At the Center. Dorothy Van Soest

in the field.” I turned toward the sound of Melanie’s voice, from the adjacent cubicle. “She was here earlier but she left a few minutes ago.”

      “Thanks,” I said. I didn’t know how to respond to the unspoken concern in my worker’s voice. “I’ll leave her a note, but if you see her, could you let her know I want to see her right away when she gets back?”

      “Sure, Sylvia.”

      I left the note propped up on Lynn’s phone and then went back to my desk to do paperwork. As the day dragged by, every time someone knocked on my office door, I looked up expectantly, and each time I was disappointed to see that it wasn’t Lynn Winters. At five thirty I finally gave up and headed home.

      —

      My Suzuki Sidekick, fifteen years old and with 180,000 miles on it, wasn’t the only beater car in the lot behind my apartment building, but it had to be the most reliable one there. In the drab lobby I checked my mailbox before getting on the elevator. The man-boy with spiky blond hair and perpetual sleep in his eyes who lived on the second floor and yet never came up with enough energy to walk up one flight of stairs got on with me.

      “Hey, Miss Jensen.” He smiled, showing his perfect white teeth. Like he was following his mother’s admonition to be respectful to the resident spinster.

      “Good evening,” I said. I didn’t know his name. He, like all the other college students and young professionals who lived in the building, would move out as soon as he was able to improve his circumstances. I stared at the holes in the knees of his jeans.

      “Have a nice evening, Miss Jensen,” he said when the elevator stopped and he got off.

      I pushed the button for the fifth floor, wondering how I might manage to have a nice evening when all I wanted was for tomorrow to come. When the elevator door opened on my floor, the smells of pizza and Chinese takeout made my stomach growl. I was hungry, and glad I’d made enough tuna casserole on Sunday night to last through the week.

      I dropped my keys onto the round table that divided the kitchen from the living room in my tiny apartment. I found myself speculating about what my naighbor would think if he knew I chose to live this simply not out of necessity but based on principle. What would he say about my dated gold and orange shag area rug? The drab off-white walls that hadn’t been painted in all the years I’d lived here, the black imitation-leather couch I’d bought at the Salvation Army, the array of candles and pottery on the windowsills? My old political posters? I imagined telling him that I’d won custody of the antique pulpit chair with its high, hand-carved walnut back and burgundy velvet upholstery as part of my divorce. But I didn’t expect that he would make any connection between my life and the privileges he probably thought he deserved and the luxuries with which he aspired to surround himself.

      Speculating about what the man-boy might think of me, while a welcome diversion, soon led me to wondering if J. B. Harrell might be more inclined to trust my sincerity if he saw the way I chose to live. I read a magazine while I ate. I swept then mopped the kitchen floor. I sorted through the papers and magazines that had been piling up for months on top of my old scratched desk in the corner of my otherwise neat living room. But the sadness in the pit of my stomach was still there and soon I found myself ruminating again, about Brion, Betsy, Lynn. I went to bed thinking about who knew or didn’t know what and lay there counting the hours until I would be able to talk to Lynn Winters.

      —

      I woke up the next morning with my stomach twisted into a pretzel of anticipation after having dreamed that I called J. B. Harrell to tell him he was wrong. With a cup of coffee and a plain bagel I’d picked up from the café on the first floor of the Health Services Building on the way to my office, I sat down at my desk. Eating the bagel made my stomach relax, so I decided to give the coffee a try. I was just lifting the cup to my lips when a timid knock on the frame of my open door startled me. The coffee splashed over the rim and I watched a brown circle spread over the flowery print on my skirt.

      “Are you ready for me?” Lynn Winters stood in the doorway. Her eyes, which were usually a luminescent green, were cloudy and red-rimmed, and her cheeks were puffy. She was wearing a shirtwaist dress that hung loosely off her shoulders like she’d recently lost weight and hadn’t had time to buy new clothes.

      I motioned for her to come in. She sat in the chair on the other side of my desk with her shoulders hunched over, the stringy tips of her long hair brushing the tops of her thighs. I thought about seeing her for the first time just a few months ago, an eager, compassionate, and idealistic twenty-four-year-old with a master’s degree in social work. Her hair had been a thick and fluffy blond; by everyone’s estimation she had been the most fashionable and beautiful woman ever to work in our agency. It made her disheveled appearance now all the more alarming.

      “Are you okay?” I asked.

      She nodded.

      “I know this must be terribly hard for you,” I said.

      She nodded again.

      “Do you feel up to talking about it?”

      “Do you want me to tell you what’s in my statement?” she asked.

      I pressed my hand on the folder lying on the desk in front of me. “I already read the statement you gave to Brion Kacey,” I said. “But I’d like to hear more about what happened the day you placed Anthony Little Eagle.”

      “I’m sorry...uh...you mean...?” Lynn’s voice was a barely audible whisper.

      “Take your time. Just anything you remember.”

      Lynn started to speak but then stopped and looked around uncertainly. I empathized with her, remembering what it was like to be young and new on the job.

      “It’s okay if you want to start with what’s in your statement,” I said. “I’m also interested in anything that isn’t in your statement, anything you thought of later or maybe something you weren’t asked.”

      A piece of paper slipped off Lynn’s lap and fell to the floor. She moved to the edge of her chair, looking a little shaky as she scrambled to pick the paper up. I thought back to the times I’d gotten into trouble as a new social worker. Only unlike Lynn Winters, I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong. I’d firmly believed I was in the right when I licensed a foster home with only one exit in the house (after all, there wasn’t a single house on the reservation that had the required two exits), and when I gave out birth control information against agency policy. How ironic it was that now, as a supervisor, I had a reputation for demanding that my social workers adhere to all agency procedures, when most of my own offenses had involved skirting bureaucratic red tape.

      “I’m sorry...I don’t know what you want me to say.” Lynn’s voice wavered.

      I cleared my throat and picked up my pen. “Maybe if you start with the day you placed Anthony Little Eagle, it will help us work through what happened, see what we can learn from it.”

      “It was late on Friday afternoon,” Lynn said with a tremor in her voice. “A child welfare worker named Ted Pound called just before our office closed saying he needed an emergency placement. He said the police found Anthony Little Eagle’s parents passed out in an apartment in the public housing complex and a drunken uncle was screaming and waving a gun around. They arrested the uncle and brought the boy here.”

      “And how did you decide to place him in the Mellon home?”

      “They were on our list of emergency foster homes and we’d used them before, so I figured...” She sniffled and wiped away a tear. “I didn’t want to send the boy to a shelter for the weekend. Most of the kids there are tough teenagers. He was so little and so scared.”

      I pushed a box of tissues on my desk closer to her. I sympathized with her, but at the same time, there was something missing. Something wasn’t making sense.

      “I understand that a child might have been injured in that foster home in the past. Tell me what you know about that.”

      “What?