Shadows on the Ivy by Lea Wait

to take care of another man’s kid. That’s about the time I realized he was drinking too much. After that he started drinking a lot too much. Maggie, understand, my dad was a pretty good drinker, too, so the drinking in itself didn’t bother me. My dad would come home and pick up a couple of six-packs of beer and sit in his chair by the TV and drink until he’d go to sleep every night. Most mornings my mother would have to wake him up and get him to shower and shave and get dressed to go to work. But my dad never yelled at anyone. He never hit anyone.”
    “And Ed did.”
    Dorothy nodded. “I knew I couldn’t stay; life with him wouldn’t be good for my little girl even if he’d wanted her. By that time she was four years old. I saw her once in a while. Supervised visits, they called them. But then the social worker said I’d had long enough to get my life together. The Division of Youth and Family Services was going to take me to court to take away my parental rights, so they could place her in a permanent home.”
    Maggie thought of all the prospective adoptive parents waiting for a four-year-old girl. The social worker had done what she was trained to do: given the biological parent a fair amount of time to provide a home for her child before finding a permanent home for the child.
    “I gave up,” Dorothy continued. “I felt I’d never get off the bottom, do you know? No, you probably don’t. But I knew I couldn’t stay with Ed, and my parents wouldn’t want my little girl, and I still couldn’t support her by myself. The social workers were right. She needed to be with a family who would love her and provide for her. I hadn’t been able to do that.” Dorothy sagged deeper into the hard couch.
    Dorothy herself must have felt very unsafe and unloved then, Maggie thought. It must have been nightmarish. “So you relinquished custody of your daughter. Did you stay with Ed?”
    “For a few more months. Then I got up enough courage to leave him. I went home for a few weeks, but my parents said I was grown-up and I couldn’t even keep a husband, so I needed to find out what it was like to live on my own. To see how hard it was to deal with the real world.” Dorothy paused. “The next years were pretty rough. At first I shared an apartment with an older woman I worked with at the supermarket who had just gone through a divorce. She had furniture, and I paid half the rent, so that was all right. But I wasn’t really making it on my own. I was depending on her for things I’d depended on my parents for. Plus I had no privacy. I couldn’t invite friends over without checking with her, and she liked the apartment to be quiet.”
    Dorothy paused for a moment. “I must be boring you, Maggie. I’m going on and on. But I’ve never told anyone. No one.”
    “It’s all right, Dorothy. I’m here. And I do care.” As she said the words, Maggie realized they were true. She did care about the young Dorothy who had felt trapped and limited by circumstances. Her own family situation had been far from perfect, but she’d been able to get a college scholarship so she could leave home and make a new life. She hadn’t had to depend on her mother and father. No wonder Dorothy wanted to help young single parents. Their plights were all too real to her.
    “Then I married for the second time. I was in my late twenties by then, and Fred was a nice man. He had a job at the local bank, and he wasn’t aiming at being its president. All he wanted was a wife to love him, and a small home in the suburbs, and children. He wanted children more than anything. He’d been an only child, and he wanted his children to have lots of brothers and sisters.”
    “That must have been a great relief…to be with someone who loved children, as you did.”
    Dorothy nodded. “Yes. Of course, I didn’t tell him I already had a child. He would never have understood my giving her up. And it wouldn’t have made a difference; she was