Free Evening Street by Julia Keller

the other nurses—Sue or Molly or Maribeth—would bring over a baby for her to hold, too, until it was time for the child to receive a more sophisticated form of treatment, something more substantial than a song and a warm lap.
    Of Abraham, she knew only that he survived, and was placed in foster care in another county when he was ready to leave Evening Street. Bell learned that Hinkle’s sister, a woman named Patty Moncrief, at one point had petitioned for custody, but irregularities were found in her application. She’d had her own problems with the law over the years, and lied about the particulars to the social workers, and was found out, and that was that.
    Sunny pulled through, too. The Reverend Cholly had a friend in Blacksburg, Virginia, a single woman who had long dreamed of adopting a child, and he was able to arrange Sunny’s placement with her. When he ran into Bell on the streets of Acker’s Gap, he’d pull out his cell and show her the pictures of Sunny that the woman texted him each week, pictures that showed a laughing, smiling little girl—a girl who was much, much too small, and who had profound challenges ahead, but who still had a kind of sunrise in her eyes, a radiance that explained her name.
    But Bell couldn’t keep track of all the children. There were too many. In the years to come, she would find herself thinking about them and wondering how those early struggles affected them as they grew up. Little was known about the permanent impact on a child of a mother’s addiction to prescription medication. Other kinds of drug addiction—crack, meth, heroin—had been around long enough for such studies to be valid, but pain pills were still too new, still such an unknown frontier, when it came to long-term medical research. And medical research, moreover, could tell you only so much; there were other variables at play. Softer things. There was the child’s personality and temperament. There was nutrition. Education. Parental interest. The endlessly churning alchemy of circumstance and initiative, accident and will. All the elements that combine to make a destiny.
    Bell knew only two things for sure about the children: She knew that through no fault of their own, they had been born with a shadow over their lives, and she knew that they had started out those lives in a place called Evening Street.

Chapter One
    â€œDrugs.”
    Darlene Strayer nodded. “Copy that,” she said. “So what’s second?”
    â€œDrugs.”
    â€œAnd third? Fourth? Fifth?”
    â€œDrugs. Drugs. And drugs.”
    â€œI’m sensing a pattern here.” Darlene smiled a quick, tight smile. She picked up her shot glass and moved it around in a small level circle, making the river-brown liquid wink and shiver. The whiskey didn’t slosh; it shivered. Barely.
    Darlene had no intention of finishing her drink. Bell Elkins was sure of it. She had used the technique herself on occasion: Order a drink, because not to order one was too conspicuous, especially when your invitation had been casual but specific. Hey, want to meet for a drink? Take one tiny sip. No more. You needed to keep a clear head. Use the glass as a prop, a thing to do with your fingers, to stop those fingers from fidgeting. Lift the glass, tilt it around, make the liquid move. Lower the glass. Pretend to be just about to take a second sip. But somehow, you never do.
    Because this little get-together, Bell had recognized right away, had nothing whatsoever to do with alcohol. Or with friendship—the friendship between them was nonexistent. And it certainly had nothing to do with a desire to spend time in the Tie Yard Tavern in Blythesburg, West Virginia, a bar as overstuffed as a sausage casing on this Saturday night in February, filled with too many people, too much bad country music, too much loud talk, and too many peanut shells on the painted concrete floor. Annoyingly, you crunched