don’t like swimming.”

That was an understatement. Today had been lesson number two and Danny had yet to agree to get into the water. Afterward the instructor had advised Tara to suspend the lessons until he had a change of heart.

“You can’t know you don’t like it until you try it,” Tara said.

“Know it now,” Danny insisted.

“Oh, yeah?” Tara asked. “What if I refused to learn how to drive because I thought I wouldn’t like it? Then how would we get to the grocery store?”

Danny looked thoughtful. “Walking.”

“Good answer,” she said, laughing. It served her right for asking a question with such an easy answer. “Dan the Man strikes again.”

Danny giggled at the favorite nickname, and she bent down and gave him a hug. He loved hugs. He’d also been laughing more and more in the three weeks since he’d come to live with her mother. It was a welcome change from the sad little boy who’d kept asking where his real mother was.

She waited for Danny to precede her through the automatic door into the store. “Stay close,” she told him.

He moved a step nearer to her.

Tara stopped at a table of navel oranges at the front of the produce section and tore a plastic bag off the roll. “You want me to buy a couple extra for you?”

“Don’t like oranges.”

“I love them.” Tara injected enthusiasm into her voice. She picked out four oranges and dropped the bag into the cart, then pointed to the refrigerated section containing precut bags of vegetables. “How about some baby carrots?”

“No,” he said. “No c-carrots.”

Her mother was in the process of ensuring that Danny ate healthy foods. Like a lot of Down syndrome children, he was on the chubby side. Diet, however, was only one factor. Many children like Danny weren’t active early in life because they had decreased motor skills. Add stunted growth to the mix and weight problems resulted. In Danny’s

case, they were compounded because he loved to eat with a rare passion.

“I’ll give you a hint about what I need next.” Tara turned the cart with difficulty, noticing for the first time she’d chosen one with a bum wheel. “Cluck cluck cluck cluck.”

“Chicken!” Danny said.

“Right you are.” She maneuvered the cart to the top of one of the long aisles and got ready to push it to the refrigerated section in the back of the store.

“Tara!” Mrs. Jorgenson, who’d been her mother’s neighbor for as long as Tara could remember, headed toward them with the help of a cane. Otherwise, she was in admirable shape for a woman of eighty-plus, with a trim figure and dark blond hair without a trace of gray. “How nice to see you. You, too, Danny.”

“Who are you?” Danny asked.