Match Me by Liz Appel Page B

The rules were simple: it was to be treated like my own place. They'd call before they came down. They'd knock. They'd respect my privacy. In return, I agreed to offer the same courtesy for going upstairs. Oh, and I'd also agreed to no all-night parties and to not turn my level into a brothel. Dad's requests. No brothel meant less income, but I figured it was a fair compromise.
    “We have some news,” Mom said. Her smile moved from bright to beatific.
    I hadn't seen her this happy since my junior year, when they'd decided to adopt a baby from El Salvador. We'd just sat down to dinner, a Mexican feast of burritos and enchiladas.
    “A what?” I'd asked as my fork clanged on the wooden table.
    “A baby,” my mom repeated. She speared an enchilada off the platter and transferred it to her plate.
    “Why?” I asked.
    I was sixteen. They were done with kids. Diapers. Toddlers. All of it. At least that's what I thought.
    “There are so many children in need, dear,” Mom said. She slathered sour cream on top of a burrito.
    “Aren't there some a little closer?  Like in, say, North America?”
    “Your dad and I have researched this,” she said. “The adoption rate in El Salvador is so low. And those poor children! They live on the streets if they're not adopted, you know.”
    We'd just finished discussing poverty in my Global Connections class and I wanted to point out that millions of the world's children lived on the streets. And I was pretty sure they weren't all located in El Salvador.
    “Okayyyy.” I grabbed a handful of tortilla chips from the opened bag on the table. “So, when is this going to happen?”
    “Soon,” she promised. “Right, Hank?”
    My dad looked up from his newspaper. “What?”
    “The baby. From El Salvador.”
    His expression cleared. “Yes. The El Salvadoran child. What about it?”
    Mom waved her fork in the air. “I was just telling Katie our big news.”
    He nodded. “Oh, good. Yes. Very exciting.” He buried his nose back in the paper.
    For the next six months, we ate Mexican food four times a week. Mom and Dad bought Rosetta Stone and spent their evenings learning Spanish. Mom started a scrapbook titled Baby Es. When I asked if they'd found out the identity of the baby they were adopting, she'd said no.
    “Baby Es is Baby El Salvador,” she explained as she pasted in pictures of a maraca-themed layette she'd found and printed from some web site. “I was tired of calling it It.”
    “You just did,” I pointed out.
    “Well, forever more, the baby will be called Es. Until we find out what it—I mean, what his or her name is.”
    And we did. We called the baby Es. And we waited for over a year before their application was rejected and my mom's hopes were dashed.
    They'd been deemed too old to be viable candidates for adoption.
    But maybe a different country had different rules.
    I sat on the edge of the armchair and took a sip of water. “Adopting another baby?  Maybe an entire family this time?”
    “No. Better.” I thought my mom's face was going to split in two, her smile stretched so wide.
    “Better than a baby or entire El Salvadoran family?”
    I couldn't think of anything that would qualify. She loved babies. She'd already started hinting that Ben and I should get married. Not that she liked him very much. She didn't. But she did like babies. And I was pretty sure she was ready for me to start providing them.  I just wasn’t sure I was ready for that. And I was more than sure Ben wasn't.
    “Yes.”
    “OK. I give. Tell me.”
    She scooted closer, her butt cheeks barely on the sofa cushion. “Hank, put that down,” she said, swatting the magazine. Dad reluctantly lowered it and tossed it back on the coffee table.
    She turned to me. “We're moving.”
    I gaped at her. “You're what?”
    “Moving!”
    I shook my head. “What?”
    Maybe I hadn't heard her correctly. Ben and I had gone for a quick dip at the lake yesterday—a  warm late April day pretty much