Fall from Grace by Wayne Arthurson

caused this pain.
    One of the more interesting features I had written in the past was a story about the employees of funeral homes, and how they dealt with death on a daily basis. Sure, I had seen death more often than the average person but it wasn’t a daily occurrence. In that short day or so I spent at the funeral home interviewing the workers as they prepared bodies and worked with their grieving clients, I learned that while it was human nature to try to make those suffering feel better, it was not the best thing to do. Grief was a natural process, not something you have to fix. So those funeral home employees taught me that it was best to be professional, but compassionate. Compassionate, but not cold. And silence, I learned, was the key. In times like this, it was best not to speak until spoken to. In order to get the full story on Grace’s life, I would have to wait.

13
     
    Once Mrs. Lewis got herself together and again sent all the kids out of the room, she started to tell me Grace’s story. It was good for Grace in the beginning. Although her mother was a teenaged native girl, Grace was adopted by a loving couple. They raised her for several years, giving her the home that normal kids like me got. However, the relationship soured, and the couple split up. Instead of one of them taking custody of their little girl or at least sharing it, they sent her back into the system.
    It was hard to imagine, being four years old and having the people you call Mom and Dad tell you that you are no longer important enough for them to take care of you, and you are now going to live with strangers.
    For a few years, until she was about ten, it was a lot of strangers. Grace, not surprisingly, wasn’t the perfect child after this, and since there was a strong likelihood that her birth mother drank and took drugs during the pregnancy, it was also likely that Grace suffered from fetal alcohol syndrome, which meant she couldn’t really think about the consequences of her actions.
    While most foster parents were decent enough folks who did their best for the kids they were given care of, it was a tough job, and some foster homes don’t always provide the best environment for these kids. There were the odd assholes who were only in it for the money or for the chance to exercise some weird psycho power over a bunch of vulnerable kids. Still, despite the problems, the system worked as well as it could and it was better than sticking kids in a bunch of run-down orphanages like they used to do in the old days.
    Grace came into the Lewis home just before her eleventh birthday. “She was a tough kid to get to know, she had a skin thicker than concrete, but she was still a sweetie. So lost, so lonely,” said Lewis. “All she needed was a lot of love and bit of structure and that’s what we tried to give her.”
    “How was she in school?”
    “The first few months were tough but the important thing with FAS kids is to give them structure. You’ve got to get them up at the same time, give them a schedule of their day, which class is where, what time is lunch, all that. And it took Grace time to get used to that, but once she did, she flourished. The teachers who first thought she was just another foster kid on the way to being a dropout were shocked at her transformation. She wasn’t the brightest student in the bunch, she was never on the honor roll, but she got her work done on time, never skipped class.”
    “Pretty much a normal kid, you’re saying?”
    “You could say that. I mean, once she settled in, knew where she stood, and realized that she was going to be here for a while, she was great. It took longer to break through her thick skin, but these kids, you can’t blame them for being who they are. Especially her.” Tears came to Lewis’s eyes. “I can’t understand why her adoptive parents could have given her up so easily, she was just a sweetheart.”
    I shook my head to show sympathy, but I personally knew it was