The Truth About Tara. Darlene Gardner
a lot of choices. The next closest grocery store was twenty miles away.
“You’re a good boy to come with me.” After picking up Danny from his Saturday swimming lesson at the community center in Cape Charles, where the camp was being held, she’d announced she needed to make a stop. “If I don’t buy a few things, my cupboards will be bare. Like Mother Hubbard.”
“Your mother’s name isn’t Hubbard.” Danny gazed up at her out of small brown eyes with the distinctive slant characteristic of people with Down syndrome. He was short for his age, another trait common to children like him.
“You’re right.” Tara sometimes forgot how literal children with Down’s were. “It’s Carrie. She’s your foster mother and my mother.”
No matter what the stranger who’d stopped her on the street had suggested.
Tara released Danny’s hand to take one of the grocery carts in front of the store, careful to keep him in sight. During the time it had taken Tara to get to her mother’s house the night before, Danny had wandered close to the street to follow a butterfly.
“C-Carrie is getting pretty,” Danny announced. He had a good vocabulary, although his speech was halting and not quite clear. He also stuttered occasionally. Once school started again, he’d be in speech therapy.
“Right again,” Tara said. “Carrie’s at the beauty shop. That’s why I picked you up from swimming.”
Her mother had insisted Danny take the lessons, maintaining that anyone who lived in an area surrounded by water should know how to swim.
Danny scrunched up his face. “Don’t like swimming.”
That was an understatement. Today had been lesson number two and Danny had yet to agree to get into the water. Afterward the instructor had advised Tara to suspend the lessons until he had a change of heart.
“You can’t know you don’t like it until you try it,” Tara said.
“Know it now,” Danny insisted.
“Oh, yeah?” Tara asked. “What if I refused to learn how to drive because I thought I wouldn’t like it? Then how would we get to the grocery store?”
Danny looked thoughtful. “Walking.”
“Good answer,” she said, laughing. It served her right for asking a question with such an easy answer. “Dan the Man strikes again.”
Danny giggled at the favorite nickname, and she bent down and gave him a hug. He loved hugs. He’d also been laughing more and more in the three weeks since he’d come to live with her mother. It was a welcome change from the sad little boy who’d kept asking where his real mother was.
She waited for Danny to precede her through the automatic door into the store. “Stay close,” she told him.
He moved a step nearer to her.
Tara stopped at a table of navel oranges at the front of the produce section and tore a plastic bag off the roll. “You want me to buy a couple extra for you?”
“Don’t like oranges.”
“I love them.” Tara injected enthusiasm into her voice. She picked out four oranges and dropped the bag into the cart, then pointed to the refrigerated section containing precut bags of vegetables. “How about some baby carrots?”
“No,” he said. “No c-carrots.”
Her mother was in the process of ensuring that Danny ate healthy foods. Like a lot of Down syndrome children, he was on the chubby side. Diet, however, was only one factor. Many children like Danny weren’t active early in life because they had decreased motor skills. Add stunted growth to the mix and weight problems resulted. In Danny’s
case, they were compounded because he loved to eat with a rare passion.
“I’ll give you a hint about what I need next.” Tara turned the cart with difficulty, noticing for the first time she’d chosen one with a bum wheel. “Cluck cluck cluck cluck.”
“Chicken!” Danny said.
“Right you are.” She maneuvered the cart to the top of one of the long aisles and got ready to push it to the refrigerated section in the back of the store.
“Tara!” Mrs. Jorgenson, who’d been her mother’s neighbor for as long as Tara could remember, headed toward them with the help of a cane. Otherwise, she was in admirable shape for a woman of eighty-plus, with a trim figure and dark blond hair without a trace of gray. “How nice to see you. You, too, Danny.”
“Who are you?” Danny asked.
“You know Mrs. Jorgenson, Danny,” Tara said. “She lives in the white house across the street from you.”
“Old lady in white house,” Danny said. Tara winced.
“That’s me,” Mrs. Jorgenson said cheerfully. “I’ll be eighty-seven on my next birthday.”
“I’m ten,” Danny said.
“Lucky you,” Mrs. Jorgenson said. “Where’s your mother, Tara?”
“At the beauty salon,” Tara said. “School’s out for the summer so I have more time to help her with Danny.”
“Such a good heart your mother has,” Mrs. Jorgenson said. “I don’t know what I would have done without her when Artie was in the hospital. She drove me there every day. Now that he’s home, she stops by a few times a week to check on us. Always brings us something home cooked, too.”
Tara hadn’t known that, but it didn’t surprise her—not when frozen dinners filled Mrs. Jorgenson’s buggy.
“Artie doesn’t feel up to cooking these days,” Mrs. Jorgenson said, gesturing to the food she was going to buy. “I was never much good at it.”
Danny started down the nearest aisle, darting back and forth as he checked out the items on the shelves. Tara debated whether to call him back and decided against it. The attention span of a ten-year-old, disabled or not, was only so long.
“Nice talking to you, Mrs. Jorgenson,” Tara said. “But I’ve got to go after Danny.”
“Certainly dear,” the older woman said, shooing Tara away with the motion of her hand.
Tara gave chase, the bad wheel on her buggy causing the entire cart to wobble. “Danny, wait up!”
She needn’t have bothered calling out anything. The child had stopped, transfixed by an item on the shelves. Tara groaned even before he reached out and grabbed a jumbo-sized bag of potato chips.
“Look what I found!” Danny thudded toward her on heavy feet. “Chips!”
He put the bag in her cart, his face creased in a broad smile. Tara did not smile. The salty snack was a terrible choice for a little boy with a weight problem.
She reached inside the cart for the chips and held them out to Danny. “Please put those back, Danny.”
“I like chips!” Danny cried.
“I know you do,” Tara said. “But they’re not good for you.”
“They are good!” he protested, his voice rising.
“Not every food that tastes good is good for you.” Tara gave up trying to get Danny to reshelve the chips. “I’ll buy you a healthy snack.”
She headed for the spot where the chips had been with Danny following close behind.
“Want chips!” he yelled at the top of his lungs.
The other people in the aisle, Laura Thompson and her two young daughters, stopped and stared. Tara had taught the older girl, Shelly, in PE last year. She groaned inwardly. Tara was a teacher. She was supposed to be able to handle situations like this.
“Anything