This World So Fierce: A Novel

By Mary Bourque Marcotte

Trish and Nikki are Orphans who live on the poor side of town. But they know what it means to have a family that cares, even if that family is not blood. Their foster parents can't have children of their own, so they raise children who come to them from a world of pain and loss. When the family is asked to take in one more, they can't refuse. But it might be one more than they can handle.

"The World So Fierce" is a story of the other side of tragedy. The orphans are a surrogate family, but when they take in one more child could their family break? What happens when one orphan can't turn his life around?

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098332631

Book preview

© 2020. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

Names: Marcotte, Mary Bourque.

Title: This World So Fierce: a novel.

Description: Pennsauken, NJ : BookBaby Publishing, 2020.

Summary: A teenager is thrust into a new foster family and must learn to cope with strangers.

Identifiers: ISBN (Print Edition): 978-1-09833-262-4 | ISBN (eBook Edition): 978-1-09833-263-1 |

Subjects: Young adults. | American South Literature--fiction. | Foster family--fiction. | Louisiana--fiction. | Rape and recovery--fiction. | Surrogate family—YA--fiction.

FOR RICHARD

who is a blessing beyond imagination

With loving remembrance of

Riley and Ellen, my parents

Volcie, my grandmother and friend

This World So Fierce

This world so fierce can do nothing to me.

This world so fierce here to harm family.

Hurt, pain, broken promises

from the ones for whom we care

those feelings we know in the world we share

those are the ones most oft to break

so spare them, please, for my sake.

Love, kindness, truth be told

those are the virtues we must carry

the joys of life together we marry

love for each other given happily

that is what makes us family.

This world so fierce can do nothing to me.

This world so fierce cannot harm family.

Contents

Return

Mike

Trish

Trouble

Eighteen

Max

The Festival

Nikki

Run

Molly

1

Return

Every girl in the home had been someone’s daughter. Every boy had been someone’s son. Few of them had siblings living here but all shared one thing—the least common denominator. Living on the poor side of a small town in the poorest state and attending schools in the poorest parish, none had seen a parent or family member in the past year except Trish.

There were only a few days before Joey, Willie, and Frankie, who were brothers would be up for adoption. If all went as planned, Molly and Bud would become their adoptive parents. Bud had spoken to Joey on a couple of occasions and tried to reassure him that, if the state agreed to move forward with the adoption, there would be no doubt about it. Foster parents have the first option to adopt children in their home. In fact, they could say no and then change their minds at any point in the adoption process. Bud and Molly would never need to change their minds, especially when it came to their children. They had never lost children to the state or given a child to other parents. These children were their children. Their family.

They had no biological children of their own.

As foster parents, Molly and Bud were as good as it gets. Children, mostly boys, who came into their home were given time to adjust, treated with kindness and love, and never hit, cursed, or abused. It was the most important rule of all—no hurting each other. Anyone could get angry, but anger could be controlled. Molly and Bud taught this above all the other social skills on their perpetual lists of ways to live. They spent time with the kids, talked to them about serious subjects, explained why certain behaviors were unacceptable and how the children could change those behaviors. Most importantly, they taught through their actions.

Having lost children of their own, Molly and Bud could not understand how other people could hurt or abandon their children. However, their longing for children meant they were able to deeply appreciate the ones in their home. They taught by example, with love, asking for help when they were stumped or at wits’ end. Molly was a bear of a mother. She defended her cubs as easily as she loved them. One way to defend them, in her mind at least, was to know what services were available and to encourage them to take advantage of those services. Her children were regular visitors at doctor and dental offices. They saw counselors. They made their own decisions…but they knew the options and the consequences before those decisions were made.

Bud knew his beautiful wife. She was middle-aged, her little body rounding out. Her yellowy-brown hair showing signs of gray that reflected light when she was outside. Wrinkles sneaking in around her dark brown eyes and small mouth. But she was beautiful. And she could summon strength from her heels to the top of her head. There seemed to be strength in every fiber of her being when she needed it. When Joey, Willie and Frankie first came to them, she fought, hard, to get Frankie into a speech therapy class. Willie was far behind his classmates. She had had him tested and, when she found out he could barely read, she set to work teaching him. First, she got books from the library, then she spoke to teachers and reading specialists. Once she felt ready, she created a plan. Though he did his best in class during the day, Willie came home to Molly. And he learned to read. Slowly, falteringly, at first. But Molly helped him to see that he could do it. Most likely he would not catch up to his peers, but she believed he could keep up with the class he was now in. She didn’t fool herself into dreams that were not likely. Instead, she took the children in and accepted them as they were, and where possible, she helped them become better.

Joey, Frankie, and Willie fought like brothers and shared like brothers but really didn’t know what it meant to be brothers. Joey was the closest that Frankie and Willie had ever had to a parent. At 14, he was only five years older than Willie. Their mother was a drug addict who cursed and hit. Hard. She kicked Joey around until the day he kicked back. That was the day she made good on her threat and gave him to the state, meaning she convinced some judge that the boys would be better off in a foster home than with a mother who had no money, no welfare, no family support. Who just didn’t care.

She gave Willie and Frankie, too, for good measure, she’d said. Sometimes Joey wondered how she could just leave them. But remembering how she had left them alone in the apartment for days at a time with nothing to eat, he knew they were better off with Bud and Molly. They never hit or swore, and Molly was the best cook he’d ever known. Okay so they didn’t have all the things that other kids had, but they were never hungry, like before. Besides, Molly and Bud really cared about everyone in their home. Sometimes, on quiet night, which was Wednesdays because there was nothing on TV, when everyone was lying around on the sofas and floor, Molly looked around the room and smiled. The look of honest-to-goodness satisfaction on her face was real.

In their early forties, Molly and Bud had never had children of their own. Almost ten years ago they decided to try adoption, hoping for a baby. They ended up foster parents instead beginning with Trish when she was eight.

With Molly and Bud, the problem was that they couldn’t say no when they got calls from Eva, the small woman assigned to check on their home and foster children. That is how they had ended up nine people living in a small Acadian-style, four-bedroom built years ago for a family of four. The house had been built long before Bud’s parents bought it and moved in when he was a boy. After his father left, his mother managed to hang on to the house and met the mortgage payments working two shifts on the weekends. Years later, after Bud and Molly married, his mother became terminally ill with cancer. She needed their help, and Molly agreed to move in to care for her. Bud paid the mortgage while Molly worked and cared for his mom, and together they managed until her death. Because Bud’s only brother had moved out of Louisiana for a more lucrative job, and Bud and Molly were already living in the house, they simply stayed. Now they paid the mortgage that his father and mother had taken on when he was boy. It felt that the loan was meant to last two lifetimes, but they were getting close to the end now. Finally. They could see, sense, that the house they had turned into a home would become theirs. They would do what his parents could not—own the home two generations had worked for.

With this many people in the house, everyone was crowded, and everything was cramped. In fact, the youngest boys sat on the floor when everyone wanted to sit in the den. Nevertheless, Molly loved her life. She’d get a look on her face as she surveyed the crowd sitting in the small den and sigh heavily, then pick up her magazine. Bud knew both the look and the sigh. He’d put out his hand to reach over the arms of the two chairs, and she’d reach toward him. He always caught two of her fingers and just held them. They’d hold hands that way—her two fingers in his big paw—even while Bud slept, snoring, on his chair.

They had married when he was twenty and she was nineteen. He’d been lucky enough to land a job unloading trucks at the furniture plant. Gradually he had been promoted to Shipping and Receiving Supervisor, but not before he had worn his