Read Online Chosen by Chandra Hoffman - Free Book Online Page B

clay-colored sweater. Penny’s hair was buzzed—“Prison joke,” she’d said—and her pasty cheeks were covered in angry red cystic acne.
    Jason, on the other hand, was attractive in a bad-boy, sinister-hot way. Chloe finally stopped at a Denny’s halfway between Salem and Portland, when Penny’s whining about being hungry and Chloe’s anxiety that Jason was going to mount her in the backseat won over her desire to get back to home territory and complete this meeting in her office.
    “Okay,” Chloe said, sipping from her diet Coke, centering the lemon yellow folder in front of her. “So, Penny, you’re pregnant, and you’re considering placing your baby with a family.”
    “Ya think?” Penny jumped up and jerked her ratty sweater up, exposing a blue-white belly crisscrossed in zebra stripes of stretch marks, a dingy sports bra that barely held the breasts resting on her stomach. “I’m ready to pop!” She plopped down on Jason’s lap, grinding into him, and he glanced around the restaurant, gripping both her shoulders before moving her off him like a boisterous preteen daughter.
    “Okay, baby,” he said, “ enough .” And something in his tone whipped Penny’s head up and she sobered, nibbling at her nails while Chloe started with the Preliminary.
    As she took their general information, Chloe learned that Jason was from a logging family in northern Washington, with a white father and a mother who was “half black, half Indian, full-time drunk.” He lifted his sunglasses to the top of his head, showing one blue eye and one brown. There were hints of swelling, a yellowed bruise under his left one.
    “Heterochromatic,” he said, and Chloe nodded like she understood. Later, she looked it up at home.
    “Always got one foot in each world,” he said.
    When Chloe asked about his time in jail, he said, “I trusted the wrong people. Story of my life, baby. Put my eggs in the wrong fucking basket.” He rubbed his blunt hands together, tattoos of Chinese dragons curling up the backs of them to his thick forearms, as big around as Chloe’s calves.
     
    “I S THIS J ASON X OLAN ?” she asks in her dark living room.
    “I saw you today with that girl, Heather,” he says. “Can’t say hello? Can’t speak to me in public?”
    “I’m trying to be respectful of people’s right to privacy.”
    “Do they like her better?”
    “Who?”
    “Because she’s blond, right? She dyes it, I bet. I bet the carpet don’t match the drapes. Bet they don’t know that.”
    “Who?” Chloe asks again. She leans against the dark living room wall, feels the burlap wallpaper, recently repainted a deep plum, dig into her cheek.
    “John and Francie. Because I have a picture of Penny, before. She had this long hair, good skin—”
    “We’re an agency. I have more than one family waiting for a baby.” You have no idea, she thinks.
    “So what, now, you got a bidding war going? Do they want her kid or ours?”
    “That’s not how it works,” she says. She remembers Jason and Penny in the Denny’s, how he plunked his finger right down on the spot on the McAdoos’ profile where Francie had put in John’s salary. “Jason, you picked them.”
    He’s quiet. In the other room, she can hear Dan rummaging around, heating up something in the microwave.
    “What do you want?” she asks Jason.
    “Money.”
    “I can’t just give you money.” Chloe takes a deep breath and tests the water. “Especially not when I’ve seen the bassinet, when it looks like you’re taking us for a ride.”
    “It’ll go through,” he says, so quietly and ominously that Chloe feels the hairs on her neck tingle. Two years ago, this would have been deplorable to her, a red flag, duress! Now it just means there needs to be more money. Like a parrot, she goes through her speech.
    “Look, we got you groceries last week, all of your rent is paid, which we aren’t even supposed to be doing since your brother and his girlfriend are living