Free The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo

She’d bought the hardware store by then. Gracie was in grammar school. Life as usual, a little crazier than usual, perhaps, but nothing out of the ordinary. She was accustomed to craziness.
    “Where is all of this coming from?” David asked. “How did you find him?”
    Violet, again, failed to meet their eyes. “I didn’t. Wendy did. She said it was—just a lark. Genealogical research.”
    “But how did she—”
    “I don’t know, okay?” Violet said. “I’ve had to force myself to stop thinking about that because now he’s here and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
    Wendy. Her eldest daughter was always bobbing around the epicenter of their familial drama.
    “It’s actually,” Violet said, chewing the inside of her cheek. “It’s a little more complicated.”
    “Oh, lord,” she breathed. David took her hand.
    “The foster parents are moving to Ecuador,” Violet said, and Marilyn nearly laughed again. Crazy on top of crazy. “Normally he’d end up back at the group home—that’s where he met Hanna, the foster mom; she volunteers there—but she’s indicated to me that if there was another living situation in place, it would be advantageous—” Here her daughter began to cry, a display of emotion, finally, that seemed to match the scope of what she was telling them, and Marilyn felt her own eyes dampen. “As I understand it, it’s a textbook systemic failure. He was in a series of foster homes, nothing awful, I guess, but nothing lasting, and then he— But he’s a good kid, smart. And Hanna says he’s made—just astronomical improvements since he came to live with them. There’s a chance to keep that momentum if he transitions to another stable family environment. The thing is— Matt and I don’t think— The boys, with the ages they are, we don’t want to— It could be incredibly disruptive, developmentally, to suddenly have such a major change to our family structure.”

    “I’ll say,” David said.
    Violet colored. “And so I had the idea that—”
    “Of course we’ll take him,” Marilyn erupted, and she ignored the molten heat of David’s gaze on her as she focused on their daughter, arranged her most convincing Resolute Mom face. David would be horrified: imagining bearing the brunt of a new teenage life under their roof just as he’d finally disentangled himself from caring for patients and raising offspring. But of course it would be she who shouldered the burden, washed the boy’s clothes, checked his homework, acted as his informal alarm clock. She who stayed awake worrying about his chemistry test, his collegiate prospects; who noticed when he started to outgrow his parka and dragged him to REI for something that covered his wrists. David would be disturbed by the presence of him—his papers cluttering the kitchen table; his shoes tracking mud into the designated mudroom; his youthful indiscretions commandeering the bathroom for hours at a time—but he would never fully experience parenting a teenage boy, just as he had never fully experienced parenting a teenage girl.
    “Of course we will,” he said from beside her, and everything shifted, fluidly, because of course he’d parented their girls, of course he was the reason that Wendy still spoke to them and Violet raised her kids to be kind to animals and Liza got through a PhD program and Gracie would always stop an elderly person to see if they needed help carrying their groceries. Her hand squeezed his three times, and his hand squeezed back thrice even harder, and they were agreeing to be parents again, during the most unbecoming part of parentage, after the infant sweetness and the toddler charm and the youthful epiphany, straight to the miserable adolescent sludge. Of course she and David would do that. Of course they would handle it together, as they always had, even if her tasks were more concrete and less pleasant.
    Violet looked uncomfortable. “Oh, God, you guys, I— That’s really nice of