Mother's Milk by Charles Atkins Page B

you’d be amazed how few do.’
    â€˜She’s a great woman,’ he said, flashing on an ancient memory of playing by his grandmother’s side as she picked tomatoes and basil from the garden behind her three-story home in Park Slope. As he hung up, he knew that in addition to the $1500 for the inflatable mattress cover – probably an inflated price – he’d also slip Dorothy an extra couple hundred. On Saturday, he’d take the subway to Flatbush, as he did every week, to the hellhole of a nursing home that had warehoused his grandmother for twenty-one years, ever since she suffered a catastrophic stroke, with what the doctors called locked-in syndrome. He’d sit with her and hold her hand, feeling the crêpe-paper fragility of her skin. He’d talk to her about his ambitions, that he was going to be a doctor, that his aunts – her daughters – Kelly and Donna with their fat husbands and ugly children would regret the way they’d treated him, and treated her. Grace had taken Chase in after his parents had died within a year of each other. His nearly famous fashion-model mother OD’d on heroin. Ten months later his cracked-out nightclub-promoting father blew his heart out at the end of a glass pipe – Chase was four. Yet strangely, the following months living with his grandmother were the happiest of his life. Then Grace had her stroke. He found her on the kitchen floor, her eyes open, unable to move, spittle dribbling from the corner of her mouth. The brightest light in his life had just gone out. His aunts Kelly and Donna, both with their own families, refused to take him in. Years later he’d understand why, too jealous of his beautiful mother to give a shit about him, and furious that any money Grace had, as well as the big house in Park Slope, was sucked up by the state to pay for her nursing home. At the age of five Chase became a ward of the state, and like the kids he now worked with, his life was a series of foster homes and group homes. When he was still very young there was always the hope of full adoption, and likely couples dangled the prospect of a stable home, security … love. But each time something got in the way, and he’d find himself, battered suitcase in hand, moving toward the next.
    The worst came when he was thirteen, just removed from the foster family he’d been with for three years after he’d attacked his foster father, who’d tried to rape him. His foster mother had called him a liar; it wasn’t the first time. Given the chance, he would have killed them both and felt no remorse, but now, sitting in his small office, with its single window, he realized that if it hadn’t been for that horrible twist of fate he’d never have met Janice. And one of the many ironies in their relationship was that while he regretted not bashing in the skull of his foster father, it was with Janice and her cheating husband that he got his first heady rush of what it feels like to take another’s life.
    His intercom buzzed again. ‘Chase, your three o’clock is here.’
    â€˜Send her down.’
    Moments later, a knock at his door.
    â€˜Yes.’ He looked up as someone tried to turn the handle; of course it was locked. Chase couldn’t stand being intruded on. He got up, as a girl called through the door.
    â€˜It’s Morgan. I’m here for my appointment.’
    He smoothed back a bang and opened the door onto a fifteen-year-old dressed in a midriff-baring jersey top, low-rider jeans with faux stone-washed stripes that ran up the front of her thighs and down her back from ass to ankle, and bright pink flip-flops with red beads on the straps. Her hair was a mess of home-dyed blonde, streaked with near-white highlights. Her blue eyes, lined in black with mascara that had clumped, looked up at her six-foot-two gorgeous hunk of a counselor. ‘Hi, Chase.’
    â€˜Hey, Morgan, come on